The article deals with the tendency that has developed in modern fiction not to depict the immediate future (the future in 10–50 years). The rapid development of technology in modern society has created conditions in which the predicting events of our time made by fiction writers over the past two or three decades has not had a chance to come true. Fiction writers can not manage to predict anything also, and it creates the situation of psychological discomfort, prompting them to look for a way out of this situation. They found two such ways out: first, it is possible to describe worlds that several centuries older then the present , and in these descriptions they can give free rein to fantasy; secondly, it is possible to place the modern world in fantastic circumstances, and then to make things up about the technologies of the future is not necessary at all. As a result of the rapid technological development, modern fiction has been deprived of such an interesting segment as works about the nearest future.