Degeneracy of the fantastic

Video games and fantasy-fiction movies these days show an increasing propensity amongst producers to veer toward the technologically rich fantastic. Of course, that's nothing to complain about (I honestly can't wait for the release of Battleship). At the same time, these visually tech-abundant entertainment options are gradually homing in toward stuff that could actually be possible. This could be an indication of our advancement in real-life, too, but still, the credit goes to the visionaries and dreamers who thought up the future all those years ago when they first conceived these ideas.

Is the future here, then? The future is never here by definition, so that's ruled out. What, then, is the future? In the 1960s-1980s, a critical mass of fiction writers sat down in the Golden Age of science fiction and thought up a world in which the problems of their time didn't exist, a world in which the capacity for human goodness stood exacerbated by the development of technology immensely advanced but not yet radical. Where are such writers now? Going around the web looking for answers to these questions, it looks as if futurism has evolved into a less materialistic and more scientific school of thought.

Thinking about it, it'll quickly become evident that the Golden Age could actually have ended with the start of the digital revolution in the late 1980s. With the advent of channels dedicated simply to the distribution of knowledge, the enthralling unknowability that fascinated and invited the mid-late 20th century writers was being disintegrated bit by bit. Back then, it was much easier to be fantastic even though a lot of the science known today was known then as well: people were not connected as they are now, and were therefore more welcome to new ideas, perhaps some of which they could use to make better sense of the world.

Today, even as the price of being unique has gone up, so also has the ease with which uniqueness is to be found - original thinking has become really hard with the development of influences (which has always been happening) and their pervasiveness (which is a product of the revolution). There has been more and more to know about, to learn, and that learning eroded at the base of what was left to speculate about. This doesn't mean the solution is to limit learning: learning takes priority over writers inventing the future any day. This only means something unfortunate has happened that has quelled a once widely popular interest.

The shift toward more localized and less operatic fiction shows in the sci-fi books that have been hitting the shelves these days. Earlier, there was greater focus on alternative timelines, spaceflight, aliens and humanoids, teleportation, etc. These days, the focus seems to lie with the near-future, time travel and faster-than-light travel, telepathy, etc. There is a shrinkage of domains and it only seems like a natural conclusion given how the times have changed. However, with the dearth of such broad-domain thinking, who are the inventors of the future today? At least, inventive enough in comparison with Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein?