Vernor Vinge's work is amazing. In the story "A fire upon the deep" he introduces the most amazing concepts, and there's a realistic way that an AI reboots itself after being in cold storage, there's a Usenet communication between civilizations, and the most impressive was an idea that there's regions in the universe where the speed of light is faster and brains work at a higher rate. It's an amazing work. Later he comes up with the prescient "focus factor" in the sequel.

Art imitates nature. All ideas are remixes of previous ideas, and ideas are ultimately rooted in observations from nature. A human mind in a vacuum wouldn’t be able to create anything.