As the noted SF writer and poet Tom Disch made clear in his 1999 book The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, the tropes developed in science fiction since 1900—alien invasions, telepathy, time travel, people-shaped robot helpers, travel to other planets, nuclear mutants, flying cars, immortality—are now universal in the culture without actually having come much closer in actuality, or even appearing at all. Meanwhile SF kept missing the things that in fact would happen. Disch’s own best novel, 334, published in 1974 and predicting the world of 2025, entirely missed the digital age just then dawning—not computers, which everyone knew would rule the world, but the universal accessibility of them, our ever-present freedoms and enchainments. But then almost every writer did. By the time William Gibson set his cyberpunk novels in a digital future, it had already come to be.
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