A fantastic time in the not-too-distant future.

If we manage to narrowly avert a nuclear holocaust and manage to keep the godless Commies in check, and manage to preserve our nebulous deism which can be misrepresented in the future as "family values" by anyone who didn't live through the worst war the world ever saw, and if we manage to prevent the resurgence of Fascism (which is what precipitated that war), – if we manage all that, then the society of the year 2000 will be a fantastic utopia.

Everyone will fly around in their own fusomobile.The major automotive companies promise us flying cars by the year 2000, and those companies are run by good, honest, hard-working, clean-cut, non-Communist Americans, so you can bet they'll deliver. Nuclear power will be perfected, so you needn't fear giant rampaging mutant creatures, and pollution will be a thing of the past. Electronic computers will become so sophisticated that they will be able to support artificial intelligence, and so large that they will fill a medium-sized warehouse. Only the richest governments of the world will be able to afford such thinking super-machines, but the average joe wouldn't need one anyway.

By the year 2000, everyone will be wearing the latest in silver and gold lamé fashion. Television will be available in colour. Telephones will be a thing of the past; – why settle for only hearing the other person when you can also see them on your two-way (colour!) TV screen? People will no longer be judged by the colour of their skin or their race or their religion; conversely, it will be as easy as ever to identify an enemy intelligence agent by his Russian accent (or if he can't do one, he'll resort to a German accent, which is almost as evil).

In those golden times, we may have made contact with an extraterrestrial species. These fellas will be flying around in improbable disk-shaped craft, and will probably look fairly human except for their swollen crania, which will be a sure sign of their superior intellect. Another sign will be their ability to speak English without a trace of an accent, without ever having seen or heard a human being speak English before in their lives -- whereas our most intelligent human enemies are burdened by those aforementioned pesky Eastern European accents when infiltrating a nation they've been trained all their lives to know better than their own.

Above all, the year 2000 will emphatically not be a dirty, confusing world halfway between utopia and tragic dystopia, where the food is fast and cheap, and the women are only moreso. War and disease will be things of the past. So will existentialism; – nobody will confused about their place in the world.

And the music will be cool.