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Many science fiction stories are what we call "cautionary tales." They are called "cautionary" because the things that happen in the story are bad. Part of the reason authors write stories like these is so that we can *avoid* things like that happening.
The stories show how people were short-sighted or made mistakes with technology and science and the horrible things that can happen.
IDK... I just suddenly felt the need to explain this very clearly for some reason.
Even if some of the people in the story are cool, or the mood of the story is cool... it's still a bad thing that the technology went all wrong... I ...
Agreed.
I was born in the late 1950s and read a lot of science fiction while growing up. Stuff like Nineteen Eighty Four, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, The Marching Morons, and John Brunner's Club of Rome Quartet.
So my entire life has been watching the world go through a slow motion disaster as each of those novels became true. 
I am waiting with dread for the global spread of Star Trek's Eugenics Wars.
What really frightens me is Heinlein's description of Nehemiah Scudder in the afterward to his Revolt In 2100...
@nyrath @futurebird What makes that doubly painful is the knowledge that if the late-era Heinlein were alive today, given where his thinking was going, he'd almost certainly identify today's liberals as the equivalent of Nehemiah Scudder and think of Trump and particularly Elon Musk as liberators. I certainly see plenty of his fans making that kind of leap.
Star Trek: TNG did an episode, "The Drumhead", that was a courtroom parable about a Joe McCarthy-style witch hunt. I recently saw an excerpt from that on YouTube and most of the comments were from people drawing parallels between the villain of the episode and liberal governments supposedly oppressing us with COVID prevention measures, vaccination and "wokeness". The problem with this kind of art is that you can take it just about any way you want.
Agreed.
I've heard tell that Heinlein's politics seemed to vaguely track with his current wife.
@nyrath @mattmcirvin @futurebird It is a shame that a lot of that generation of sci-fi authors were right-libertarians. Their ideas ended up leaking to SFF fandom for decades and influencing people like Musk and all sorts of "Rationalist"
"thinkers".
I wonder if there would have been any major difference in today's political and cultural landscape if Golden Age SF authors were majority leftist instead...
@maxthefox @nyrath @futurebird A bunch of them were, that's the interesting thing! It was the subject of huge blowups in the early early fandom, back in the 1930s. See the Futurians and "Michelism":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurians
The direction of the field during and after WWII got overwhelmingly influenced by the editorial voice of Astounding/Analog editor John W. Campbell Jr., who was a right-winger with a lot of very specific cranky ideas, and even a lot of these writers had to learn to pander to his preferences if they wanted to sell stories to him. There were competing editors with different politics, such as ones appearing on the Futurian list, but the "hard SF" branch continued to revolve around Campbell's ideas.
@maxthefox @nyrath @futurebird Now, some of these people themselves evolved in strange directions--I wouldn't describe the perspective described in James Blish's later writing as leftist, for instance. But this was where they'd been coming from.