Science fiction is about the gadgets. To be on the cutting edge of science fiction, therefore, you need to know your doohickeys from your gizmos, and be able to determine which will catapult you out past Uranus. Space flight, nanotechnology, virtual reality, and all the things you can do with AI-the serious science-fiction writer has all of those terms on Google alert, so as to know exactly what the future will look like five minutes from right . . . now.
"Great science fiction explores the philosophical possibilities of science's impact on reality," sci-fi writer James Wallace Harris declares at SF Signal. You take real science, you add brilliant philosophy, and you've got sci-fi. Right?