I'd be really interested in seeing a list of, say, your top 5 or 10 SF books you most respect as specifically being interesting or apt or inspiring or thoughtful in their predictions, as opposed to just books you like for style or story.
That aside, there's still room for space-travel fiction and alien-encounter fiction, since we're not much pursuing the former and still haven't experienced the latter.
And I still find Cory Doctorow's near-future predictive SF interesting, though I suppose it's as much about trying to understand the present as anything else. I just read his latest short-story collection, "With A Little Help," and while it's kind of spotty in quality, it has a couple of stories that are specifically sociologically/technologically predictive. The one that sticks with me is basically a "What if Google did decide to go evil" story that has, for instance, American border-reentry checks being performed by bored functionaries who Google people coming back into the country and question them about their political and legal opinions based on everything they've ever done or said or read online.
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That aside, there's still room for space-travel fiction and alien-encounter fiction, since we're not much pursuing the former and still haven't experienced the latter.
And I still find Cory Doctorow's near-future predictive SF interesting, though I suppose it's as much about trying to understand the present as anything else. I just read his latest short-story collection, "With A Little Help," and while it's kind of spotty in quality, it has a couple of stories that are specifically sociologically/technologically predictive. The one that sticks with me is basically a "What if Google did decide to go evil" story that has, for instance, American border-reentry checks being performed by bored functionaries who Google people coming back into the country and question them about their political and legal opinions based on everything they've ever done or said or read online.