The year is 2001. Welcome to the future.

And after much careful consideration, I have decided the future is good. How can you think otherwise? The mass production of Schwarzenegger-sculpted Terminators will trouble us naught, for it has been ordained that specially organized Bladerunner units, led by the hard-boiled Harrison Ford, will be given orders to send their scrapmetal asses back to the junkyard.

From our orbiting Babylon space station, we will seek out new life and new civilizations like the intergalatic swingers Captain Kirk knew we could be, and rather than going to the movies, we’ll simply download them into our optical nerves through an entertainment pollen dispensed five minutes past every hour. As for the flying cars, sorry, the cost of the gas will be far too high to make them a practical means of transportation. All things considered, though, it’s clear to see we’re in for one hell of a ride.

Or are we?

I see no off-world colonies being settled, no contact with alien civilizations promoting new fields of technology and understanding. And hell, who’d want to even think about manufacturing cyborgs when those cute little remote-controlled puppies are so much more marketable? With the exception of that patchwork, Erector Set spacestation, and maybe the modern miracle of cloning, what do we offer this new millennium?

What do we bring to the table when people are more concerned with what’s on TV than what advances are being made in space travel? I hate to say it, but we are not ready to inherit The Future. We do not deserve this golden age books and movies have promised us, simply because we don’t care enough to work for it.

“But, you fool,” a chorus of skeptics cries out, “that’s science fiction you speak of; you’re living in a dream world!” Maybe I am just a bit, but when we talk about the future, either as a location or a degree of time, I think we’re bound to bring up science fiction in some form or another. Hold on, don’t go just yet. I know what you’re thinking, “Sci-fi, Tony? Thanks, but no thanks.” I can’t blame you really; sci-fi is definitely the kind of genre that you will either love or hate to death. Tell you what: If you make it to the end of this article and still aren’t satisfied, first round’s on me.

So like I was saying, the future and sci-fi go hand in hand. It’s like the song “Love and Marriage” by Frank Sinatra; you can’t have one without the other. Writers like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and William Gibson have all used science fiction as a kind of laboratory to test the effects of science, technology and time on human beings.

More recently, science fiction has been used in movies like “Terminator 2” and “The Matrix” to show us how the errors of our ways will come to affect us. We have this urgent need to question where we’re headed and what we’re capable of achieving. Science fiction gives us a chance to do that, risk free.

But what’s the point of showing us what’s possible if no one wants to do anything about it? Essentially, all we do is pay these people to lie to us. This, however, is a good thing. Weird, I know, but we need these stories because somewhere in them lies The Truth: The future can never be ours.

Writer Warren Ellis explains on his Web site www.warrenellis.com, “The problem with the future is that it’s boring. Its big secret is that it’s the present, and the present is never as attractive as the future. It should be, but it’s not.”

Every minute you and I play video games, every hour we’re stuck in class, every day we waste away wondering whether we should watch “Jerry Springer” or “Jenny Jones,” we slowly inch and creep and crawl into the future, oblivious to the fact that we are changing nothing.

The future is elusive, and it’s supposed to be. It works best when it coaxes us with ideas just outside our grasp, but not totally unattainable. Whether we’ll be cruising the Milky Way in the USS Enterprise anytime soon is irrelevant; science fiction only asks that we not be afraid to try if we want it bad enough.

But for those of you still waiting for those flying cars, don’t worry. After all, there’s always tomorrow.