Why should we believe that our future is already written in our past? Psychoanalysis tells us that patterns and shocks picked up early on in our lives are repeated and woven into what will be. But psychoanalysis is not powerful because it has discovered this relationship between past and future, but because it weaves itself into experiences of the relationship that are structured into Western culture. We are encouraged to discover how important the past is to who we are and where we are going, then, not simply because psychoanalysis tells us so, but because we learn this many times over when we try to imagine the future. Or, rather, when our futures are imagined for us. Then more parts of a psychoanalytic narrative start to make sense.

Each particular future is tied to a particular present. As representations of the future have accumulated in science and science fiction over the last century, we have been able to see all the more clearly how each attempt to stretch our imagination forward is glued to present times. Remember those models of molecules at school constructed out of red and yellow spheres on black wire, and the way they now look like 1950s prints, and how like the patterns on the linoleum they were. Remember the rockets to the moon, where the pilots sat in tubular frame chairs clicking switches like real pilots of the time.