I mentioned a "continuum" on the first post, and your description of "Science Fiction" mostly describes earlier "Hard" Science Fiction but doesn't really describe a lot of other stuff in the genre. This is a lot of what you'll get with Clarke and Asimov in particular, but even there you're going to get a certain amount of handwaving because even extrapolating from the most detailed knowledge of the best knowledge we have about the relevant sciences, you have to make an imaginative leap to build a world in which these things are concrete reality. This goes back to Clarke's third law as well: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (And of course, Anne McCaffrey really demonstrates that one with her Pern books, which are also "soft" SF because they deal much more with speculated social structures, and have the Fantastic dragons and pseudo-medieval(ish) society. And not very explained telepathy. And some of the books are also romance, of course.) One of the reasons that Space Opera is absolutely still within the greater category of Science Fiction is exactly what you're describing -- it's the Sense of Wonder (or facetiously, "sensawunda") that is so important in Star Wars and in Asimov, in Le Guin and in Bradbury. (Bradbury really is - ---was RIP *sob* the epitome of sensawunda for me.)
Anyhow, another spectrum within the SF/F spectrum is Hard vs Soft Science fiction (cf. hard sciences vs soft or sciences). The harder you get, the more closely I see what you're describing, but that is much more the case with older SciFi. More recent authors pay a lot more attention to plot and (especially) character development in my experience, and it's part of the maturation writing within the genre or mode. (For instance, I definitely would categorize Peter Watts as Hard SF -- I don't know if you can get much harder-- but he's such a consummate master of psychologically deep and real storytelling that the awesome development of frighteningly plausible and very well researched worldbuilding is seamless with the story. (IMHO, though I can't recommend him without caveats, because he does not write stories for the faint of heart or easily triggered, and he gets dark dark dark.)
It's probably also worth noting that I know people who couldn't get into Tolkien because of what they saw as excessive world-building at the expense of plot or character, and I smegging HATED Madame Bovary because I couldn't care less exactly which shop the damn wedding cake came from or exactly how many feet wide the office was, and Victor Hugo nearly lost me in The Hunchback of Notre Dame because of the entire smegging chapter on exactly why the buildings in a certain quarter of Paris were built a particular shade of yellow. It's not a characteristic that either defines or is restricted to Science Fiction.
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I mentioned a "continuum" on the first post, and your description of "Science Fiction" mostly describes earlier "Hard" Science Fiction but doesn't really describe a lot of other stuff in the genre. This is a lot of what you'll get with Clarke and Asimov in particular, but even there you're going to get a certain amount of handwaving because even extrapolating from the most detailed knowledge of the best knowledge we have about the relevant sciences, you have to make an imaginative leap to build a world in which these things are concrete reality. This goes back to Clarke's third law as well: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (And of course, Anne McCaffrey really demonstrates that one with her Pern books, which are also "soft" SF because they deal much more with speculated social structures, and have the Fantastic dragons and pseudo-medieval(ish) society. And not very explained telepathy. And some of the books are also romance, of course.) One of the reasons that Space Opera is absolutely still within the greater category of Science Fiction is exactly what you're describing -- it's the Sense of Wonder (or facetiously, "sensawunda") that is so important in Star Wars and in Asimov, in Le Guin and in Bradbury. (Bradbury really is - ---was RIP *sob* the epitome of sensawunda for me.)
Anyhow, another spectrum within the SF/F spectrum is Hard vs Soft Science fiction (cf. hard sciences vs soft or sciences). The harder you get, the more closely I see what you're describing, but that is much more the case with older SciFi. More recent authors pay a lot more attention to plot and (especially) character development in my experience, and it's part of the maturation writing within the genre or mode. (For instance, I definitely would categorize Peter Watts as Hard SF -- I don't know if you can get much harder-- but he's such a consummate master of psychologically deep and real storytelling that the awesome development of frighteningly plausible and very well researched worldbuilding is seamless with the story. (IMHO, though I can't recommend him without caveats, because he does not write stories for the faint of heart or easily triggered, and he gets dark dark dark.)
It's probably also worth noting that I know people who couldn't get into Tolkien because of what they saw as excessive world-building at the expense of plot or character, and I smegging HATED Madame Bovary because I couldn't care less exactly which shop the damn wedding cake came from or exactly how many feet wide the office was, and Victor Hugo nearly lost me in The Hunchback of Notre Dame because of the entire smegging chapter on exactly why the buildings in a certain quarter of Paris were built a particular shade of yellow. It's not a characteristic that either defines or is restricted to Science Fiction.