The pollution is horrendous. The rich have withdrawn into fortress-style towers. The avenues teem with unruly, eccentrically dressed immigrants who speak a rough street language instead of English. References to these scenes show up everywhere, from books about politics to civic-planning documents like "L.A. 2000," a look at the future commissioned by Tom Bradley, when he was mayor of the city in the 1980's. The report warned that the region might deteriorate into a scene from "Blade Runner": a featureless sprawl seething with class and ethnic hostilities. In "A California State of Mind," the public-opinion analyst Mark Baldassare writes that Californians who were asked about the future "presented an image more like a nightmare than a utopia" — descriptions that recalled a certain science-fiction movie.

Even Raymond Chandler painted an ugly picture of California. Everything moves faster here, technology and politics, qnd also all the problems that threaten to turn the entirety of the Western world into miserable scifi scenario. Yes, we're afraid of the bad bits. who wouldn't be?