I’ll go sit in the corner now. Sorry, Carrie.

I didn’t think this was my cup of tea (and one reason I didn’t ask to be on).

Near future SF is tricky, since it gets outdated so quickly. And I do think that SF that “slums” as mainstream is much more accessible to general readers. Most readers watching Charly would have no conception of how it is Science Fiction…

I agree in most cases, with two exceptions:

1. The original Star Trek incorporated a lot of contemporary issues with its — for that time groundbreaking — multicultural crew;
2. The Discworld series incorporates so many references that are either ‘near-past’ or ‘near-future’ that the boundaries often blur: the computers and the ‘high-tech’ experiments of Ponders Stibbons c.s., the oncoming modern communication of the clack towers, the multicutural issues throughout the series but especially in the development of how the Night Watch incorporates all the different creatures throughout the Discworld, and highly successfully at that. There are so many contemporary issues in the Discworld series that at some point Terry Pratchett may have no other choice but to tackle the near future (if he doesn’t already);

And even Avatar tackles some contemporary issues like environmentalism and cultural appropriation (while admittedly not on the level of the Discworld books).

Just to say that you can have a fun story that does incorporate contemporary elements, and as such is often more near-future than is apparent at first sight.

Anyway, IMHO, the reason that we don’t see much near-future SF is that most authors see it as too complicated (as it it so close to the highly complex now of which we see more and more through our increased accessibility through the internet and the better and cheaper access tools to it) and as too risky (and yes, many SF authors are afraid to ‘get it wrong’: I speak from direct experience).

In the meantime, a ‘near-future’ scientific magazine like New Scientist has more subscribers than Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF combined…

Tam: As I now know in detail, having just finished Atwood’s IN OTHER WORLDS, she does not write SF and does not consider it to be so. It is “speculative” work that ostensibly maintains some attachment to the real.