The years of my youth must have been such a disappointment for sci-fi fans of my parents’ generation. They were raised on stories of spaceships soaring between the stars, and they grew up to see the space shuttle explode and humankind abandon the moon. They grew up expecting flying cars and robot servants, but as they reached middle age they were still trundling along the ground and doing their own laundry.What happened in the 1970s that seemed to rob the future from the Boomer generation? Energy. With the end of cheap oil in 1973, and the failure of nuclear power to get cheaper as volumes scaled up, the dreams of the sci-fi authors of the mid-20th century failed to materialize. Those dreams had partially been based on fantasy physics (faster-than-light travel, gravity control, time travel),1 but partly they were based on the expectation that energy would keep getting more plentiful and engines would keep getting more powerful and compact. But in the 1970s, humanity suddenly stopped being able to harness more and more energy per person:Limited by energy scarcity, humanity’s innovative efforts switched from atoms to bits; “technology” in 1970-2010 was defined by computers, software, and the internet. In 2011, Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen were writing that the appliances in their kitchen hadn’t changed since they were children.Science fiction writers anticipated this shift quite early on. The “cyberpunk” writers of the 1980s and 1990s — William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Masamune Shirow, Bruce Sterling, Mike Pondsmith, Kojima Hideo, Konaka Chiaki, Vernor Vinge, and many others — didn’t envision a future entirely devoid of hardware innovations, but most of what they envisioned for the 21st century centered around advances in the internet, AI, robotics, and biotech. That was the future I grew up expecting — a neon-drenched, mostly earthbound world where humans would mingle with robots, escape into digital fantasies, and modify their bodies. Instead of bold space explorers