During an interview William Gibson notes something he missed in his great science fiction novel, Neuromancer, with implications for futurology:

Any imaginary future as soon as you get it down on screen starts to acquire an instant patina of quaintness - it’s just the nature of things.

If I were a smart 12-year-old picking up Neuromancer for the first time today I’d get about 20 pages in and I’d think ‘Ahhaa I’ve got it - what happened to all the cell phones? This is a high-tech future in which cellular telephony has been banned’.

(via Slashdot)