People being augmented to handle space, and the ways that changes how people think. Stuff like in my Earth with magic game, where space tech involves the user “meshing” with the machine, joining organic consciousness to technological input and digital data.
Giving a damn about the social sciences.
Weirdness that isn’t grim or edgy. Sentient nebulas and such.
Trahnshumansim that isn’t dystopian or horrific.
Weird tech/weapons like how Dune has personal shields that deflect high velocity objects but not slow-moving objects, leading to futuristic knife fights.
Consideration of stuff like music and cocktails and art movements and small scale architecture.
Too many Sci-Fi franchises fall into the trap of trying to keep humans and human society as similar as possible to what modern people know to the point of making it "Modern Western Society with better toys". Your list here is almost a checklist of the thing that can't be allowed to happen for such reasons.
(I've cut Optimism off because the trend for Grim & Gritty Sci-Fi was in itself a reaction to the previous generation of Sci-Fi being
too optimistic. Now of course the pendulum has swung too far to the other extreme and may be starting to correct.)
Star Trek is one of the main examples of such a setting. You can't have anything that changes the core of the old-school Space Opera genre. Transhumanism always turns out to be evil and/or have terrible consequences. Social Sciences are left vague and only referenced as plot devices- they prove X or solve Y but it's not explained in detail how and why. And it generally feels as if the only art and culture the humans of the Federation know come from pre-2000 or aliens. They've stopped innovating these things for themselves.
But out of all of these, the Social Sciences are going to be the hardest thing to include. They often show up in Sci-Fi literature as the writer either expounds on a personal philosophy or explores ideas in a way that isn't possible in the real world. But this isn't happening in screen adaptions to film or TV, and it's less common recently in print.
It's pretty inevitable that this would be the case. Such exploration inevitably comes with the suggestion that the moral and ethical standards of modern day aren't perfect and need to be revisited. That's always been a very risky sell for mainstream media companies and why many fans will tell you that popular adaptions to the screen are "Toned Down" to be less controversial. Now? In the middle of the Culture Wars it's impossible to explore something like that without one side or the other screaming for the author's head. Worse still if rather than supporting a side in current political/social movements you dare to suggest that
both might be wrong.
RPGs have tended to be pretty mainstream in Sci-Fi concepts for the same reason that D&D has stuck to a generic blend of Tolkein, Moorcock and Vance as the baseline. The starships and planets model is one that's easily recognisible and thus has more mass-market appeal. I like the idea of settings that push the boundaries, but it's inevitable that the more a setting diverges from the assumed standard of the genre the more niche it's going to become.
