I don’t think much of scifi is about “predicting the future” at all. A great deal of scifi is really fantasy, just with equations instead of incantations. They are still stories about our world and us.
But one bit of modern scifi, posthumanist or transhumanist scifi, does engage in what I think of as pretty serious future prediction. (I personally call this genre “awesome scifi” because that’s kind of how the prose and technology come across.)
I doubt that writers in this tradition will have any better luck in getting the future right than Jules Verne or the Golden Age writers, but they are thinking seriously about the implications of cutting-edge engineering for us, and their conclusions are interesting.
I myself have not had much luck with writing in this genre — well, we’ll see. I do have one thing making the rounds now…
Sometimes the myopia of contemporary politics makes you forget how quickly technology itself can change the terms of the debate and what people think are worth fighting over. This really is powerful stuff.
