Is science fiction dying?

and really quite enjoyed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nights_Dawn_Trilogy

and found pretty much everything in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe to be as good as anything I've read by Heinlein, Clark et al.

Honestly, there's tons of good stuff out there, but it's just hard to separate it from the pulp. With the oldie goldies it's relatively easy because we have a few decades of people assessing those books.

To me, sci-fi is fiction based in science that asks "what if"

What if we had time travel? What if we could read minds?

When you string together many such what-ifs, you end up in fantasy, which is what a lot of people today confuse with sci-fi.

Early Star Trek to me was sci-fi because there were believable contemporary characters engaged in asking and exploring around clear "what if" questions. Yes, there was a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but it mostly stayed out of the way. Soon, though, the Trek universe became so full of mumbo-jumbo, futuristic societies that could never exist (really? no money? Just how would that work?) and reversing the warp drive through the deflector grid nonsense that it quickly ended up in full space fantasy land.

I just got through with Hull Zero Three, and while I liked it, it struck me as a dark nightmare from a soulless author (I know nothing of the author, that's just my impression). I think there was a clear "what if", which was only put to the reader at the end. Therefore, I'd qualify it as sci-fi. Pretty good book, but dark.

But a lot of the crap, er, stuff I'm seeing that folks think is sci-fi is just long-format futuristic fantasy -- social commentary at an epic scale written with blasters and hyperdrives. Nothing wrong with that, but (to me) once you lose track of exploring that simple what-if question, it's more like commentary than analysis. You spend more time learning how the author views the universe than you do questioning you beliefs in how things are put together and what depends on what. Good stuff, certainly, but not sci-fi.

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the Star Trek universe, but there are other works of science fiction that explore this idea in a more plausible fashion. Iain M. Banks has written a number of novels about a post-scarcity civilisation called the Culture, which also lacks any sort of a financial system.