Which is unfortunately true, but also just illustrates how far science-fiction has fallen - not sure when it started but I guess Star Wars played an important role to remove the 'science' from 'science-fiction'.
It's been there since day one. What, you thought early era SF used accurate science? No, they used made-up rules based on whether they could tell a good story.
Science fiction usually doesn't conform to how the world actually works in the same way pornography usually doesn't conform to the way sexual relationships work. They are both there to tell titillating stories, not describe reality.
> What, you thought early era SF used accurate science?
It depends on the author I guess. Stanislaw Lem for instance mostly separated his "silly-fiction universes" (e.g. the Ijon Tichy and 'robot fairytales' novels) from his "hard sci-fi" universes (for instance the Pilot Pirx novels) - and there it was mostly about the restrictions of space travel (where space travel is usually just plain old cargo hauling), Pirx never left the solar system because it simply wasn't possible during his lifetime (part of him eventually did - maybe - in his last book 'Fiasco'), instead the Pirx novels were mostly occupied with typical 'space trucker' problems like oil leaks on his rocket boosters, wrestling with space harbour bureaucracy or the occasional humanoid robot going into a mode that could be described as 'mad' or 'depressed'.
Or more. The War of the Worlds was published half a century before Lem's first novel. And arguably SF goes back farther than that. Jules Verne in 1864. Frankenstein was published in 1818.
Yeah, I'm deliberately sticking to the time period when SF was recognized as a genre in its own right, distinct from others. Otherwise we might have to go back a few centuries, depending on one's definition of sci-fi!
For instance: Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics aren't based on any practical science, they exist as a plot device for setting off mystery stories with robots and morality plays about hubris. And the reason robots have positronic brains is that positrons were recently discovered at the time, and it sounded cool. Yet people will swear Asimov is one of the hardest SF authors around.
Sometimes you might get a SF author who's an expert in a particular field or has a specific hyperfixation, and that one aspect of their stories might be grounded somewhat in plausibility, but everything else turns out to be complete nonsense.
I believe people use the word “hard” to differentiate more scientifically rigorous scifi. I’m not well-versed enough to know when that started being a term, or what the status quo was before it was a term.
Interestingly there’s also “high” fantasy to differentiate between earth like and non earth like subject worlds, and then even “historical fiction” to describe books that try to be faithful to some degree to some historical time period on earth.
Anyway, this is all to say maybe “how far science-fiction has fallen” might be a narrow interpretation of what’s been happening to fiction in general over the past 75 years. More options than ever, maybe…
Perhaps you should rewatch Star Trek as well. TOS back in 1966 had rather a lot of technical marvels that were ridiculous at the time that became commonplace tech that we take for granted in 2026: electronic tablets, pocketable communication devices that could reach a ship in orbit, a computer that could be talked to and and respond with at least limited intelligence, orbit to surface sensors, etc. Certainly most of the concepts weren't original to Star Trek but the series' popularity embedded them in the global cultural consciousness.
The fear of humans being replaced by computers (TOS: The Ultimate Computer) was speculative but also germane back then and is perhaps even more germane today.
