No one seems to have a very smiley vision of the future, or at least America’s future.

It’s kinda fun to predict irretrievable disaster, isn’t it?

The Fox-MSNBC news talking heads predict political melt down. The environmentalists are throwing up white flags and buying land in Canada. The artists are watching “Jersey Shore” and “Real Housewives of Atlanta” reruns, while imagining all of western culture stumbling off some massive cliff. Academics are watching humans achieve the brain activity similar to that of an amoeba with our shrinking attention spans. And Boston Red Sox fans are contemplating suicide.

Then, there is the writer — the most pessimistic and miserable of the bunch. To be more precise, it’s the fiction writers, whose dystopic novels are smattered through our canon.

Which brings us to the newest novel by Gary Shteyngart, “Super Sad True Love Story.”

Understanding exactly how Shteyngart fits into the crowd of Orwell and Huxley is a tricky matter. On one hand, he has a written a novel that takes place in the future —‚ exactly when in the future is not known. You might guess anywhere between 20 and 30 years. And let me quickly add that writing any kind of futuristic novel is a risky business for a someone who is part of the “literary fiction” crowd. It can quickly drivel into the career- and prestige-killing genre of science fiction.

But I digress.

The real question is analyzing what kind of future Shteyngart is imagining in this novel. Here are some of the basics: Nearly everything, monetarily, is measured in the Yuan currency, as if to say that the days of green dollar notes is far in the past; then, nearly everyone must basically carry an iPhone-like device, which people cling to even more desperately than the situation we have now; people are constantly ranking each other online, and it’s important to keep your score up high; people speak in this ridiculous abbreviated language, which becomes far more advanced than TTYL and LOL, but rather abbreviations like TIMATOV (“think I’m about to openly vomit!”).

Yet it’s very possible that my descriptions of this world sound quite boring and not very interesting. And maybe you’re thinking: sounds un-funny and lame.

That’s because I’m not Gary Shteyngart. And I don’t have nearly the skill he has for writing humor.

Because, more than anything, this is an outrageously funny book. For those of you that read his previous book, “Absurdistan,” you probably know what I’m talking about. It’s satire stretched to its most hilarious limits.

And, in some strange way, this book removes itself from the science fiction category simply because it is funny.

That might seem like an odd point, but think about a scenario in which a writer constructed the exact same world as Shteyngart, but wrote a gooey drama. Seriously. The book would immediately sit in a dusty corner with Asimov and Orson Scott Card.

For whatever reason, humorous satire actually makes a book more “literary,” when initial logic would suggest the opposite would happen. Why? Perhaps because good satire and humor is revealing, and uncomfortably so at times. It’s perhaps the easiest way to make big social statements that can be read by the masses.

“Super Sad True Love Story” is also, as the title suggests, a love story. It’s a romance between Lenny Abramov, the son of Russian immigrants in his late-30s, and Eunice Park, the daughter of Korean immigrants in her early 20s. To no surprise, they make this futuristic world quite real. Their problems are the same ones we grapple with now: identity, family, future. And though they are part of America’s immigrant-heavy past, the America we all grew up in is changing and teetering and falling behind the developing countries.

As such, our identity as Americans, or immigrant Americans, is changing too. In fact, Eunice Park’s family keeps saying they made a mistake leaving Korea, as the Koreans are now becoming more successful than the Americans.

There’s a lot of truth in “Super Sade True Love Story,” a lot of far-fetched speculation, and lot of sharp prose. My only concern was the voicing. Lenny, the protagonist in this book, sounds oddly familiar to Misha in “Absurdistan.” They are both Russian Jews. They both have excessively imaginative and florid narrative abilities, which I like (think “Humbert Humbert” in Nabokiv’s “Lolita”). And they both pine for women of dissimilar ethnicities.

The point being: Shteyngart has tapped into this voice, and it’s a great voice. It’s one of my favorites. They question, I think, is at what point will Shteyngart create a truly different character? When we will see a radically different voice?

Another question is whether or not this even matters. Must we require a writer to continuously stretch themselves? Or, should they stick to their guns when they know it works?

Questions for another day.

For now, go read “Super Sad True Love Story.” You’ll find yourself contemplating and laughing at the demise of our country. What could be more fun?