The old truths still hold: without a sustaining civilization, no isolated collection of ships and humans can rebuild the core of technology. A Deepness in the Sky (1999)
The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable ... soon. The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)