Charles Stross tells the Guardian what literary fiction can learn from sci-fi's best:

""I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction—the study of the human condition—needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever. If it was, we'd still be living in caves rather than worrying about global climate change. To the extent that writers of mainstream literary fiction focus on the interior landscape exclusively, they're wilfully ignoring processes and events that have a major impact on our lives. And I think that's an unforgivably short-sighted position to take."

In some ways, this isn't a new argument; compare Stross's position, for example, to Jonathan Franzen's 1996 essay "Perchance to Dream," in which he famously advocated for a literature which, he explained in an interview years later, "is engaged with society, both in its reception and in its preoccupations." But Stross is absolutely right in his suggestion that, at its best, science fiction points to the kind of literature Franzen wanted to see flourish—in fact, you could make a convincing argument that the entire point of science fiction is to imagine social and cultural changes and then work out their ramifications on people's lives.

In this vein, for people who think they don't like science fiction, I'm inclined to make a few recommendations, starting with a callback to a post I did earlier this year on the crossover appeal of Stross and his latest technothriller, Halting State; at that time, I also mentioned Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel. You might also pick up Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain, which imagines what could happen when climate change hits Washington, D.C., hard. (It's the first book in a trilogy.) Of course, there's Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union... Oh, and Pattern Recognition and Spook Country by William Gibson, although those aren't "really" science fiction.

That's a good start... I'll leave it to commenters to draw out some of the classics...