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I'm OK with science fiction. A lot of it is terribly written, but on the whole I accept the genre.

That said, the kind I like best isn't really science fiction, it's economics fiction, fiction that addresses what the world would be like if the rules of scarcity changed. Books like:

  • The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin (the best SF author ever. If you disagree, you are wrong.)
  • The Culture novels, Iain M. Banks
  • The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson (to a certain extent)

In most of these stories, societies solve the "limited supply, unlimited demand" problem by inventing technology which provides an unlimited supply. Hence, they become "science" fiction.

There's also a short story by Lord Dunsany called "The Bureau d'Echanges de Maux" which describes a market where evils, rather than goods, can be traded. Of course, Dunsany doesn't care about whether this market performs a useful economic function, so there's still areas to explore.