I read Paul McAuley's The Quiet War yesterday. It's good, solid space opera, in that it debates all the problems facing us (environmental destruction, the ossification of democracies into oligopolies, genetic engineering) by sticking them into a near-ish future and playing with the possibilities. McAuley is part of the hard-sf genre, also known as 'mundane SF' - scientific realism and a pretty downbeat assessment of our chances.
If you look down on SF, you're missing a genre which deliberately tackles all our social, scientific, philosophical and moral problems head on. Perhaps you're lumping fantasy in with it - and that's bad.
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