Why is Science Fiction Good Literature?

I know what you're thinking: ugh, not this topic! It's a good starting place though. I get to express my views, and you get to patiently wait until you can comment on this post and tear me apart. Let me take a nontechnical approach to the subject and build it up based on the industry rather than evaluating different books on different merits.

What's happening in the science fiction industry right now? Well, the competition is fiercer than ever before, competing with movies, TV, netflix, ebooks (that people can easily find for free), computer games, new gaming technology (Playstation 17 with direct neural linkups), etc. Science Fiction (sf) writers have competition with other industries, but they also have competition with other sf authors. I don't know the exact figures, but I'm sure there are more people submitting manuscripts today than there were 50 years ago.

How did science fiction get such a bad name? That's pretty simple: when it first came about, either the authors were technical writers coming from careers in science or they were literary but didn't know anything about science. Meaning a lot (but certainly not all!) of early sf was bad writing with good science or good writing with bad science, making for a pretty crappy read either way. Thus, first impressions stick, and the high and mighty literary people who read some of the bad writing extrapolated and assumed it was all like that (which I have to admit, I probably would do the same). So, yes, at one point sf was a new field and was just starting out and was not very good.

What is sf like right now? Lot's of competition means the editors/publishers have lots of choices. They don't have to settle for bad writing anymore. In fact, they must publish things that are both good science and good writing in order to compete with everything else a reader would rather be doing. Not only that, but readers demand good literature out of publishers now. No one will tolerate bad writing now that they've had a taste of the good stuff. Plain and simple, you must write good literature as a sf novelist (or short story-ist) to even get published in the present day.

One thing that I'm not saying is that sf is literary in the sense of Pynchon, DeLillo, Ford, Moore, Wallace, or the countless others. Every sf novel would be over 1,000 pages long if they had to follow that tradition and still get everything else in there that makes sf unique from mainstream literary fiction. Of course science fiction and literary fiction are different! But anyone who studies literature, I dare them to pick up a Vonnegut novel (who actually published in the 50's, 60's, and 70's -- back when sf still had some issues) and tell me that it doesn't read similar to a literary novel from the 60's.