I like the Refugees from Genocide because it could be expanded to Refugees from Natural Disasters. What do you do with displaced Katritians (New Orleans residents)? You send them to work the iron mines on Mars! What do you do with Oklahomans displaced by tornados? Make them the cleaning crews for interstellar stations! The fun is endless.

'Super-epidemics of drug-resistant organisms" has kinda been done to death. I voted Peak oil.

Religion. It's probably the biggest source of problems on the planet.

@rrich: agreed. but since it wasn't an option, i went with peak oil.

I like the sub-Prime mortgage one.

I've been reading Iain Banks' Excession (thank you, io9), and the idea of sentient habitats, as well as the changes that future technology will bring about in manufacturing and economics, has become fascinating to me.

Global warming and radical climate change (which feeds into refugees, I guess)

^
^
Good idea! Let's have a sci-fi movie where atheism rules and religious people have to live in little underground hovels eating ratburgers. Set it in 3000AD and then have the second coming of Christ, leading his followers to the planet Promised Land.

I want fewer cautionary tales about technology and more cautionary tales about insufficient technology.

@Huxleyhobbes: yes!

I voted for the super-epidemic, with this thought in mind: It should be SF focused on the actual social issue at hand - fear of super-epidemics and constant media frenzies over things that probably aren't going to harm us en masse (SARS, avian flu, mad cow...). That can be exploited in many interesting ways. Possibly the megadeath epidemic is just normal old flu, cold or minor infection but we've all become so heavily bleached and duct-taped-windowed and scared of vaccines that everybody's immune system's gone to pot.

Peak oil for me, although religion definitely needs to be added to the list.

.

RRich, if Dune (all the way to Chapter House)isn't enough religion, then what!

@MrLister: Or no one "rules" based on which fairy tale they believe.

@Jeff-Minor: Well, sure, but there can be more than one, right, Jeff?

Maybe even a good one next time, ya know?

Will a two-headed mutant get to vote twice in the primaries? And what if each one wants to vote a different party?

The Future: Transgender robots wreak havoc because the T got left off of LGBT.

@braak: Yeah, I picked that one because I'm curious about sci-fi economics as well. I've always wondered what the invention of replicators did to the economy in the Star Trek universe.

Also? Alien Nation (the movie, written by that same crazy guy that produced Farscape) is an interesting exploration of science fiction and refugees.

Human cloning is getting closer and closer to becoming a reality. I've always been curious about what might happen to rejected clones and where they fit into society.

It would be great to see race tackled more in sci-fi instead of just alien race....

@zeppelined: There's a Charles Stross novel, Singularity Sky about the social and economic effect of cheap replicating technology.

@MrLister: that sounds a lot like titain a.e.

How about a sexually transmitted disease epidemic from space, with gratuitous nudity?

@Thieu: Duly noted. Thanks!

i want to see sci-fi tackle labor economics and imigration in a world where teleportation is safe and cheep. what would the world look like if anyone could be anywhere they wanted to be at any time and take any amount of stuff with them?

labor economics in a world where you can download knowledge and experience directly into your brain is a close second.

Fritz Leiber published in 1951 the story "Poor Superman" which was basically mocking the fledgling Dianetics of L. Ron Hubbard. It's a great short story but it kinda covers religion along with Dune, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Jeff Noon's works, etc.

Frank Herbert tackled oil decades ago.
Spice is oil.

Delany, in Aye, and Gomorrah, covered cheap labor, teleportation, prostitution, and using those genetically inferior as labor for dangerous jobs. Fantastic story.

The war on terror. Mostly because of the applications in literature to use cool new technologies/weapons as a MacGuffin.

@tetracycloide: I wrote a story years and years ago where people have invented the "hyper-luge," which basically uses quantum tunneling to transport a little person-sized canister anywhere in the world almost instantly. People associate much more according to affinity groups and much less according to where they live.

@charliejane: sounds interesting although i'm more interested in the economic interests than the social ones. socially i think language barriers would breakdown within a matter of decades on a global scale (another interesting question might be what language would sound like then which has been done but never done well). national governments would hold considerably less sway over their citizens as well, depending on exactly how the tech worked.

still, the economics is what i really want to know. what happens to national markets when the laber market becomes international? would retail stores still exist if there are no shipping fees or shipping times? what would happen to manual labor positions if they had to compete internationally for workers?

for example, a lot of low skilled labor jobs in manufacturing are currently sourced in places that have a low standard of living because the workers need less to live in that area. there are still low skill jobs in more affluent areas, but only because moving the work to another location is not economically feesable.

if movement was free and unlimited what would happen to those jobs? what would the global job market look like after a century of two of this kind of movement?

The effect of intelligence modifying drugs, and how they split the workforce into groups who will pop pills to get ahead, and those who won't.

I say sub-prime, not so much for sub-prime, but because if you want a concise explanation of what's wrong with "our society," sub-prime touches on most of them. Lack of space, views of society and culture that no longer are feasible, the new strong preying on the new weak, people selling out the future, the dangers of amazingly interconnected systems.

@tetracycloide: There's a series of short stories by Niven (which I think are set early on in the Known Space universe) about the social impact of teleportation, including instant riots, the death of exoticism, and murderers always having an alibi. I don't think he touched on economics much except for, as you mention, no more retail stores or window shopping.

I went with sub-prime but in a way its already been covered by Walter Mosley's Futureland. Maybe the best sci-fi novel to look at how the future looks for the lower middle to middle class.

There is also Tales from the Montuzuma Strip by Alan Dean Foster.

I voted for Peak Oil, just because I'm a "5 minutes into the future" geek, and that kind of pressing global collapse/revolution seems important. The Refugee one was a close second in that regard.

At first I thought the Subprime option was a bit of a joke, until I saw all the SF/econ comments. Especially with regard to cheap/free/unlimited transport and manufacturing. Stephenson's Diamond Age has some interesting concepts for the cheap construction side of things. If "things" are cheap and plentiful, what will wealth be? Information? Culture? Hand-produced items?

@braak: Ah, you meant O'Bannon. He was also the mind behind SeaQuest DSV.

I tend to give Kemper and Woods more credit for the style of the Farscape I loved.

A lot of all this is in Bester's "The Stars My Destination." Teleportation economics and making religion illegal in any case. A lot more in in "Stand on Zanzibar."

I have a theory; "The Singularity is When Everything Happens at Once" So somebody need to write all those stories at once.

@tetracycloide: Bladerunner did it well I thought.

And Firefly did the TV version of it, where only curse words and insults were in Chinese. Which was just, odd, but easily understandable.

@MrLister:your idea is the one that is most clearly fiction but where is the science? ;)

South Park did something similar. they had an episode where atheism was the norm and different factions of 'Dawkinsist' were fighting it out over dogma. Richard Dawkins is the writer of The God Delusion.

MrLister said "then have the second coming of Christ, leading his followers to the planet Promised Land" this is being done by BSG.

@Gomi: I'll take my wealth in whuffie, please.

Super chickens will look like they taste great!!!

I think Super Epidemics was already done. A few times actually. No, wait. I'm thinking of all genetic-engineering-gone-awry movies.

I want to see a remake of "Silent Running" with John Hodgeman as the main character.

The movie "Dark City" was all about subprime forclosures. :p

there really isn't a social topic that you can come up with that is really new to sci fi. it's allllll been done before. but the ones mentioned seem particularly ubiquitous.

if we can't be new, at least we can be offensively controversial.... anything based on religion and/or politics.

better question would be - what topic that you wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole should sci fi deal with?

on a somewhat related note, i thought it was "the other shoe" to have a "DROID REBELLION" historical timeline in star wars. lucas never deals with the issues of self aware subservient slave classes somehow never seeking freedom.

or if the only thing the force does is seek balance (seeking good in time of bad, seeking bad in time of good) and is not allied with the side of good or evil, that there wouldn't be a zealout group of anti-force users that seek to wipe out the influence of the force entirely. a fascist ep4 han solo. oooo, that can be tied into the droid rebellion history... cuz droids are logical and can't use the force. droid inquisitors.

abortion. pro-choice? pro-life? or pro-robotic-enslavement?

I'll add my vote for religion. Of course, there are scifi stories that take it on, albeit usually rather carefully. The failure of The Golden Compass movie is a depressing example of how difficult being even marginally critical of religion can be.

What about the growing Petagap between the Rich and Poor. Surely the Singularity will only be for Rich geeks who can afford top notch brain scans, while the rest of us have our jobs taken over by machines.