How could they rip off ideas from Halo so blatantly!!
Kidding of course. I don't think I had consciously acknowledged this, but @paulsutter is totally right. I think the only vision of the future from recent times that I can think of is the "Minority Report UI" ... and we've pretty much already achieved that (NUI, iDevices, Kinect, etc.).
Can anyone give any contemporary examples of what we imagine the future to be like (aside from a blade runner-esque dystopia)?
The Culture is very optimistic, and features engineering on a scale that makes these concepts look like iron age coracles.
A personal favourite of mine is Schismatrix though. It's set almost entirely in space habitats similar to the ones featured here.
As Neuromancer's lesser known cyberpunk contemporary, in places it's very... 80s in tone politically. But it's still a great setting, I'd highly recommend it.
Schismatrix is 27 years... Honestly, that's still pretty new in sci-fi terms. The genre is older than most people think!
Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything more recent that describes such structures as evocatively as those novels. They seem to have fallen out of fashion a little, which is a shame.
http://www.orionsarm.com/ world building project.
Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" features technology that I would personally like to achieve some time in my life time.
Kidding of course. I don't think I had consciously acknowledged this, but @paulsutter is totally right. I think the only vision of the future from recent times that I can think of is the "Minority Report UI" ... and we've pretty much already achieved that (NUI, iDevices, Kinect, etc.).
Can anyone give any contemporary examples of what we imagine the future to be like (aside from a blade runner-esque dystopia)?