There are 'frame' writers and 'picture' writers. This formula takes us back to the weak literary querelle of the early 1998 between those who “played” - as Calvino and Quenau - and those who didn't. A major, substantial, inner, 'picture' writer who never “played” much was Paolo Volponi. I was honoured to enjoy this writer's friendship and esteem, who was one of the few who, among the other things, today could rightfully cudgel his brains and give his opinion on the 35 working hour issue thanks to all that literature on work that he knew. But he is no longer here, unfortunately.  
Once, I believe it was in the daily “Corriere della Sera”, he commented on Ridley Scott's famous movie “Blade Runner” and claimed that, ten years after its release, he was not feeling that streets were about to become as hallucinated as those of the film. I did not agree, and not because of the difficulty in comparing a fantastic work with a urban, future reality, but rather because Volponi had conceived “Blade Runner” as a future hypothesis that he actually did not recognize. What I thought was that the film transfigured a present, not what we would have become, but what we metropolitan humans already were deep inside, after taking some masks off.  
A couple of days ago I was reasoning on how art and creativity depict the future during a short holiday at the Canary Islands, the Spanish resort with Tenerife as the main island in the Atlantic African area. I'll skip the tourist-like and tour operator-style observations on the so-called four-season island, whose area can be covered with about a four-hour drive experiencing microclimates that differ despite the few kilometres' distance. Instead, I will zero in on some images that will maybe explain the association of ideas with “Blade Runner”, Volponi and the conception of a future/present.  
So: in the island of Tenerife that has a volcanic origin, there is Spain's tallest peak, the Teide, over 3700 tall. One needs to climb more than two thousand metres in a 45-minute drive from the coast that is always under a summer sun - which I'll tell you of in a minute - and that is the island's southern part. 
Then one arrives in an incredible and unique on the 
planet (I believe) post-volcanic plain, shadowed by the Teide: an extraordinary geological richness, a special panorama, a lunar though “tourist” atmosphere, with coloured wind-jackets that suddenly emerge among big stones, the canyons, the expanses of pumice stone that the wind refined and turned into dust.  
To reveal all: this is where Stanley Kubrick directed the most exciting scenes of “2001: A Space Odissy”. Then the famous films that make a ring between reality and fantasy for an association of ideas that might (?!?) lead to something, have now become two.  
Let's continue with the movies and from the smoky and “alien” metropolis of “Blade Runner” and the lunar expanse of “2001”, let's move on to a less committed and more popular film genre: “superficial”, so to speak, science fiction.  
What comes to my mind is Besson's last work, “The fifth element”, or a top-quality Schwarzenegger in “The last action hero”, and a whole series of movies that have at least one thing in common which I really need to mention: the fact that going on holiday for the futurist man means going “somewhere else”, that is to “a tailor-made resort”, a holiday planet or a holiday space (or thermal?) station, it won't matter.  
Thus, you'll say, where is the real parallel with this movie place-name of the holiday? How can one continue to make the equation “Blade Runner” is to Milan as “2001” is to the Teide's lava plain? Descending the Teide, walking backwards, one reaches the Playa de Las Americas on the “sur” coast where twenty years ago there were only banana plantations and villages and now there is a continuous building site, an estate agent's that spreads in all directions, and especially upwards with breathtaking huge hotels that begin in Rimini and imaginatively reach Las Vegas' skyscrapers.  
All was invented, all was built up in a hurry and in a laboratory for the millions of Europeans who look for sun and beaches all the year, in a sort of collective videogame from another planet. Without roots, without memory, not even of tomorrow.  
That's the future, Paolo, right in the present, disassembled and reassembled on the same island, with quantitative rather than qualitative human types, in an environmental cloning that makes us laugh and cry at the same time: in other words it makes us move as if in a movie. Already seen, obviously