Yeah, my fingers and my thoughts didn't quite connect there. My challenge of the initial poster's idea was more based on the idea that replicators, transporters, and alien interaction are common, everyday things to the people of the Star Trek universe, and that those things, in and of themselves, would be no more story-worthy than microwaves would be in a contemporary story.
And that's what I disagree with. As I said, many successful SF stories have been about technologies that were considered common, everyday things to the characters in the stories -- but which had transformed the very nature of everyday life and society in ways that made the future culture fascinatingly exotic to the reader. Such as the way universal teleportation ability in
The Stars My Destination had completely redefined the idea of privacy. Or look at the movie
Gattaca. The use of genetic engineering is perfectly ordinary and routine to that society, but it's that very ubiquity that makes the society so alien and creates the problems that the story explores.
Indeed, a story in which an alien or future culture
does not consider its differences from our own to be commonplace would be very awkwardly written and self-conscious indeed. The readers should be impressed and intrigued by those differences, but the characters should take them in stride.
And honestly, I think if you took a contemporary story back in time to 1960, despite some cool inventions, it would be rejected as scifi due to the lack of truly imaginative elements. Imagine John Campbell reaction, reading about a 21st century where the only robot servants around were small disc-shaped vacuum cleaners, and computers were mostly used to have pointless arguments with people around the world...
I think you're greatly underestimating how radically our society has transformed in the past few decades. A world where people all over the planet can communicate instantly with each other? Can access a global computer network that's decentralized and open to any sort of input, as opposed to the monolithic central mainframes that '40s and '50s SF expected to be the future of computing? Can instantly access a repository of all knowledge but have to contend with the risk that the information they're getting may be biased or rewritten at a whim? Can easily get around government censorship, making political oppression and disinformation more difficult? Can easily be misled by widespread rumors and unsourced claims, making other forms of disinformation easier? Can easily bootleg intellectual property, eroding copyright law? Can easily access pornography and shocking fringe content, eroding conventional standards of decency?
As for microwaves, they may seem mundane to us, but they were a significant factor in transforming gender roles. No longer do wives have to slave for hours in the kitchen preparing meals. The responsibility for preparing food has increasingly shifted to industry, with cooking becoming a quicker, simpler task that even bachelors can manage. That change in the logistics of food preparation helped change the role of women and thus helped transform the whole of society (or at least they facilitated a change that was already underway). That's what SF is about -- not just the technology itself, but its consequences to society, culture, values, etc., especially the unexpected and surprising consequences. (And this is one change that most past SF failed to predict. Look at all the '50s predictions of super-advanced computerized households that make for happy, efficient housewives. It never occurred to them that it might help free those women to become something other than housewives. That would've been really science-fictional to readers back then.)
There are so many ways in which modern technology is transforming our society in ways that would've been amazing or disturbing to readers from half a century ago. Just because we don't have humanoid robots (yet) or flying cars or jetpacks doesn't mean our everyday world wouldn't be the stuff of science fiction to people in the past.
(For a vintage story that actually predicted the power of heavily networked personal computers, read Murray Leinster's "
A Logic Named Joe" from 1946.)
