This is an interesting point. The near future must look far more vivid to the current crop of SF writers than it did to Aldiss's generation, and no wonder since VR, social media, and robotics are so much more advanced. Even Non-Stop, which took place in one relatively short narrative timeframe, I'd put further into the future than, say The Martian or any Stephenson novel... would be intensely curious to know of modern SF that ponders far-future questions.
> The near future must look far more vivid to the current crop of SF writers
I was a SF reader in the 1970s, and the near future as perceived then seemed intensively vivid, even if the subject matter (e.g. spaceflight, nuclear war, etc) now appears dated. NASA was launching astronauts to the moon while I was reading SF.
