Almost fifty years ago, Norman Mailer insisted that realistic fiction
"had never caught up with the rate of change in American life, indeed it
had fallen further and further behind." Even then, the answer to
Mailer's complaint was obvious. Many writers and movie directors have
turned to science fiction -- loving it for its brazenly free invention and
its market popularity, but also, perhaps, as a way of catching up. By
setting events in the future, they can identify social trends and
technologies that bedazzle or frighten us, push them to their limits,
and use the created fiction as a way of redirecting attention back to
the present.
-- David Denby, in a review of the movie "Transcendence."
New Yorker (Apr. 28, 2014)
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2014/04/28/140428crci_cinema_denby