2025, a disappointing odyssey: This is not the future we expected when we read sci-fi as kids

Brunner eschews conventional plotting. Instead, we get postcards from the future, a world on fire, ravaged by climate change and ecocide.

His narrative strategy is to induce a kind of distortion in the reality field by interspersing the text with newspaper headlines, snippets from articles, and advertisements, what critic Darko Suvin calls the “factual reporting of fictions”. Somehow, these artefacts from another reality represented, for me, the frisson of encountering the future.

Jeremiah explains that he and his Russian friend, who does R&D in robotics, figured there was scope for robo-baristas.

What gave him the idea, I ask. Jeremiah feels he’s ahead of the curve: “Since the future is turning towards AI.” He explains that there are issues in “finding and retaining staff”, and with robots, there is “no room for error, no reporting late, they will be working even when you are sleeping.”

I think back to a few years ago when I met Fedor the robot at the entrance of the Cosmos Pavilion in Moscow.

Confined to a desk, he balefully glared at the gawking visitors filing past. Fedor had earlier served on the International Space Station, where his job was to conduct spacewalks and carry out maintenance, but was fired after unsatisfactory performance.

When Fedor was unable to grasp things in zero gravity, his cosmonaut shouted at mission control, “Maybe I should bash it with a hammer?” With his whirring servo motors and chunky metallic appearance, he was already far removed from the gracile offerings of Boston Dynamics or China. He already belonged to a different past’s future, something left behind.

I retreat to my bookshelves piled with second-hand paperbacks; going through their strata is like an archaeological excavation