There's no one to defeat. It's not surprising to see NASA and its military-industrial allies trying to pump billions in financial energy into the flaccid corpse of the Russian space effort. Without rival knights of the spaceways, what exactly is the point of a manned space program of any kind? How long can Canaveral survive the death of Tyuratam? Do Apollo gantries rust any less completely than the dead Buran space shuttle?

The twentieth century is almost over now. Hindsight is increasingly possible. We can now recognize a certain kind of rhetoric as being intrinsically "twentieth- century." It sounds like this:

"A War to End All Wars. Wings Over the World. A Thousand-Year Reign. Science, the Endless Frontier. Energy Too Cheap To Meter. Miracle Drugs. Sexual Revolution. A Great Leap Forward. Storming the Cosmos."

The slogans seemed to emanate from every corner of the ideological compass at the time, but in retrospect they can be recognized as notes in a single piece of period music, a brassy modernist rant. The Soviet Union was born in the twentieth century and died in the twentieth century. It had the worst case of this syndrome ever known, maybe even the worst that will ever be possible. The USSR -- scientific, centralized, revolutionary, technocratic, blind to historical continuity, contemptuous of humanity, impossibly enthusiastic -- fell headlong for every 20th-century sucker's game imaginable: Marxism, aviation, electrification, mass industrialism, total warfare, atomic power, space flight.

The USSR longed for transcendance-through-machinery with a deeply religious, unquestioned and formally unquestionable fervor. Other twentieth-century societies shared this cast of mind, but it was the USSR which paid the worst, the most sordid, and the most degrading price for these aspirations. Toward their miserable end, the Soviets were even gasping for the chance to get up to speed on personal computers -- even as Chernobyl detonated. The consequences of that terrible act, like so many other 20th century enthusiasms, will easily outlast the 21st century.

It's "hubris clobbered by Nemesis," as Brian Aldiss likes to say. Science fiction was also born in the twentieth century, clutching a rocketship and wailing for the stars.

If we needed one shining example of a truly prescient 20th century science fiction writer -- our one stubborn dissident, denied his tithe of chrome Hugos, yet stubbornly clinging, despite all odds, to the light of reality -- then we need look no farther than J. G. Ballard. This great artist of our genre, with his uncanny surrealist insight, has made all the chest- pounding, slide-rule-waving, 60s go-go dancers of the Old Wave look like fossils. His science fiction is still entirely relevant, while theirs has become nostalgic gimmickry to be auctioned-off at Sotheby's as household 60s kitsch. I can't imagine Ballard taking much pleasure in this vindication, or even bothering to notice; but surely he deserves some formal recognition for being so entirely right at the wrong time.

J. G. Ballard, author of "Memories of the Space Age," could have written James Oberg's article for him. In fact, he did. Repeatedly. Oberg's nonfiction article in an engineering magazine is the single most Ballardian piece of text never written by J G Ballard.

What this means to the rest of us will probably be decided by the first generation to come of age in the next century. Is there still real life in science fiction, or is the aging cadre of veterans merely going through the motions, hoping for miracles? What exactly is the role of "wonder" in a society where cosmic exploration is a matter of cash on the barrelhead? If there's hope, it surely lies in the young. Not much hope seems evident. But then again, where else has there ever been hope?