I've worked on stories about defending artificial wombs, the telepathic treatment of transplant patients, and of engineers fixing hyoergate breakdowns. And several trends emerged while I was doing the re-writes.
The first was that most of my stories have a close-in focus. By that I mean the story follows the life of one individual, or a small group of people. I'm not drawn to pictures of a universe with millions of people spread across it. Most of my heroines are heroic on a small scale. That doesn't mean they're nobodies. They're chief engineers, security chiefs, senior doctors, starship captains. But the problems and challeges they face generally aren't on the scale of a sprawling space opera.
The second trend I discovered from reviewing my old stories was that many of them had no setting. I'd either not described where my characters were at all, or I'd done it in generic terms that gave no real sense of that place. I'd been lazy and ducked out of the work of creation. I needed to focus in on the surroundings my characters were in and focus in on important details in that scene.
The third trend I uncovered was that my stories are usually set within a century of today. I'm writing about worlds that have a lot in common with ours today. Generally, exotic and magical tech that nobody understands isn't the main focus of my stories. Future tech may drive social and cultural changes though, and that's usually what my stories focus on.
Often the worlds I write about are recogniseable from today. And there's a good reason for that. I'm usually writing to challenge something I don't like in current society. I want the future situation to be recogniseable to the people of today. I'm saying "look what will happen if you don't change this."
Not all SF heroes and heroines travel the Galaxy. Some are just determined to defend freedoms close at hand. By using a close-in focus the reader's attention is drawn to the issue I want them to consider, and not to shiny, mysterious, tech.
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