Where are the 'what ifs' ?

It's not the 'what if' there was FTL that bugs me. What bugs me is that authors use it as a taxi service to get around places, there isn't a 'what if' to it anymore. It's been killed, by science, by bad writing, by authors that think it's 100% guaranteed. Well... it's not. In fact, the idea of accelerating to FTL travel presents a metric crap ton of problems for a human. (I'd like to see a new science fiction story with THAT concept -- woopsy, we accidentally obliterated a bunch of people by trying to accelerate them to faster than light... can we try again? oooops! obliterated them too. How about now? eeew... human goo.... ok, wait, I think we have it! hmmm. slushy humans... Ok, it would be more douglas adams than asimov, but it would be a 'what if' story!)

I don't have a problem with the FTL drives in stories, per se. Ursula K. Le Guin does a fascinating job of getting around to the 'people' in her stories without belaboring the FTL drives and that's what I want. What I find, however, are boring books about FTL drives, Time-Travel, and a bunch of other tropes that are little more than macguffins/devices/contrivances. I don't find any 'what if' about it... it's tired and tiring to read.

If authors would look at the amazing science we have available right now and wonder about what cool stuff can happen because of that, I think it would make for something back to the 'what if' that I want to read about. I mean, what IF you could use your printer and print yourself out a new ear?! What if you could give yourself new 'thoughts' by a chemical injection... what if you could copy someone else's thoughts through recording just their electrical impulses and let others experience those thoughts through a kind of shock treatment? (I've tried reading cyberpunk but .... most of the stuff in the genre is... not appealing to me at all... the ideas are, the writing isn't.)

I didn't like the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson -- but I did get a lot of 'what if' out of it -- and because of that, those books stay in my reading list. They're full of 'what if' ... just by taking current science and thinking about it. That's all I'm asking.

I just want science fiction to be about the wonders of science again. (which is why I write... I have wonders I want to share too...)
It's not that I don't want to hear the what-ifs... I just want the what-ifs to be based on good/newer science so that I'm not completely pulled out of my suspension of disbelief by the bad science *cough*michael crichton*cough*....