Above is the question of the day. It used to be that you could come up with broad and not entirely correct descriptions of sf decade by decade.
The 1940s was the Golden Age of John Campbell and Astounding.
The 1950s was Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy -- the quirky, gritty stories by people like Cyril Kornbluth, William Tenn and so on. Post WWII, McCarthy Era fiction.
The 1960s was the New Wave.
The 1970s was women and feminism.
The 1980s was Cyberpunk.
After that, I don't know. I can't characterize the 1990s. The new space opera, maybe?
And what about the most recent decade, the Naughts? Are there any new schools of writing? Any new trends?
The most interesting thing I have noticed is the appearance of increasing numbers of non-white writers and writers from non-European backgrounds.
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Perhaps it's too soon to catagorize the '90s, but it was the time I broke in, so I'd call it the decade of cross-genre, which led to the rise of urban fantasy/paranormal romance.
Cross genre sounds good. Maybe it's the rise of post modern sf:science fiction and fantasy that plays with tropes, meta-f&sf.
The new millennium seems to be heavy on military SF; not that it started here, of course, but there seems to be a prevalence of the stuff at the expense of everything else. The New Space Opera seems to be mostly about fleet movements...
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