Technology has indeed affected storytelling. The basic stories of boy meets girl, knight vanquishes dragon, etc - those all stay the same. Shakespeare still works, because it is about basic human interactions. In that sense, there are no new stories to tell, because people are still people and there aren't that many roles for them to play.

But the trappings around the stories change, and the reader's mindset changes, too.

Before extremely fast technological changes, generations of people would live essentially the same life, and would 'get' essentially the same stories. They lived in the same society as their parents, and as their kids.

But now technology changes lives at an extremely rapid rate. Generations live completely different lives. My grandmother was born into a house without indoor plumbing. My parents read newspapers and magazines for their news, and invited friends over to play cards and socialize. My kids get their news from the Daily Show, and usually get together with their friends online to digitally kill each other.

Storytelling like science fiction became a coping mechanism for rapid change. An "OK, here's what tomorrow might actually look like, get ready for it." There's no new stories, and people are still just people, but we deal with the world differently than our grandparents. So what makes an interesting story changes, and what we get out of the stories changes, too.

In my grandmother's day, putting one person's body parts into another was madness, hubris, and the stuff of horror stories as in Frankenstein.

In my day, science fiction writer Larry Niven predicted carving prisoners up for their body parts, and kidnapping people to sell them piecemeal. Organ transplants were becoming commonplace, so treating people as replacements parts began to seem inevitable.

For my kids, knowledge that China is harvesting their prisoners is yesterday's news. Organ-legging might the basis of a detective story, but it is no longer a science-fiction premise.

It's gone one step beyond that, too. Fiction has become a major force in what we build, and how it works. What Hollywood imagines today, scientists will invent tomorrow because they want to have an R2D2, or phasers, or teleporters, just like they saw on TV.