In his book The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, Thomas Disch observed that of all literary forms, science fiction is rather unique: it is the one in which the author imagines not only the characters, but the world in which they live as well. The resultant worlds thus are peculiar reflections of their creator's own worldview, and the reordering of the universe is often quite deliberate.
In the works of Ursula K. LeGuin, for example, we see a frequent recalibration of social institutions to reflect her perspectives on gender identity, marriage, and more. The same could be said of Robert Heinlein, Phillip K. Dick, and any other science fiction writer out there. While most of my favorite works by Phillip Dick were written well before he decided he was a Buddha channelling cosmic communications from Valis, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, virtually all of his writings reflect a dreamlike merging of reality, illusion, and paranoia.
But perhaps that is to be expected, at least to a certain extent. As Disch points out, "science fiction is in its nature millennialist," which is to say that it is primarily focused upon the end of tomorrow, and often reflects the fear that humanity will one day overreach itself. From the fear of hubris comes much of contemporary science fiction, even as another strain of it posits that humanity is capable of overcoming any challenge set before it.
These two competing visions of the promise and peril of the future (and of mankind's manipulation of it) merge in the short-lived 1994 television series called Earth 2. The creators of the show envisioned that 200 years in the future, Earth can no longer sustain terrestrial life. Instead, humanity is crowded into a motely collection of orbiting space stations. The sterile environments of the stations have spawned a strange degenerative sickness called simply "The Syndrome." The Syndrome affects children; it is, as one person describes it, not a virus but rather the absence of one - the absence, in effect, of contact with a terrestrial atmosphere.
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