Live every day as if you've come back in time from a dystopian future to try and prevent everything from breaking.
Storytelling is more like a skin. You start with the outermost layer, what it's going to look like, then you kind of get deeper into it. What's actually going on beneath the surface is not really dictated by or related to the surface genre. It's more about what's going to happen between the characters and what's taking place in the story.
There's been a greater awareness among people, especially geeks, that the laws of physics don't allow that much wiggle room in terms of things like faster-than-light travel, time travel, sending people to other planets. It's harder than we were aware a few decades ago. I think there used to be this widespread imagination, this idea that we'd eventually just hop in a rocket and go to Mars.
Genres are like the surface of the ocean. There are waves and things moving, but you don't instantly see all the reefs and ecosystems that's happening beneath the surface.
I think that technology is much more mysterious to the people using it than, say, the automobile was. This isn't an original observation, but a lot of the smart devices people rely on now really do feel like magic to a lot of us.
On the one hand, technology is more mysterious. On the other hand, we're more aware of its limitations. Every time I watch Star Trek, I'm highly aware of magical everything is: the holodeck, the warp drive. It's possible that with wormholes we might eventually be able to do something like that. But the laws of physics are pretty unforgiving.
There are no requirements when you're using a particular genre. It's not like the genre is your boss and you have to do what it says. You can make use of the genre any way you want to, as long as you can make it work.
Earlier, if you had a piece of technology, anyone could theoretically take it apart and put it back together again, and understand how it works. Some people would do that with the technology that they owned. It's not as easy to do that today. Most users wouldn't even think to do anything like that.
If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock.
People really don't understand the technology they're using. It's been talked about a lot. Apple products in particular are designed in such a way that's harder to get in and understand what processes are going on.
