I had heard something like that in my SciFi and Politics class. My teacher made the statement that it was our fears of the future put into words (My professor also made the assertion that SciFi was progressive...), but that it reflects the present would fit it (though in our class we have a running joke that Asians seen as the other in all SciFi... wonder what that would mean.) Hmmm.... I’d need to mull that over.
The presenter on my “Classical Mythology” lecture CDs said that science fiction is the direct literary and cultural descendant of Greek and Roman mythology. She only spent a half hour on the topic, but there’s definitely a good case to be made.