Prediction is Hard

...especially of the future.

It's an aphorism attributed to Niels Bohr, but it seems to apply to science fiction these days. Once upon a time SF writers were mighty in the art of prediction. Arthur C. Clarke famously predicted the communication satellite and the smart phone, for example. So how are they doing now. If the SF series I'm reading now is typical, not so hot.

The setting is several hundred years in the future, when man has colonized much of the solar system, but aside from fusion powered space ships, the technology is mostly off the shelf 2015. Battle are fought with bullet shooting guns pretty much like those that have been around for hundreds of years, or fists, (or in one case, a can of chicken.) Biology is pretty much lab standard the present, though modest progress seems to have been made against cancer.

I wonder if it has become too difficult to imagine anything not already almost in technologies grasp.

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