The Future of Sci-Fi

George RR Martin speaking on the future of Sci-Fi on To the Best of Our Knowledge:

"Social changes of the last 50 years has made the future something that we no longer want to go visit the way we did when I was a kid. Back in the 50s and 60s when Sci Fi was perhaps as popular as it's ever been, we really had alot of belief in the future. We couldn't wait to get to the future. The future was going to be much better than anything in the present. You know, we were gonna have robots, and flying cars, and all these labour saving devices, and we were gonna take our holidays on the moon and space stations and we were gonna go to the stars. When they took polls, everybody gave the answer yes, yes, my kids are gonna have a better life than I do and my grandkids are gonna have an even better life then they do and we're gonna go into space and were gonna go into the stars...
...People take polls now and most people think that their children and not going to have better lives than they do. They think that their children are going to have worse lives. They're worried about things like ecological problems, global warming, the growing instability of the world and nuclear proliferation, more and more nations having the bomb and all that..."