I agree with Chakradiva. Clive Thompson is obviously sitting with his back to some very important writers. SF has ideas, but the sorts of writers Chakradiva lists have better ideas than much SF and certainly much better prose.

Tom is right, the notion that SF is the literature of the future was hackneyed twenty years ago.

Literary fiction is not a genre: it is the best of all fiction. Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is detective fiction, but it is primarily literary fiction. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is science fiction, but it has great literary merit. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon has a talking dog and follows the story of two real life individuals, it is historical fiction, maybe magic realism but most importantly it is great literature.