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...at least according to Larry Niven, in "The Soft Weapon" (1967) which was remade into a Star Trek cartoon script "The Slaver Weapon".

"There was smoke across the sky, a trail of red smoke wound in a tight spiral coil..." - one of the first "Interstellar Tourist Attractions".

It's been depicted in fan art:

http://www.scifi-az.com/dixon/ddbetalyrae.htm ...and by the great Chesley Bonestell, who was doing astronomical paintings back before space travel, though this was in 1978:

http://www.noreascon.org/retroart/images/Bonestell,%20Double%20Star.jpg

I went into the X-Files as SF earlier, but let me tackle it this way.

What if I told you that an episode of the X-Files was about monks who were bringing about the end of the world by calculating the permutations of the name of God on a computer. Sounds like a fairly plausible episode to me, and would not stick out from other X-Files episodes.... It also happens to be the plot of The Nine Billion Names of God, which won the World Science Fiction Convention's Retrospective Hugo for 1953.

Science fiction is about the nature of science and discovery and our relationship to them, not just the technology and aparatus of science. When we question what the nature of belief and skeptecism are in fiction, we are very much engaging in science fiction just as the great short story authors of the 30s-60s did and just as Twilight Zone did.

The presence of space ships and ray guns is not reasonable benchmark for the genre.

But anyways, as I just wrote in the Singularity vs SF thread, SF is almost never about prediction. Its about showing how people will react to major changes in science or society. Sure, there've been some lucky hits, and there are SF writers who enjoy extended infodumps, but that's not the point / not the goal.

With SF you're trying to capture the feel of ordinary life under new (to us) circumstances. The best SF ( short stories or novels, or award nominees) often read like ordinary books, just from very far away. As an example, the Handmaid's Tale wasn't predicting the future of the US. But look how well it captured the look and feel of a country taken over by religious fundies (i.e. the Taliban).

For a much better take on what life might be like in the 2010's, read Stross's award nominated first story in his Accelerando set. At peak density one of his paragraphs contain more predictions than all of Sawyer's article, yet Lobsters also includes sensawunda. (sensawunda: hard to define, but its analogous to Chesterton's quote (my paraphrase): we shouldn't treat 'we can go to the moon' as being just as ordinary and boring as a telephone call. We should realize that being able to call anyone, anywhere in the world is as amazing as being able to go to the moon.)

Hard to capture a single quote, but for example (and this crowd):

[protagonist arrives at a bar for his meeting] "Manfred's away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a capacitative transfer bug on it, and all the handshake vCard's that have visited the bar in the past three hours are queueing for attention. The air is full of bluetooth as he scrolls through a dizzying mess of public keys.

"...The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.

"Oh shit, thinks Macx, better buy some more server PIPS. He can recognize the signs: he's about to be slashdotted..."

"...Just then a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head and sends clumps of humongous pixellation flickering across his sensorium: around the world five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?"