99% is far overstating it. SF is a wide genre with pretty much every other genre inside it. At this point it’s infiltrated popular culture; just think how many movies and shows are not billed as SF but contain SF ideas or settings.
I'm of the belief that the TV and movie sci-fi are a completely different genre than book sci-fi. There are occasional faithful adaptations, but none of the far out stuff ever gets adapted.
But even discarding cinema (Star Wars famously being a samurai movie set in space), most sci-fi books written after the golden age, are focused on societal changes and people. Stories are metaphors for our world.
That is fine, fiction that cannot be related to rarely gets read.
Bobiverse is a nerd's power trip fantasy. 90% of what Heinlein wrote is just "external observations on sociey".
Even Greg Egan, who writes super hard sci-fi (his books have footnotes linked to actual science papers!) has his novels largely focus around societies and people (or aliens that are easily related to!)
It has honestly been 80 or so years since science fiction was mostly "here are a few poorly fleshed out people, and some really damn good science!"
I've read a lot of those stories, they are cool and I kind of miss them, but honestly almost every major plot point possible was already thought up by the boards of scientists turned sci-fi authors of the 1930s through 50s. An occasional new story of that type makes its way out now and then (some of the SCP stories are actually this in a very pure form), but IMHO that genre of pure science writing with minimal focus on people or society is 99.9% dead.
The homage and direct copy of shots of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress nothwithstanding, George Lucas is on record saying the Alliance represents the Vietnamese, and The Empire is the United States of America and the films are partly commentary on the civil war in Vietnam.
Greg Egan's work has its share of humans but also some extremely imaginative aliens. I am not sure who can relate to the aliens in Wang's Carpets.
Greg Egan is a very good example of a novelist who is a GOAT but will be dismissed by most critics of lit-fic because "his characters don't have arcs" or some such.
Star Trek makes 0 effort to explore the impacts of its technology on people. Some good books have been writing exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the premise except make tea.
The novels that do explore a world like what ST posits end up going off the rails very quickly. Fun reads, people who live for eternity spend time terra forming planets (why not) cloning themselves into endless bodies and exploring the universe, or just becoming something not human at all.
ST still has people dying, never mind that immortality would be trivial to accomplish with that science level. But that isn't the point of Star Trek.
> Some good books have been writing exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the premise except make tea.
The economics of Star Trek are particularly incoherent; it's not even really clear that it _is_ post-scarcity. Really you only have Picard's word for that, and there's a lot of indication to the contrary.
Pet theory: the Star Trek tv shows are in-universe propaganda made by the Federation, which is a military dictatorship. They should be taken about as seriously as Stalin-era Soviet propaganda, on economic matters.
