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"Okay," Bobby said "then what's the matrix? what's cyberspace?"
"The world," Lucas said.
- William Gibson, Count Zero (1986)

Science fiction, as a genre of popular fiction, can trace its roots as far back as the 2nd century AD, where fantastical worlds were conjured up in order to comment on current beliefs. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1996) outlines a very specific ancestry:

"[Science Fiction] is a descendant of the type of prose fiction sometimes referred to as Lucianic Satire (after Lucian of Samosata, a Greek writer of the 2nd century AD). Lucianic Satire - also commonly known as 'Menippean Satire' after an earlier writer, Menippus, whose works are now lost - is a kind of fiction which tends to the fantastic but also puts considerable emphasis on the discussion and dramatization of ideas In Lucian's fictions, the ideas discussed, and frequently lampooned, were those of Classical Greek philosophers, many of whom were exponents of early 'science'."

In the 17th century, such tales were slugged with many different names, like "utopian fiction," and dealt with the technologies spawned by the discovery of science (formerly known as the "mechanical philosophy"). It was in the 18th century that realist authors discovered the future. Scholars point to L'An 2440 written by Louis Sebastien Mercier in 1771 as the first popular "future novel." The truly "first" science fiction novel noted by scholars is Mary Shelley's Gothic horror tale, Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus (1818). The term "science fiction" didn't come along until pulp magazine editor Hugo Gernsback used the word "scientifiction" in April 1926 to describe a "Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe kind of story." The somewhat derogatory "sci-fi" was coined in the 1950s, by analogy with hi-fi. It was at this time that science fiction (SF) split with the pulps and blended science, technology, politics and the future into its own genre.

Then something happened. While some SF authors extrapolated the future far into outer space with their unrealistic space operas, others became interested in a realistic technological future and developed the hard SF and cyberpunk genres. Here technology, and later computers, would dominate their landscapes.

The future began to look pretty grim. SF authors like John Brunner, Norman Spinrad and J. G. Ballard took notice of the impacts of technology on people and the environment. In the '60s and '70s Brunner penned four seminal novels detailing the end of

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