You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
As a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish.