Are we living in the future promised (or foreshadowed) by science fiction of old? And if not, why not?.

Remember the future? Those were the days! Teleporting to the office… quick spin in the anti-gravity gym… taking the wife out for a few Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters on Calisto… hover-boarding home to find the robot maid had done all the laundry… sigh.

Life was simpler then. Everything was sharper, sleeker, faster, less… dystopian somehow? You never needed to hunt for an iPhone charger. All the non-aesthetically pleasing old stuff had magically dematerialised. No one had invented revenge porn or malware or 4chan. Biff from Back To The Future II hadn’t accidentally become President. And no one worried too much about the retrograde gender politics of robot maids either.

The future that we have made our home in 2019 feels a bit more problematic, to use one of the words of the moment (“toxic” being the official choice of the Oxford English Dictionary). The signature science-fiction series of the age, Mr Charlie Brooker’s excellent Black Mirror, is less an exciting projection of the future than a grim reflection of a near-present, in which people really do give each other star-ratings, autonomous vehicles really do run down pedestrians, and cartoon characters really do win elections.

It’s not that we don’t have lots of cool stuff. We actually do. Video calls. Bionic arms. Gene-editing technology. The Jetsons have nothing on us. Recently, I interviewed Silicon Valley’s celebrated gerontologist Mr Aubrey de Grey, who insisted that there was a “90 per cent chance” we would eliminate ageing within 50 years, whereupon thousand-year life-spans will become commonplace and our main worry would be asteroids hitting the Earth. Tech fever has even hit the UK’s Department for Transport, which recently issued a statement on “autonomous flying vehicles”. Flying cars! Meanwhile, Google co-founder Mr Larry Page is reportedly amassing a “flying car empire” in California.

Such is the pace of change, we don’t even notice the most remarkable developments. You think the artificial intelligence revolution is still some way off? No, it’s here. We already outsource basic cognitive and social functions to the little smart-demons we keep in our pockets: navigating cities; retrieving information; choosing sexual partners, etc. We’re increasingly comfortable with modifying our bodies, too. You think the tattoo trend is retro? It isn’t, it’s futuristic. It shows that we’re increasingly comfortable with adapting our bodies in order to transmit information. It’s only a matter of time before these two trends merge – and soon, not having a cognitive implant will seem as kooky and cranky as not having a smartphone now.

“What? You’re not chipped?” your friends will say. “How do you know what your friends are thinking, LOL. Seriously, it’s GREAT for gaming. I’m on a monthly plan… Yeah, I got the IQ upgrade bundled in with my phone contract. Mind you, the latest update is making me feel a bit sluggish...”

Such is the upheaval and uncertainty associated with technology that, to be honest, I mainly find the future a bit worrying. The people who are the most excited about its possibilities – Mr de Grey, for example – don’t really reassure me, either. Would it actually be good to live to 1,000? Would it be good if a few ultra-wealthy tech CEOs got to live to 1,000?

Likewise, when I hear about flying cars, I don’t think “Cool!” I think: “Oh, grow up.” (I mean… who actually needs a flying car? Wouldn’t they be terrible for the environment?) The French novelist Mr Gustave Flaubert couldn’t see what was so great about railways, as he thought they would just allow stupid people to go and be stupid in other places. I suspect the same thing might be true of flying cars.

So what role can science fiction play in all this? The dystopian visions just make us more cynical, and apocalypse makes us numb.

I think there is one underexplored seam. It seems to me that we’ve lost the sense that things might just get better. Not just slightly-fancier-gadgets-resolution better, but socially, politically, ecologically, imaginatively, spiritually better. Because if writers and artists can’t come up with a compelling vision of how things could be, then it will be left to cynics and narcissists.

This was one of the aims of Mr Gene Roddenberry, creator of the original Star Trek (which featured, among other milestones, one of American TV’s first interracial kisses). “Star Trek speaks to some basic human needs,” he once said. “That there is a tomorrow, it’s not all going to be over with a big flash and a bomb; that the human race is improving; that we have things to be proud of as humans.” Radical, huh?

So let’s have less grim Annihilation and fewer Bird Box monsters punishing everyone, please. And more along the lines of She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power. My five-year-old son adores the Netflix reboot, in which Princess Adora and her admirably gender-variant, multi-racial, various-sized friends deal with deeply human problems… only in space. And that gives me some hope.