More on writing after the WTC/Pentagon attack: Gary K. Wolfe in Locus says:
Catastrophe is no longer an off-the-shelf narrative commodity. The historical processes that we may have assumed were defining the 21st century may still be in place, but there are other historical processes at work, too, and ones that we can no longer ignore. The future isn’t what it used to be, and now it’s coming at us from a part of the world that we know more from Kipling than from SF. A big chunk of SF doesn’t belong to SF anymore, I thought. What are we supposed to do now?