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I think anime has offered some of the most thought-provoking storylines in the sci-fi genre.

Voices Of A Distant Star is one the most outstanding sci-fi stories I’ve seen in many years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_of_a_Distant_Star

I agree re: Hoshi no Koe. It was everything SF is supposed to be: character-driven, poignant, epic, and full of sense-of-wonder.

American SF has almost been destroyed by the Cult of the Singularity: it is difficult to write meaningful stories set in a future where everyone is a godlike, disembodied intellect living in a virtual universe ruled by incomprehensible computers. (This is the future most SF authors hope for, these days.) This is why most of the big sellers these days in the US SF field are in the fantasy or altenative history categories. The technological Singularity may lurk sometime in the future, but for the US SF industry the Singularity is now.

This is why I prefer Japanese SF. In Japan, technology affects human beings, sometimes profoundly, but humans remain human. Depictions of the future in Japanese SF are almost always nothing more than the Japan of the present day with flashy bits stuck on for fun. In Hoshi no Koe, for example, mankind has perfected interstellar travel and giant fighting robots, but people still ride bicycles, use cell phones, and ship freight by rail. In Diebuster! Toppu o Nerae 2 (aka "Gunbuster 2: Diebuster"), Mars has been terraformed and weapons capable of cracking planets are built to look like cute teenaged girls, yet the characters still commute by rail, ride scooters, and hang out in coffee shops. It is this sort of thing that makes Japanese SF so compelling; it seems more like real life because it is real life, only with giant robots and space elevators.

And don't get me started on British SF...