So what's today's vibe for the fantastic near future? We've passed rayguns and jetpacks, passed cyberpunk. Is there anything that grabs the collective imagination enough?
Depends on the 'nearness' of the future.
William Gibson of former cyberpunk fame has written several novels that are set in the present (or in the very near future) and illustrate how current technologies could impact our lives if they were more widely used or just a tiny bit more advanced, e.g. "Pattern Recognition", "Spook Country", "Zero History", and "The Peripheral". The novels feature drones, augmented reality eye-wear, 3d-printing, telerobotics, and sometimes novel but forgotten technologies that could make a triumphal return some day.
The transhumanist novel genre is one of my favorite sci-fi topics, but it'll be a long time before it arrives for real. Today's implanting of chips is child's play compared to what fiction makes of the topic.
Most of the
suggested authors listed on the website for the Eclipse Phase RPG have contributed great novels about this.
But the most captivating idea, imho, is a rather old one: alternate realities, parallel universes, etc. Philip K. Dick has written many excellent stories featuring this kind of thing in some way or other. But since then, the idea has grown to a point where even some serious scientists believe in their existence. A quite recent excellent treatment on this is Neal Stephenson's "Anathem". (William Gibson's 'the Peripheral' also touches on this subject, btw.)