The Devil Said to the Deity After He Replaced Him

"It purports to be set in 2007, but you won't find a lot of futuristic science other than air cars and references to a colony on Venus. Overall, I'd say it's similar in some respects to an X-Files movie or episode--the protagonist works for a secret Government agency, and the familiar X-Files format of weird discoveries warring with bovine disbelief prevails for much of the novel. Too bad Heinlein's prime didn't coincide with the TV series--he would have been a perfect writer for it." - from a '99 review of The Puppet Masters.

So, the reviewer expected better than flying cars, handless cell phones, and a colony on Venus less than ten years from when they sat, and X-Files really could have helped out that Robert Heinlein. Seeing as how he was writing - fifty years earlier - what is easily identifiable as "the famliar X-Files format."

Alright. Could be worse. I once read a paid review of the Lensman series that trashed it as being "nothing we haven't seen in Star Wars knockoffs before." But, sincerely, is our cultural lack of historic and contemporary perspective, a sense of time, continuum, and influence not a great detriment that is too easily, today, corrected?