Some have said that books about the near future have a shelf-life, that is, eventually the future catches up to the era you write about, and unless you are a latter-day Nostradamus or Jules Verne, you're bound to get some things wrong. A good example of this is in my first book, where I predicted that Osama Bin Laden would be caught and executed. I had it half right!
Yet I can still read and appreciate books like "The Time Machine" by Wells, or enjoy the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" even though the times caught up with some of the events in the stories.
I looked backwards 60+ years in my own life. There were phones, cars, TVs, jet planes, atomic weapons and the like. Then I extrapolated what the country might look like 60+ years from now. There'll still be phones, cars, TVs, jet planes, and atomic weapons. The cars might be faster or sleeker, the planes might be faster and sleeker, the TVs will be bigger and flatter, but all in all, I'm sure that our modern technology here in 2011 will still be around in 2075 and beyond; altered by the inescapable march of technological progress towards smaller and quicker, but grounded in the verisimilitude of things we are familiar with today.
The following image, "Spacewalk 2010" was drawn in 1991.
Of course, with the end of the shuttle program only months away, and the second-generation shuttle pictured here never having been built, the picture is out-of-time. But, one day, the first encounter depicted here will surely take place.
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