There’s a joke in science fiction writing communities that the advancement of science and technology makes science fiction harder. It’s a joke because SF is a genre that depends on the advancement of science and technology; but it’s also a joke because it’s kinda true. When your job is to describe the future, advancements can make it harder when fantastic things become more commonplace or turn out to be completely disproven. This can be glossed over sometimes — and in fact, many great science fiction stories depend on things both the authors and the audience know to be impossible — but for the most part good SF depends on staying both ahead of and within scientific understanding.

Sometimes, though, there’s an advancement that makes a big splash that makes it easier, not harder. Sometimes you don’t have to be more creative than the real world in order to stay ahead of it, simply because it opens up so many more possibilities than you’d had before. Creativity doesn’t lie in being completely new, but rather in recombining things in the real world.

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