Depictions of the future are a moving target, and stories that seemed so prophetic a few decades ago (like ER's John Brunner picks) haven't aged well, at least in the details. It's inevitable that after a few decades those predictions of the future get moved into the campy column to be laughed at by so-smug later generations.

The best contemporary depiction of the future as it currently looks to me would be Matt Damon's movie Elysium of a couple of years ago. I saw it while I was reading Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, and Damon's movie seemed like a supplement to the book, a fictionalized rendering of the factual trends in a work of non-fiction. "If this keeps up..." is a poor guide to the future, I know, but projecting the growth of inequality Piketty documents a couple of centuries into the future, and you get Elyisum's world of the 1% floating along in orbit in pristine splendor, exploiting and oppressing the 99% trapped on the hellish surface of a planet ravaged by capitalism. Heavy stuff.

Lately I've been streaming old episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and one of many I'd never seen before was from about 1995, a two-part called "Past Tense". It involved time travel, to San Francisco in 2024, and I was blown away by its prescience. Times were hard because of "the economy", homeless people were warehoused in ghettos called "sanctuaries" while the wealthy elite frolicked. There was a riot brewing. People logged into the "Interface" and sometimes had trouble "getting on the net". For an extra veja du tingle, the backstory referenced events in 2015. Doesn't often happen that you get to verify the predictions made twenty years ago. That one was uncanny.

Ask me again in a year, Jody, and I'll probably give a different answer. The future's a moving target and the mirror is always distorted.