I don’t think I ever said that the exploration had to always be about the spaceships? Plenty of other concepts that Star Trek could explore as well.
So something can have many strange or futuristic elements, but only one or a few of those elements needs to have an effect in any one story for it to count as sci-fi?
If that’s the case, then even the Star Trek movies count as sci-fi. Even the first movie has a time traveller affecting history, Vulcan being blown up, and a transporter rigged up to go a very long distance. It’s hard to do those in a modern day story or a Western without something very contrived.
Heck, even Star Wars counts. It has the Force. Having a world where mysticism works is a big change that has noticeable effects on what the characters can do, and how the audience would react to them. Plenty of people here, watching a similar story taking place in the modern world where mysticism has no reproducible effects, would think that Yoda is a charlatan and that Luke should flee to keep his rationality intact (This goes double because in the real world there’s no such thing as a combat skill that only a few dozen people in all of existence are capable of learning. You’d have a very hard time writing Star Wars as a Western without wondering why Darth Vader shouldn’t be fought by a posse instead of by a single hero.)
So something can have many strange or futuristic elements, but only one or a few of those elements needs to have an effect in any one story for it to count as sci-fi?
If that’s the case, then even the Star Trek movies count as sci-fi. Even the first movie has a time traveller affecting history, Vulcan being blown up, and a transporter rigged up to go a very long distance. It’s hard to do those in a modern day story or a Western without something very contrived.
Heck, even Star Wars counts. It has the Force. Having a world where mysticism works is a big change that has noticeable effects on what the characters can do, and how the audience would react to them. Plenty of people here, watching a similar story taking place in the modern world where mysticism has no reproducible effects, would think that Yoda is a charlatan and that Luke should flee to keep his rationality intact (This goes double because in the real world there’s no such thing as a combat skill that only a few dozen people in all of existence are capable of learning. You’d have a very hard time writing Star Wars as a Western without wondering why Darth Vader shouldn’t be fought by a posse instead of by a single hero.)