That was the title of a panel at Lunacon 2016, the New York science fiction convention I attended this past weekend.  The other panelists and I discussed the merits of stories that have a message.  Science fiction is the literature of ideas, but nobody likes their fiction to preach at them.  So are stories improved when their authors have a message to get across, or harmed?  I found the question to be a thought-provoking one, so I wrote about it on Novelocity.