What happened to the future?

From Michael Chabon's "Manhood for Amateurs."

I don't know what happened to the future. It's as if we have lost our ability or our will to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lack the fundamental faith that there will be any future at all beyond that not too far distant date.

Or maybe we stopped talking about the future around the time that, with its microchips and twenty-four hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days, when you pick up the paper, it seems to have been co-written by J.G.Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, rapid species extinction, U.S. presidents controlled by boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, pharmaceutical mood engineering, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television: Some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century were a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother extending it.

Photo credit: Chris O'Meara/AP.