Through our entire history we have become accustomed to pushing [animals] around in ways dictated by our own wants and needs without much regard for theirs.

Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.

What SF can do better than anything else is show us the range of our possible futures, and what we can do to realize the good ones and avoid the nasty ones.

I think the rising and falling popularity of areas like hard SF and far-future SF is, to a considerable extent, the same as any other fashion.

Its limitations are those of the physical universe: it won't let you play with some really wild ideas that aren't possible, but are fun to speculate about.

And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.

I think the international appeal of SF is quite understandable since the kinds of people who like to read it, are, by the nature of the beast, interested in other cultures, of which other nations on Earth are the closest available example.