You're not wrong. Maybe I'm not saying it right. The Black Mirror quip in my original post is along the lines of what I'm trying to say. It's not like there's o

You're not wrong. Maybe I'm not saying it right. The Black Mirror quip in my original post is along the lines of what I'm trying to say. It's not like there's only one angle to an "uploaded consciousness" ("White Christmas") story, or a "panopticon" ("The Entire History of You") story. It's possible to take any given idea in any number of directions. For example, take (the excellent) "The Expanse". Does the existence of that story mean that all near-future, in-solar-system, politically complex SF is done now? No, of course not! It's like saying that the Beatles "Hear Comes the Sun" was written in D, so now no-one can write in that key anymore. My point is, even if all you see SF as is a vector for new ideas, there's still infinite (well, combinatorial explostion) variation in how that idea plays out. To take one last example: is "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" the last word in the SF meteor-gonna-kill-Earth sub-genre? Heck no! What if there's a robot civilization rooting around in the asteroid belt for resources, and it becomes aware of the threat first, and has to figure out a way to avert the threat (and a sub-faction doesn't want to avert it)? What if you focused on "preppers" on Earth who want to make a sustainable human colony underground? I'm just sayin', even if you're idea driven and not character driven, literally every idea could stand to be treated again.