Time & Perspective Quote by John Sladek

Sladek’s line is a neat little act of science-fiction sabotage: it takes the genre’s favorite promise - the future as upgrade - and swaps in the mundanity of a billing statement. “According to some scientists” is the sly knife. He’s not attacking science so much as the cultural role we’ve assigned to scientific authority: a priesthood that can bless any trajectory as “inevitable,” even when that trajectory is just the same social arrangements dressed in sleeker hardware.

The joke lands because “exactly like the past” is an accusation, not a prediction. It points at a stubborn continuity in power: hierarchies reproduce themselves, institutions persist, and our imaginative horizon shrinks to whatever can be monetized. The only acknowledged variable is price. That word “expensive” carries the whole critique of techno-capitalism before it had the modern name: progress measured by cost, not by justice, leisure, or freedom. It’s not that the future will have fewer miracles; it’s that the miracles will arrive as subscriptions.

Context matters: Sladek wrote in an era when futurism was often packaged as corporate optimism - space-age sheen, Cold War research budgets, consumer electronics as destiny. His skepticism also reads as a warning about “scientific” forecasts that quietly smuggle in economic assumptions. If tomorrow looks like yesterday, it won’t be because the universe ran out of ideas. It’ll be because we did - and found a way to charge ourselves for the repetition.