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Science Fiction these days sucks. Don't believe me? Take a look at the Amazon bestseller list for SF&F. What do you see?
It's all fantasy. Well, almost all. As of this writing (November 2007), The Road is #2 (mostly through the reality-warping powers of Oprah), and a Halo novel is #9. 1984 and Slaughter-House Five make appearances, of course, but the only recent science fiction book in the top 25 is World War Z! Everything else is fantasy-related, and two of the top 25 are romance novels with fantasy overtones!
So what's gone wrong? What happened to the genre that once held such towering giants such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke (other than the fact that two are dead and one rots in senility in Sri Lanka)?
I think that the answer lies in society's perception of what the "future" is. When science fiction got its start back in the post-war period, the future was all jet-packs and flying cars: the GE Home Of Tomorrow, the Nuclear Family (both socially and literally), the whole World's Fair Promise of the Future ideal. Science fiction channeled this optimism, putting men on Mars and fi'tghting evil Aliens from Outer Space in shiny space ships with neat-o ray guns.
It wasn't, of course, going to stay this rosy for long. The Atomic Bomb revealed the other side of the coin on all this futurism: death and destruction. Science Fiction, however, thrived. The 50s and 60s were a great time for what's now called "hard" Science Fiction: Asimov's Robot Novels (1954, 1957), as well as his Galactic Empire series in the early 1950s; Clarke released the highly influential Childhood's End in 1953; and Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959), Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) all during this period, as well as innumerable quantities of short fiction.
This was the good stuff; Science Fiction at its speculative best.