Kurt Andersen co-founded Spy Magazine and served as the Editor in Chief of New York Magazine before writing his first novel, Turn of the Century. Published in 1999 and set one year into the future, it's about the marriage of a journalist-cum-television producer with a show called Real Time, and his wife, a Harvard Business School entrepreneur who runs a technology company, negotiates a buy-out, and advises the digital strategy of a media conglomerate. Ten years have passed, but the story of George Mactier and Lizzie Zimbalist is still incisive, trenchant, and utterly relevant to our moment. 

What larger questions were you working on before writing the book? How does it relate to your experience as the Editor-in-Chief of New York Magazine?

I hadn't encountered much fiction that depicted business knowingly, or a contemporary marriage of two businesspeople, or the peculiar quality of the dawning digital age in which the boundaries of fiction and reality were blurring. So I thought I'd try to do that in a novel. Being editor of New York (and being fired from that job; and, before that, co-founding Spy), while my wife was a senior executive of Nickelodeon, as it turned out, provided useful material on all those fronts.

Why is Turn of the Century a science fiction novel?

In addition to the story and characters, I began it with a few big ideas, one of which was that real life had achieved a kind of critical mass of science-fiction-ness -- that a realistic depiction of life at the turn of the 21st century could be interestingly shot through with variously eerie and thrilling frissons of the present day having become "the future."

What do you think makes the future both eerie and thrilling?

Well, because its nature is unknown and thus open to individual speculation. And during times that feel as if everything's changing rapidly, depending on who you are or your mood, that mysterious next chapter of history can excite or terrify or (usually, for the last 600 years or so) both. Also, what I meant is that the sense that the future is *now arriving* -- digital gadgets and China's rise and revolutions now, the telegraph and photography and railroads and revolutions 150 years ago -- makes those thrills and chills acute.

Where does the idea of "the future" come from? 

You mean "the future" in a sci-fi sense? I guess it's a late-breaking result of the Enlightenment and science and ideas of earthly progress.

Right out of the airport, George spots the famous new two-acre billboard, two hundred feet tall and five hundred feet wide, advertising MEGAMILLENIUM, the yearlong lottery organized by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. The tickets, ten dollars a pop, are only sold here in town, and the holder of the winning numbers, to be drawn at midnight on December 31 [1999], will win a jackpot of at least one billion dollars - the biggest jackpot anywhere, ever... Lining both sides of the highway into town are thirty-foot-long metallic gold banners formed into graceful swooping pretzels and stakes to the ground, printed with big blue letters spelling out the slogan VEGAS 2000® - EVERYBODY WINS... The VEGAS 2000s seem to glow; they flash sequentially down the road toward the horizon into infinity, like runway strobes. George realizes after half a mile that it isn't some trick of fluttering phosphorescence or a desert illusion, but fiberoptic stitching. Electrified golden flags! When George was a boy, the twenty-first century was going to be absolutely sleek and white. Starting when he was an adolescent, in the seventies, the future was going to be rubble, random fires, and highwaymen speaking gibberish - a grimy postindustrial ruin. Now the twenty-first century is here, and it's rococo. High-production-value, fiber-optic, evanescent rococo, imagineered Albert Speer gilded and baking in the desert sun.

-Excerpt from Turn of the Century

Where does vision come from?

Paying attention and connecting dots in non-obvious ways.

If we arrived at "the future" in 1999, are we now "post-future?"

Interesting phrase, one that could catch on, but no. We are in an extended period of being at the threshold of the future.

What does that mean? What are we waiting for? Total economic collapse? To see just how much technology and globalization will change our lives? Godot?

Mad Max or the Singularity, take your pick. Or (more likely, in my view) something in between. But the sense of so much in such extreme flux for such a long time -- technologically (and thus) economically and geopolitically -- is unprecedented in my lifetime. 

What do you think you wrote then that was especially prescient? What have you watched come to pass since? 

Off the top of my head, large and small: Proliferation of quasi-fictionalized "reality" television and news reinvented as entertainment. An investment banker in early 2000 who thinks the stock market it close to its top. False internet stories moving stock prices--and, in particular, a hacker who posted a fake report of the death of a key computer executive (Steve Jobs, not Bill Gates). An endless U.S. counterinsurgency war in a developing country. The rise of gaming, and Microsoft's heavy involvement in it. An Islamic suicide bombing of a U.S. target. Uncensored R-rated versions of broadcast TV series. Pandering to high-end nostalgia for the 1960s New York advertising world. An entertainment complex whose theming is a version of its particular location 40 years earlier (the Las Vegas 1961 Hotel = Disney's California Adventure.) Searchable e-books. Entertainment moguls with young Asian second wives. Proliferating product placement in TV shows. A show that stages Twilight Zone-ish pranks. Video tombstones. Watergate's Deep Throat being revealed. Brill's Content ceasing publication. A web news site covering nothing but the media. John F. Kennedy and his wife dying on an airplane. The Chinese government renting out its monuments for parties. And a passenger in a plane over the World Trade Center towers, worrying that the plane is crashing, having a cell phone conversation with his wife on the ground.

Why did the sensational, quasi-fictionalized blend of fiction and news portrayed in Real Time become so popular? 

Fiction and non fiction & news and entertainment routinely came in blends until the 20th century, then they were more strictly divided, then in the 1960s they started blending again at the high end (New Journalism), a blending that accelerated in the 1980s and 90s after it was decided that news had no special exemption from maximizing profit margins. And those blends are more vivid and "relatable" than real news (in the way that Pringles are more popular snacks than carrots) and cheaper to produce than either serious news or scripted fiction.

Has the future, limited in 1999 to the Mactier-Zimbalists of the world, been "massified"?

If I understand what you mean by that -- mass production, mass consumption, diminished individuality -- yes and no. Networked computers and telecommunications have the paradoxical effect of both increasing massification (everyone can see everything and communicate with everyone_ and individualization (each of us can create and inhabit his or her own little mediascape).

How do you think that the arrival of "the future" will change the love stories of writers younger than yourself?

Cell phones and always-on communication make certain pre-21st-century plot turns difficult or impossible to pull off convincingly. But I pretty much think love stories are love stories, past, present and future.

How does all of this effect love and marriage? Lizzie and George's work, while providing handsomely for their family, pulls them so far apart.

Yup. It makes love and commitment and family all the more desirable and important as a haven and fixed point, but harder to achieve.

What would the Zimbalists be doing in 2012?

Lizzie might be a VC, but more probably she'd be, say, running a non-profit underwritten by Ben Gould. George would maybe be writing books and teaching. 

I adore Featherstone and Cubby. They could have just been punchlines, but they're handled with extraordinary sensitivity. Featherstone's death is tragic, and Cubby's utopic visions of the future are beautiful. I think that my favorite moments are when George is forced to confront Cubby's creations: the fully contextualized vision-and-off-the-planet-visionary, being critically evaluated by someone who is himself considered by many to be too progressive. What do you think about George's relationships with Cubby and Featherstone? Why is he so critical?

Thanks. I love Featherstone and Cubby, too, and in particular the scene with Cubby's miniature City of the Future. Featherstone and Cubby are both ridiculous but also both lovable, as I think probably a majority of people are. George's contempt and criticism of Cubby is mooted, however, when he encounters Cubby's creation. And his contempt for Featherstone is more a contempt for show-business falseness than Featherstone per se.

How do you relate Turn of the Century to your second novel, Heyday?

They're both love stories featuring strong women, and both set at times of discombobulatingly rapid social and technological change.

Bret Easton Ellis used the term "Post-Empire" recently (http://bit.ly/h2Bh15) to link popular celebration of Charlie Sheen's unmasked, libertine id with a larger, more permanent dissolution of America values. When you wrote Reset in 2009, you called for a "great national rehab."  What Ellis points towards is that, not only are we not getting treatment, we're masochistically enjoying the disease. Has the malaise - a fatalistic sensation of irreversible decline - just set even deeper?

Could be. I prefer to think not. In Reset I also raised the distinct possibility (if not probability) of American decline, although my vision is more, as I wrote in the book, that we become a "supersized Great Britain" rather than 5th century Rome with flat-screen TVs. I prefer to think that decency and sanity still have a shot. But it's probably a close call.

Andersen is also the host of radio show Studio 360, which can be found on PRI, WNYC, and a podcast near you. He is currently working on his a third novel. Additional information can be found at his website, www.kurtandersen.com