“Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now?” His interest was in disentangling the structural causes of the West’s failure to fulfill the promise of its own mythology of unrelenting scientific and technological progress.
