People predicted that we'd have moon colonies by now and even be mostly on the way to making Mars ones. Instead, we basically gave up and now pay billionaires to go to space while making fun of and snubbing our favorite icons like William Shatner.

The idea that we even want to go to space is dead, at least in political terms. Irl, we get to be slaves until the earth ends within our lifetimes, making us dream of like socialism or at least less cost gouging in our near future. No wonder we turn to fantasy settings like LOTR and Harry Potter rather than sci-fi - the former is fun but the latter becomes increasingly depressing when you try to mesh futuristic technology with what we know of human morality today.

Tbf, the dream is not dead, it's just... postponed for awhile while we sort things out on earth.

I'm not very well-read so my opinion comes from a select well-known big hit novels/series, but mostly film/tv and also a vague, surface-level knowledge and understanding of themes, settings, etc of some of the important works I haven't read

IMO a lot of earlier scifi was conceiving of possibilities or coming up with weird ideas and building a world and narrative around them, and sometimes you can't make a reasonable way for this to occur from where we are in our reality. So you do "a galaxy far far away" or 10,191 or something so far out that earth is a long-forgotten planet, and now you are doing something more similar to high fantasy world building, and can do whatever you want.

Versus a later generation of sci-fi stories that are cautionary tales about things that could become invented, and how they would integrate and affect our current societies over a (relatively) small number of years.

I'm on my phone so I don't want to completely rewrite what I just wrote, but I do want to clarify/correct that this is not actually "earlier" vs "later" - there are examples of both all throughout scifi history - but perhaps what has entered the mainstream via adaptations, smash hits, cult classic, etc. pathways. Basically it depends if the author is writing a cautionary tale or metaphor, developing a conceptual & epic universe, telling an allegorical story, or whatever else - and then oftentimes popculture dictates which ones people become familiar with.

Anyway it's super early and as I said I'm on my phone, so I hope these thoughts are coherent and at least vaguely interesting to you. I found your question thought provoking and wanted to respond. Cheers

hits blunt

I don't know, 40K is pretty far in the future.

No, I don't think you're wrong at all. Another semi-recent game that took a perhaps too optimistic view of how quickly our tech would advance was Detroit: Become Human. It came out back in 2018. I recall how the fandom (myself included) was kinda weirded out about the setting of that game, which was only 2038. So within a roughly 20 year time gap, the game presumes that our current tech in then 2018 would advance so far and fast by just 2038.

I think it depends on the content you expose yourself to, we did get Dune, Foundation, and a bunch of disappointing Star Wars, but yeah, otherwise it does feel like some sci fi lately has had settings or plots that didn't feel foreign in terms of era

https://youtu.be/kmzpdd4pWvM

In Hindu mythology I guess the current age ends in 428,899 CE so that's another data point for a longer speculative future from the distant past