“let’s put the future behind us”

Good grief, the man is a keen observer. From Stross’ observations on the causes of the decline in readership of speculative fiction:

Firstly, let me tackle the reason for the decline in the SF/F readership over time as a proportion of written fiction. I don't have quantitative data to hand, but I believe we can attribute it to the fact that the civilization we live in is changing so rapidly that we’re all exposed to rapid technological change all the time. SF as a genre evolved during a period of industrialization and standardization and rapid linear progress. It was both an escapist literature and a didactic form that lent its readers some exposure to new ideas about how they might live in future. But things have gone non-linear, and a lot of the future has arrived today, albeit in bastardized form. Want to go live on Mars? Tough, you can’t — but you can download travel albums from the red planet til you're blue in the face. Want to go live on an alien world? Go visit Japan — it’s not that expensive — or explore the Goth night club scene in Ulan Bator (I’m informed it has one). We don’t need SF for pre-adaptation to the future: the future is now.

Meanwhile, we’re competing in the special effects stakes with TV, film, and increasingly, computer games. Back in the 1950s or even 1960s, special effects were so poor that, for real sense of wonder, no visual medium could compete with written literature. But today, if you're a writer who strives for versimilitude or believability, you can't compete with film! (After all, you know damn well you can’t hear explosions in space, even if those bloody franchise productions insist on putting them in ...)

The gap between the visual imagination of things, and the literary imagination of the universe, has narrowed. (full text)
—Charles Stross—Let’s put the future behind us