In the future, the entire world will be a library and all the punch-drunk Library Boards and Library Operating Agreements won't much matter.
The future comes on like shrapnel, embedding itself in you at high speeds. Time-lapsed evolution shunted pin-pointedly into your brain before you can get out of the way. And not just the viable future but any of them, any old future, all of them, sputtering bits of themselves at you. The out-of-date futures long past their best before dates. All the Philip K. Dick worlds smacking against the barriers of decency and cracking like eggs.
Roger Luckhurst, "The Many Deaths of Science Fiction"--
SF is dying; but then SF has always been dying, it has been dying from the very moment of its constitution. Birth and death become transposable: if Gernsback’s pulp genericism produces the "ghetto" and the pogrom of systematic starvation for some, he also names the genre and gives birth to it for others. If the pulps eventually give us the "Golden Age," its passing is death for some and re-birth for others. If the New Wave is the life-saving injection, it is also a spiked drug, a perversion, and the onset of a long degeneration towards inevitable death.I have stupefying favouritism for the shitty futures that we can't escape, all those dead-ends with big-red-eyed HAL shrieking incoherently and Harrison Ford gunning down innocent robots in the street because they look too human, never mind his own questionable existential status.
(Science Fiction Studies #62, March 1994)
But really, why do I keep reading about J.G. Ballard? I need to read some Ballard. He's been criticized for his nihilism.
What will love mean in the future? Probably pretty much the same as it does, only we'll have adapted whole new survival etiquette for whatever comes after social networking sites. You think it's awkward, some of the things that happen on Facebook? Imagine them, only with telepathy.