There's something going on if you compare the retrofuturism of early Space Exploration/Colonization science fiction with Cyberpunk science fiction.
Both predicted futures that didn't come to pass, but the older strain seems to hold up better than the newer.
I think it's that we've leapfrogged the Cyberpunk future, but not the Space Exploration future.
Exploration science fiction assumed that space exploration technology would become cheaper, more effective, and privately available and it mostly didn't.
I mean, it did, but not in a way that led us to colonize other planets. We're still talking about getting back to the moon.
This was probably because the space race was a challenge between the USSR and the USA to see who could burn more money and still survive.
It was just wrong about what they were!
Instead of Cyberspace, we have Facebook. Instead of VR, the World Wide Web.
Instead of anonymous hackers paid with digital money we have... okay, we actually have that one.
But lots of Cyberpunk stories assume wired networking, but we have 5g and WiFi. Lots of them assume portable computers slightly larger than laptops, while we have smartphones.
Their online communities look like Second Life (but successful,) not like Facebook groups.
A modern Cyberpunk story is just a spy thriller set in the present time.
(And don't get me started on how many spy thriller plots fall apart in the presence of cell phones.)
Basically, Cyberpunk seems obsolete because we've leapfrogged it. Space Exploration never happened, so it still seems futuristic.
That's my guess, anyway. What do you think?
Cyberpunk assumed that computer technology would become cheaper, more effective, and privately available. And it did. And it led to a bunch of things that Cyberpunk didn't really predict.
Cyberpunk was right that there would be social repercussions from ubiquitous computing...