The last line here aptly summarizes, I think, why science fiction is simultaneously so exhilarating and so frightening. On the other hand . . as we’re starting to see, the future kind of does care what you think, in the sense that a techno-utopian attitude would produce a very different future from a dystopian, anti-tech paranoia, and so on. At the very least, the point that the future has autonomy and a life of its own meshes well with “The Gernsback Continuum.”