I believe the days of wishful technofascism in which Man masters himself and Nature are long gone.
I don't know that fascism is the right word, but the Enlightenment really put this thinking at the forefront. The Death of God was really a swapping of places where man took the place of God--Man was now the fundamental atomic unit of governance (democracy), knowledge (Cartesian rationalism), and morality (subjectivism/relativism). The death of man, which followed (e.g., free will problem, Darwinism showing that humans are just another species, the death of the self-transparent conscious "self," the advent of nuclear weapons) has left us adrift, but in the heady days when you could unlock mysteries of the universe for a few pennies worth of copper wire, this attitude was very strong indeed. It was rather disgusting/silly, but just about every "gold rush" is.
Even so, there is a lingering techno-optimism, the idea that we will save ourselves from our last technological mistake with the next great leap forward--kind of like if your life depended on Moore's Law never coming to an end. People need escape and they need hope and techno-optimisitc sci-fi is a little ray of sunlight.
If anything, some of the greatest works of science fiction philosophy are all about the de-centering of Man.
But even then, we make a meal out of our own decentering. These stories are fugal and tragic. There is that old joke that Zizek loves to tell,
There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida, about a group of Jews in a synagogue publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: “O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!” After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest: “O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!” After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: “O God, I am nothing.” The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: “What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!”
Moreover, these decentering stories will, nevertheless, tend to leave us with flickers of self-importance and hope. P.K. Dick mocks our hollowness with Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends, but still incorporates Mercerism as legitimate (if paradoxical) metaphysical force for redemption (the universe that cares and is reaching out to us) in
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
About revealing to us our frailties, and that we are so much more dependent on cosmic forces beyond our grasp than what we used to think. The more we "conquer" space, the more we find out the less we know. And the more we dig into fundamental physics, the equations multiply, expand, explode, instead of simplify. If anything, science fiction is about the need to always be open/receptive to possibilities, and to be flexible or adaptable to new ideas, because Nature can never be exhausted by our mastering of it.
A fundamental urge driving the human race is a desire to be God (to have control, mastery, perfect prediction, safety from any possible threats, superiority over rivals). As David Lo Pan replies to Jack Burton, we keep at it, even if we know it is a fool's errand:
Jack Burton: "Jack" what? I'm supposed to buy this shit? 2000 years, he can't find one broad to fit the bill? Come on, Dave, you must be doing something seriously wrong!
Lo Pan: There have been others, to be sure. There are always others. But you know, Mr. Burton, the difficulties between men and women. How seldom it works out? Yet we all keep trying, like fools.
And what sin is more enticing than piety? The greatest pride is oft found in the greatest avowed humility. Yes, Socrates tells us that he knows nothing, but he does this on the heels of telling us that he is the wisest man he knows (Well, I'm wiser than the rest of you lot! I am so much more humble). At the very least, we can claim mastery over the poor fools who think they can claim mastery over nature. And in that humility of the scientist (who is never political or shortsighted and who loves finding out she wasted 40 years on a hypothesis--Brutus is an honorable man), we can still learn
some of the mysteries of the universe, acquire a few tricks, and embark on the treadmill of never-ending enlightenment through the study of nature (i.e., the promise of adventure and mastery are still there).