Alastair Reynolds on living in the future

[apologies if this has already been exhaustively linked]

"If you had been transported from 1997 into [2007, you would be incredulous and think of it as science fiction."

Funnily enough I was already thinking along the same lines: a quick trawl of the BBC news site produced:
- renegade wolf cloners
- NASA refusing to coordinate lunar exploration with Russians
- degree show staged in cyberspace
- gene therapy for sight disorder which deteriorates with age (and sounds similar to retinitis pigmentosa, which I first encountered via Tanya Huff's Blood series)
- homes in rural India lit by solar power
- international scandal centres on artificially-constructed celebrity (actually, there's a lot of this)

Worth noting, too, that although some of those stories are in the 'tech' section they are all linked from other parts of the site -- Health, Politics, Education, World News/

However, this is still the real world: where 'sci-fi' is a derogatory term