Interestingly this is an approach some really serious SF writers have taken to build what they considered to be minimally plausible future histories:
Back in the '70s Jerry Pournelle did this literally for his Codominion series: the US and the USSR agreed to rule the world together and one of the corollaries was suppressing science and technological development. Not only did that fit very well into the Zeitgeist of the '70s, it allowed him to write about a future that wasn't much advanced from what he could easily foresee. Later this was continued by a post-fall of the first interstellar empire series of stories, which again allowed for limitations in advancement. At least one other series of his also uses this trick in one way or another.
In The Peace War the rulers of the world through a technological breakthrough they ruthlessly exploit of course suppress or co-opt the development of science and technology they view as potentially threatening.
In Marooned in Realtime the vast bulk of humanity has transcended and is gone from Earth and the action is with small groups of people who were suspended in time prior to this. One of them was fairly close to when the Singularity happened....
In the "Deep" series (evidently formally called "Zones of Thought") the galaxy is roughly divided into zones starting at the center; the ones of interest are The Slow Zone where FTL and AI are impossible, an outer zone where societies can transcend through a Singularity, and in A Fire Upon the Deep the action is almost entirely in The Beyond that's in-between.
"JP, If you take the long view I’d argue that there is an equivalent to Moore’s Law in software. This law is that each year it becomes slightly easier to create a service that does something for a customer...."
Back in the '70s Jerry Pournelle did this literally for his Codominion series: the US and the USSR agreed to rule the world together and one of the corollaries was suppressing science and technological development. Not only did that fit very well into the Zeitgeist of the '70s, it allowed him to write about a future that wasn't much advanced from what he could easily foresee. Later this was continued by a post-fall of the first interstellar empire series of stories, which again allowed for limitations in advancement. At least one other series of his also uses this trick in one way or another.
Vernor Vinge had a real problem writing SF after coining "the Singularity" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity) and addressed that in various ways:
In The Peace War the rulers of the world through a technological breakthrough they ruthlessly exploit of course suppress or co-opt the development of science and technology they view as potentially threatening.
In Marooned in Realtime the vast bulk of humanity has transcended and is gone from Earth and the action is with small groups of people who were suspended in time prior to this. One of them was fairly close to when the Singularity happened....
In the "Deep" series (evidently formally called "Zones of Thought") the galaxy is roughly divided into zones starting at the center; the ones of interest are The Slow Zone where FTL and AI are impossible, an outer zone where societies can transcend through a Singularity, and in A Fire Upon the Deep the action is almost entirely in The Beyond that's in-between.