Reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep recently made me ponder the genre a little.
The best science fiction, despite its often futuristic setting and colourful cast of humans, machines, aliens and creatures, is not really concerned with the future, but with the problems or perceived problems of the present. Machines replacing humans is a present problem of jobs and societal structure, as much as it is a future problem of androids run amok. Censorship and book burning, a la 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, were preoccupations of the day, and 1984 in particular represents the political scare-mongering of the later 1940s. The science fiction of the 1960s was similarly obsessed with the atomic bomb.

Perhaps Sci-Fi has passed its golden age, but it seems to me that now is absolutely the time for a new crop of writers to emerge. After all… we have climate change on our plates now. Where are all the dystopian views of a world where humans pick their way along flooded coast lines in search of the ultimate bounty… a last remaining polar bear?