"Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old ..." — Paul Di Filippo

It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

Generally speaking, by the time a subculture such as steampunk secures the attention of major media, resulting in extensive coverage of the craze, said phenomenon is already on the way out.

The entire Internet, as well as the types of devices represented by the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the iPhone, the iPod, and the iPad, are a continuing inescapable embarrassment to science fiction, and an object lesson in the fallibility of genre writers and their vaunted predictive abilities.

There must be a rule of thumb in pop-culture archaeology that states that the allure of any topic is inversely related to its assigned importance in the affairs of humanity. The more trivial the subject, the dearer it is to most of its partisans and the more worthy of scholarship. The smallest things in life often mean the most to people.