"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul." [...] "Sadly, Britain faltered on the way to its own future, half-heartedly erecting a shabby urban limbo of under-serviced municipal towers and wind-swept shopping precincts." J G Ballard Imperial science fiction's combination of medievalism with rocketry was one way to combine nostalgia for social certainty with a sense of possibility. With the industrial growth and now shrinkage of the classic city, modern is no longer colossal. Miniaturisation not megasatructure: body intervention and behaviour control dominate environmental modification.