But then you look around and you notice people are still stuck in cars instead of . . . literally . . . flying around.

Pitifully earth-bound, fighting a daily losing battle against filth and grime and nature . . . this is the sorry condition we find ourselves in a full seven years into the 21st century. This, despite what fiction, and especially science-fiction, has led us to believe. Maybe it's a good thing. At least 1984 wasn't really like 1984. In fact, the trend, in the west at least, was for completely the opposite: instead of restrictive state management, the world's two most powerful western nations got hands-off, right-wing governments that left their citizens to fight for their lives.

But consider how things might have been in 1992 . . .according to the 1950s Dan Dare comic strips, we'd already have flown spaceships to Venus, where an answer to global food shortages was to be found.

Things would only have taken a turn for the worse again though. By 1997, if 1981 film Escape from New Yo r k was to be believed, Manhattan would have been a walled-in wasteland full of marauding cyberpunks.

Two years later, the moon would be blown out of its orbit by a nuclear explosion . . . this was the gospel of Space 1999 (1975). In 2000AD, said 2000AD, judge, jury, jailer and sometimes executioner would be embodied in one jut-jawed justice dispenser by the name of 'Dredd'. And by 2001, Stanley Kubrick told us in 1968, we'd be frantically unplugging energy-saving light-bulbs from shed-sized computers that had taken on a life of their own and would be threatening to kill us.

There's reason to hope then, based on this evidence, that various appalling vistas of the very near future . . . again, dreamed up by cavalier predicters in the near past . . . will not become a reality. I for one am comfortable with the idea that Blade Runner . . . and its vision of a dystopian world in 2019 . . . might accurately be referred to as Non-Runner at this stage. Even closer to the present, the flying skateboards and inside-out clothes of Back to the Future II . . . set in 2015, all of eight years away . . . seem like fun on initial consideration.

But regardez this: 2015 will also be the year . . . according to BTTFII . . . that Jaws 19 hits cinema screens.

That's 14 Jaws sequels that have to be crammed in between now and then. And you wonder why no futuristic sci-fi film is set this side of 2050 anymore?

Maybe in Back to the Future II, future-shock envisaging had its jumping-the-shark moment.