Really, the fact that we are in an age when science fact is fast replacing science fiction, bringing advances which would have been thought of in purely fantasy terms (nobody could have predicted that humanity would actually come up with a way to prove quantum entanglement in a laboratory setting), then you already have an edge on classic SF. Those were written for an audience of their contemporaries, and as the years roll on, the ideas within some classic novels slowly become outdated. It isn't a big deal for some of the psychologically-motivated novels, but for the science of even the hardest of hard SF, the creep of time places them in an alternate future.
See, I instinctively go the other way with this. I'd argue it was better to write science fiction back when we didn't have all the know-how we do today. Because back then there was so much that wasn't known or wasn't possible that you could make up a lot more crap and readers would let it slide because they just didn't know and hey, some day it might be possible.
Nowadays everything's so mapped out and known that writing about science of the future just feels hopelessly quant since we all know how things are going to go. Writing about space travel and intelligent androids and the like just feels tired and predictable now since we're getting so close to it anyway.
Think of everything which has been invented in the last decade. Consider all of the things which are just around the corner. We are sitting in a really interesting period of history, where cutting edge sinks to yesterdays news faster than many authors would have expected. There are plots to novels written as late as the 1990s which could have their plots rendered nonsensical if current (2013) science was brought to the table. There is a lot you can bring to SF if you don't think too hard about living up to some kind of ideal.
And this hits on a fundamental problem of me trying to write science fiction: When it comes to real-world science and technology I'm a clueless fool.
I know that to stop a Z-Neutrino detonation you need to close all Z-Neutrino relay loops using an internalised synchronous back-feed reversal loop, and that you can stop Dalek weapons with a macrotransmission of a K-filter wavelength in a self-replicating energy blindfold matrix.
But when it comes to anything approaching real life science or technology, I'm utterly clueless. Barely even know how my damn phone works, let alone how one might synthesise a human's brain patterns in the head of a realistic android.
I'm just not smart enough, is what I'm saying.
when I watch the movie version of the musical 1776, since KITT was voiced by William Daniels, who plays John Adams in the movie..
