Scifi has always addressed social issues. Like, probably the only sci-fi novel that most people have read is 1984.
I think there _was_ a period, maybe from the 50s to the 90s, where there was some degree of split, with scifi covering social issues (1984, Handmaid's Tale, Children of Men) self-consciously considering itself _not scifi_ (Atwood was particularly emphatic about it), but even then it wasn't a clean split; a lot of Clarke's stuff covered social issues, say.
Followup: And Larry Niven, how could I forget! Albeit most notably over something which turned out not really to be a real-world issue (Niven was absolutely obsessed with the idea that authoritarian states would be incentivised to execute people for the purpose of harvesting their organs; organ transplantation was just beginning to show up when he started writing these.)
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Scifi has always addressed social issues. Like, probably the only sci-fi novel that most people have read is 1984.
I think there _was_ a period, maybe from the 50s to the 90s, where there was some degree of split, with scifi covering social issues (1984, Handmaid's Tale, Children of Men) self-consciously considering itself _not scifi_ (Atwood was particularly emphatic about it), but even then it wasn't a clean split; a lot of Clarke's stuff covered social issues, say.
Followup: And Larry Niven, how could I forget! Albeit most notably over something which turned out not really to be a real-world issue (Niven was absolutely obsessed with the idea that authoritarian states would be incentivised to execute people for the purpose of harvesting their organs; organ transplantation was just beginning to show up when he started writing these.)
Also Heinlein, obviously.