I think the general public has just completely given up on seeing any kind of new, radical cool tech but with the decline in the anti-tech baby boomer generation a lot of progress of long dreamed projects are starting to happen. SpaceX has lead the way with reusable rockets.
Here is a link to a video from a real company that is actively researching and building fusion rocket prototypes[1].
[1]Fusion drive page: http://www.psatellite.com/tag/dfd/ [2]video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ao5SCedIk
And here is a link to a technical paper if you are interested[3].
But, who knows? Energy is such a limiting factor that maybe you could, with enough energy, make a gigantic space-ark in space and fill it with hydrogen and have a massive fusion-powered rocket with 100,000 Isp. Maybe that's how we reach Alpha Centauri.
One huge problem with any extremely high Isp rocket is heat dissipation. Any heat hitting the vehicle has to be radiated (there is insufficient reaction mass flow for that to cool the engines, as it does in chemical rockets). So it pays to keep the powerplant separate and beam low entropy energy at the vehicle.
Oh, yeah, shit. I keep forgetting that's the defining difference between science fiction and reality when it comes to space travel.
How much fuel do fusion reactors burn?
A 1 GW(th) plant will burn about 100 kilograms of fusion fuel per year. ITER, which has a mass of 23,000 tonnes, will produce 400 MW(th). So, going by that, it would take nearly a million years for a reactor like ITER to fuse its own mass in fusion fuel. That's obviously silly. ITER is clearly not optimized for use in space (and burns DT, in which 80% of the energy comes out as neutrons that are useless as plasma exhaust), but any real fusion rocket will be designed to operate with an Isp much lower than 100,000 seconds.