Earnest Hemingway said "in order to write about life first you must live it." The earlier writters of science fiction like H.G. Wells started writing within the genre of science fiction because of the new technologies and scary circumstances that came with the wars that were happening at that time. For example, H.G. Wells wrote about a second world war before it happend in The Shape of Things to Come which included a variety of future technologies like missiles and War heads.
The cold war had a great impact on writers living within this time because of the invention of weapons like the atom bomb that could wipe out city in less than a minute. Therefore, science fiction writers made the "what ifs" that we're going through the populations head into stories. For example, insects becoming mutants because of the radiation and taking over the world or the end of the world because everything on earth had been bombed.
In addition to the uncertainty of the effects of bombs, the space race inspired many of the motifs that still exist in science fiction today like aliens. When the fictional man on the moon became real writters and the population could not stop thinking about whats to come next. This lead to many stories written about alien invasions, moon colonies and galaxies far far away.
Writters are influenced by their life all the time but I think science fiction writters, more than others, draw their inspiration from the events happening around them because of the technology centered age we are in and the looming fear of what it could turn into. For example, movies like iRobot, 2001 and Star Trek.
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