Lloyd Webber did to the same handful of notes by Paganini." Unfortunately, Clarke stumbles across the fact that that 2010, 2061 and 3001 are all very much Lloyd Webbers to his own Rach of 2001. At least his final Odyssey takes place so far in the future that no-one will notice how wrong it is, as books will no doubt have been abolished (see Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451) and replaced by story-telling marmosets (alright, no one has actually predicted this until now). As Clarke and Kubrick say in their foreword to 2001, "The truth, as always, will be far stranger."

There was a time, of course, that authors left the future well alone. If they wanted somewhere to create a fantasy world, all they had to do was cast their eye across the oceans and create a far-off country that contemporary readers were as likely to see as the year 802701. But eventually, Hythloday returned from Utopia, and Gulliver from Lilliput, and as imperialists colonised and regimented the far-off corners of the world in the Nineteenth Century, writers began to embrace the ideas of science and cast their eyes to the years ahead. Brian Aldiss sees Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the beginning of science-fiction as we know it, and Shelley's The Last Man (1826), set in the year 2100, describes the journey of the last surviving member of the human race. It is interesting to see how Shelley actually shows us the slow destruction of life and civilisation where her sci-fi successors on paper and celluloid have chosen the short cut of envisioning an apocalypse after the event (everything from The Time Machine to Mad Max suffers from this condition). She realises that the madness really occurs in the time that passes on the road to apocalypse. After Shelley, though, there seemed to be no stopping the visionaries of predictive fiction. And when, in the twentieth century, the prospect of space travel raised its head, authors had a whole new pantheon of potential Utopias and Lilliputs to travel to in the imaginary years ahead. And suddenly, with a billion billion stars to shoot off to, everyone was getting in on the act, and at times it looked as if good, thoughtful, incisive science-fiction would be drowned in a miasma of third rate speculation by viewers of one too many episodes of Star Trek. But thankfully, the likes of J.G. Ballard, Iain M. Banks and the rest have kept their heads above the parapets and continue to intrigue us with their own visions of things to come.

So much, then, for the future. While it may be fraught with obstacles, at least one can be assured that they are a few years off. Attempting to be contemporary, however, can thrust the very same obstacles right under the feet of the author. Conservatively, a novel might take a year to write, and then it can be year between a publisher picking it up and it appearing on the shelves. Or heaven forbid that an aspiring writer is contemplating composing something contemporary and is under the illusion that it's possible for someone who hasn't first done his or her stint as a celebrity gardener or game-show contestant to get published. If this is the case, then add any number of years to get noticed in the slush-piles. If a week is a long time in politics, three or four years are an eternity in fiction. For broad swipes at modern life, the concern isn't so pressing, but how many authors working on Cold War thrillers went white at the collapse of communism?

And it may only be the details that have to be changed, but it is often these details - sometimes to the chagrin of editors - that authors get so fond of within the broader picture of the whole work. Just try writing a satire, and the problem becomes evident. Whether it's a crack addict suing his dealer for getting him addicted (in the news on 17th January), or the latest in 'reality TV' where couples are sent to an island to have their fidelity tested by a variety of tempters and temptresses (coming to our screens presently), it becomes impossible to invent something that doesn't, within the week, get trumped by a more absurd event in the real world. Of course, attempting to capture the zeitgeist alive and in one piece - whilst apparently the raison d'être for many an author - often becomes a meaningless and self-defeating exercise. Publishing trends and, more importantly, purchasing trends, has ensured that as soon as one author taps into a piece of the supposed psyche of the modern world, the bandwagon starts rolling and our bookshops are full of novels about middle-class twenty- somethings living in house-shares and complaining a lot.

But, unless they are particularly keen on making a fast buck, being fashionable should not be high on the novelist's list. We all know that the best fiction says something about the human condition: the eternal struggles, joys, and anguish we find within ourselves and with the people around us. This is not the