Incept

We may not yet have flying cars or sentient synthetic humanoids, but a lot of BLADE RUNNER's predictions for what life in 2019 would be like - for better, but mostly worse - were shockingly prescient.

Our big cities are illuminated by giant digital billboards; we communicate with our computers verbally; video calls are the norm (albeit in a much more advanced form than the VID•PHŌN booths in BR); Off-world colonisation (of Mars and our moon) feels more plausible than ever; in our Asian mega-cities hyper-futurism butts up snugly against the dilapidated vestiges of 19th and 20th century architecture; and, most unfortunate of all, BR's vision of climate catastrophe appears to be a reality that we are hurtling towards with reckless abandon.

So, as we prepare to head into the third decade of the 21st century, here's to a 2019 that hopefully sees our species making some more positive choices.