Both Star Trek and Star Wars treat high technology instrumentally as a source of excuses to cause, allow and embellish the desired plot. Exploration of science

Both Star Trek and Star Wars treat high technology instrumentally as a source of excuses to cause, allow and embellish the desired plot. Exploration of science and technology is rarely important compared to exploration of characters and adventures. In both settings artificial gravity reduces visual weirdness and special effects costs; ST replicators minimize boring and challenging starship logistics; SW mass cloning allows uniform, socially rootless and irrelevant armies in an absurdly varied universe; ST dilithium crystals are always available as something crucial to repair and acquire whenever a complication is needed or the Enterprise needs to be immobilized; SW hyperspace travel allows hopping between planets rather casually with enough flight time to offer interludes, while the "technically" similar ST warp drive is used more often to meet other ships in deep space and never to land on planets; and so on as the writers find convenient. In science fiction, on the other hand, the story follows from a coherent and usually simple speculative premise: what if ants went to war with humans? What if someone had a submarine? What if a man became invisible, or extraordinarily fast? What would it be like to fly to the moon? What would it be like to spend generations of subjective time in a generation ship? Given the empirically proven forbidden magical knowledge contained in the Necronomicon, who might be interested enough in it to break into the Miskatonic University library? What kind of trouble would the Three Laws of Robotics prevent or not, and what alternatives to them might be considered? Soft science fiction mixes rigorous speculation with other priorities but still takes it seriously. For example, long-range balloon travel in Mary Shelley's The Last Man is an atrophic and naive earnest extrapolation of the bleeding edge technology of the time that is clearly meant to establish that the tragic story is a vision of a far future (which, despite this little touch, still looks exactly like the 1820's); the balloon flights in Verne are much harder science fiction because technology is the main subject. On the other hand fantasy makes the speculative elements arbitrary and therefore magical, hopefully compensating this sin of bullshitting with symbolism and consistency, a good story, etc.