Excellent op-ed, piece - thanks for the link, McFly!

To answer your question: I would prefer to believe that the future of Big Space is not merely a past dream - but I don't see it happening in my lifetime, nor in the lives of the generation after mine.

But...

The piece you linked to isn't about that - it's about the state of science fiction, and Spider Robinson's tunnel (in the sky?) vision. Robinson has a legitimate point (which became his axe to grind), but he gives SF too much credit. I infer his lament to be based on another outdated notion - that science fiction is and should be predictive. It's really about the failure of 1950s and '60s space adventure fiction to inspire the creation of The Future he (and others, including me) assumed it was predicting. To my mind, that's a little like being disappointed, if not angry, that the grand countercultural anthems in the Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers and Blows Against the Empire didn't, on their own, carry forward the Revolution they celebrated.*

McKnight nails the reasons why The Future refused to cooperate with the visionaries of fifty years ago. In a perverse sort of way, Tom's single-line analysis in this thread is correct, but I agree with McKnight: the death of Industrial Age attitudes and behaviors was a valid but unpredicted outcome of cultural evolution.

Yet science fiction has not withered into irrelevant yarns about a long-lost frontier the way the Western did. As technology and culture changed, science fiction transformed along with it.

When human spaceflight stopped being the newest, most interesting realm, science fiction stopped telling so many stories about it. When computer science and communications technology became the new frontier, science fiction developed a new sub-genre, cyberpunk, that took its information technology as seriously as space opera ever took thrust-to-weight ratios.

When cultural change became at least as interesting as technological change, science fiction discovered that engineering and physics weren't the only disciplines about which stories could be told: sociology, psychology and political science found a home in the literature.

That latter movement, so-called "soft" SF, began as early as the works of Bradbury and the Foundation novels of Asimov, and has been a constant in the genre ever since. Quite a few of those 50 year's worth of Hugos have been awarded to such work. And, let's not forget medical science. Greg Bear has been mining that vein for years with his many stories about the effects of nanotechnology, and his novels built around a next step in human evolution.

Robinson couldn't be farther from the mark in condemning science fiction readers for rejecting the "real future." The "real future" of the Jetsons era died a generation ago, along with Camelot and the Baby Boomers' lost youth. Even the cyberpunk "real future" is now our present, and its great authors are showing gray in their goatees.

I can't improve on Tom's comments about McKnight's technological "prove it" challenges, but as a writer...

For storytellers, Spider Robinson included, prove it: if nobody else is writing space fiction that that reaches us where we are, write some. Tell a better story than the fantasists are doing. Show us how a movement into space can give us back our liberty, individuality and power. Make us believe space is the answer.

Or realize that good stories are not about the uses of technology to get to exciting places to see exotic things... good, meaningful stories that will be remembered for decades to come are about people, and how they feel, and how they change - no matter what setting you put them in.

Or just take your rocking chair out onto the porch and complain there. The rest of us have work to do.

Including, in my case, writing science fiction.

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[* In a previous album, Crown of Creation, Kantner and Slick lifted much of the title song's lyrics from a SF novel - The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham - to forge another revolutionary anthem (and one of their best), without crediting the author.]