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I don't seem to have a shortage of recent SF novels ahead of me to read.
Crich's point is valid though. Speculative fiction can tilt either way, SF or fantasy. Sure, there are "hard SF" stories whose educational, factual content, and "raison d'etre" would be lost in a fantasy translation but I read fiction for the stories, not the facts. The genious of great fiction is in the characters and how I get immersed into the tale, regardless of genre.
Maybe you can question whether or not we're in a golden age of SF, in decline, or at the start of a swell. That has more to do with society's relationship to science and scientists, out of authors' control.
We live in an age of miracles (cell phones, nuclear power, space flight, internet) where the public has very little understanding of the effort or personalities of the people responsible for bringing us this lifestyle. I think of it as the corporate age. Instead of celebrating Thomas Watson we admire IBM. Instead of thinking of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard we recognize HP or Agilent. Instead of mourning the death of Dr Arnold Beckman (who funded Shockley's transistors) we follow the fate of Silicon Valley.
Funny how we supposedly elevate the individual in America but that small sample of our founding fathers of technology is hardly recognized by people today. We bow to the corporations. They endure after the founders pass on. Of course it is unknown yet whether that will be true of Apple without Steve Jobs but it seems likely.
Anyway, that change in how the public imagination is captured, by corporations not adventurous individuals, probably dominates the SF scene.
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