science fiction question
I'm not reading much at the moment, because I'm being several kinds of rubbish, but amongst the reading that I am doing is a little H. P. Lovecraft. Whenever I read science fiction, and some of Lovecraft clearly is that, I'm always struck by the Zeerust (the way that the futuristic view of the world is incredibly dated and based on science or concepts that have become discredited) and the way that science fiction, almost always, says more about the time it was written than about the future. The fact that things happen that we know shouldn't happen because of the scientific theories we know now doesn't seem to matter to the reader me, because it makes sense in the context of the story.

One of the things I always think about is how charming zeerust is, and how someone really ought to use it in a story consciously. One use would just the nostalgia factor it would give a story, but you could also use it for social commentary (the author could talk about a period of history through that time's view of the future, historical fiction through science fiction), and I'm sure there would be other uses I can't think of at this moment.

Surely someone has had this idea before, and I don't have to implement it myself to read something doing it. But, f-list, please tell me who has done it and where?