Claims such as these always make me think of the opening paragraphs of Stanislaw Lem's essay Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans[1].<p><i>No one in his right mind seeks the psychological truth about crime in detective stories. Whoever seeks such truth will turn rather to Crime and Punishment. In relation to Agatha Christie, Dostoevsky constitutes a higher court of appeal, yet no one in his right mind will condemn the English author's stories on this account. They have a right to be treated as the entertaining thrillers they are, and the tasks Dostoevsky set himself are foreign to them.</i><p><i>If anyone is dissatisfied with SF in its role as an examiner of the future and of civilization, there is no way to make an analogous move from literary oversimplifications to full-fledged art, because there is no court of appeal from this genre. There would be no harm in this, save that American SF, exploiting its exceptional status, lays claim to occupy the pinnacles of art and thought. One is annoyed by the pretentiousness of a genre which fends off accusations of primitivism by pleading its entertainment character and then, once such accusations have been silenced, renews its overweening claims. By being one thing and purporting to be another, SF promotes a mystification which, moreover, goes on with the tacit consent of readers and public.</i><p>[1] <a href="https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm</a>
Sci-fi depictions of everything bothers me. Everything just looks like Tron. Why? Because sci-fi authors are obsessed with shallow aesthetics and design - the "futuristic" look, functionality and objectivity take a back seat. The sad thing is that people like Elon Musk embrace the sci-fi look and that has influenced the new dragon capsule design, the spacesuit design, just because it looks "cool". How about ignoring how something appears, and focusing on functionality, maintainability, operability, serviceability, legibility, etc. Let's replace all buttons and knobs with touchscreens everywhere in a space cockpit because it fits Elon's taste of aesthetics inspired by sci-fi movies. Ugh... this stuff bothers me.
Looked at this while at uni over a couple of papers, tho not entirely fresh in the mind 15 years later. But would suggest that Scifi, like the western and other escapist genres, are surely more about promoting complex reasoning than embedding any kind of explicit ideology or aesthetic. Yes popular themes may also find themselves thoughtfully resurrected / enshrined in the creative output of the faithful, but is it the wonder and drive, engendered through the source material, distilled into future/present realities, that shoulder a more convincing burden?