The near future is a particularly dangerous time to write about, if you're an SF writer: if you get it wrong, people will mock you mercilessly when you get there.I've never really seen it that way. Near-future SF (or really, any fiction set in the future) assumes a possible future and then tells a story there. If reality catches up with the date of the story, all that means is that what was once a story of a possible future is now a story of an alternate history.
The book 1984 is set in a 1984 where the UK had fallen into a totalitarian regime. We're 25 years past that now; is the book deserving of mockery because the events didn't happen? Of course not; today you can read it as an alternate history that branched off from reality in 1949 when the book was published.
Similarly, we're closing in on 2015, the year in which Back to the Future II was set. It's looking pretty unlikely that we'll have hoverboards and flying cars by then, but there have been great advances in other areas of tech that didn't appear in the movie. (Future McFly got unceremoniously fired via fax; in the real 2015 it would probably be by email.) Should we mock the movie? Well, yes, but not because it didn't correctly predict which research fields would be successful.
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In an earlier (possibly years earlier) blog post, Stross gave the example of a spy thriller written just before the Berlin wall came down, that focused on the usual US-USSR cold war drama. By the time it was published, it was already horribly out of date, and the world it presented was completely unlike the world as it was.
Unlike 1984 and the like, which had enough time to get established before becoming alternate history, that book never had a time (post-publication) when it was a viable view of the world. It was mock-worthy from the beginning, due to horrible luck in timing.
Stross expressed his fear that that would happen to one of his books. That, say, Halting State II would be all about more Fun Future Internet Tricks, and by the time it was published, the internet had gone down in flames due to some freak accident, and his book would be like the poor sucker who thought that this was a costume party, and has to spend the rest of the night dressed as a banana at a black-tie event.
Ah, hm. That's true, the book does at least need to get published before the timeline split can plausibly happen. So given the turnaround time on a book, from first idea to publishing, it's possible to be outdated before you even hit market.
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