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Tomorrow I'm off to see Iron Man, the movie adaptation of the classic Marvel superhero adventure series. The story's protagonist is an eccentric millionaire inventor who creates an amazing suit of wonders to protect his own ailing body and - Hey! - save the world from diabolical evil. In the comic series, Iron Man ends up with a vast wardrobe of armours, suitable for any climate, adversary or dinner party. Useful features include discreet ballistic missiles, handy holographic generators and cufflink-style repulsor rays. The movie will surely pay for its own popcorn, gadget-wise, before Iron Man even leaves the house.

So many films would be nothing without their fantastical technology. Who'd bother with James Bond if he didn't have an in-car defibrillator, detonite toothpaste and morally questionable magnetic frock-release? No one. He'd just be a multilingual perv with massive insurance premiums. And Back to the Future Part II, a sequel that occupies a higher percentage of my daily thought processes than I'd really like to admit, is a treasure trove of 'why don't we have that yet?' inventions. I frequently bemoan the lack of a McFly-style rehydration cooker that turns miniature food into full-sized family meals. Imagine how much easier it would be to carry the shopping home. Or I could pour a year's worth of bolognese into an ice cube tray and never darken Sainsbury's door again, to our mutual delight.

We can't really buy into an outlandish plot or larger-than-life character unless the world they inhabit lives up to them, echoing the inventiveness and absurdity of the story. And even the most IT-phobic, quill-wielding curmudgeon can't help but marvel at fictional inventions such as Star Trek's holodeck, imagining what it would be like to step into their favourite book/film/sadomasochist fantasy. Klingon

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Commander Worf would appear absolutely ludicrous on board a basic, rough-and-ready Mir-style space station, but surround him with phasers, warp drives and replicators, and he becomes much easier to accept.

Of course, the best on-screen heroes don't need complicated gadgets; just sturdy ones. Indiana Jones, cinema's hunkiest archaeologist, needed only a bullwhip and a fedora to fight off Nazis and discover priceless messianic artefacts. Most Doctor Who scrapes can be solved with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, a multi-functional device that resembles the offspring of a USB stick and, well, a screwdriver. It doesn't come with a lanyard or Bluetooth capability, but it can help you stop an alien mastermind from galvanising your family's fat into a race of crazy blobmonsters.

Of course, it's easy to forget that back in reality we're surrounded by technology that, in times gone by, would have been considered awesome. As noted author Terry Pratchett once said on fangroup alt.fan.pratchett: 'If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abscesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you," they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say "yes".'

Right on, Tezza. And imagine if they had been writing science fiction scripts back then. What gadgets would Jane Austen have come up with for a 23rd century moonbase when the most advanced technology she'd ever clapped eyes on was the Jacquard loom? (Bonus fact: Wikipedia lists the Jacquard loom as the Uncle Alfred of programmable computers. Whatever; can it play Doom?) What will it be like, a few hundred years from now, being able to look back at films and telly and see how fanciful or otherwise our fictional gadgets were. Perhaps everyone will have an aquatic car, and the underwater sequence in The Spy Who Loved Me will be perplexingly lengthy and mundane to young historians, much like when Tony Robinson holds up a bit of clay pot on Time Team and my brain glazes over. Will the Doctor's sonic screwdriver seem as ludicrous as it does now, or will sonic screwdrivers become the must-have stocking filler of Christmas 2204?