On the other hand, if you have nigh-limitless energy, your option set is very large indeed. Sci fi and fantasy typically fail to see through the implications of changing important assumptions.

And I’m also in the Campbellian school. Space opera is doing something very different from hard science fiction.

I think part of the difficulty is that we really shouldn’t think of science fiction as a unified genre in the first place; rather, it’s a very diverse family of very different general types of stories that often trade particular tropes and ideas (sometimes with the point of criticizing them in the context of a different sort of story). So it’s an area of literature where generalizations are very difficult to make. Star Trek is probably closer to the description in the post than most science fiction, since I take it that heroic, world-changing scientists were definitely part of Roddenberry’s vision; but it’s actually very hard to make good, exciting stories about heroic, galaxy-changing lab work, so it’s mostly just vague background rather than actual story. And the ‘change the arc of history’ storytelling seems to me to have less to do with the science fiction of it all and more to do with the fact that (when done right) it makes for more awesome TV and movies.

Checking Wikipedia reminds me that John Campbell founded Analog, so these categories are synonyms.

After all, the (basically-false) core conceit of science fiction is that scientists are heroic because it is they who most make our modern world powerful.

So it is important that major SF story characters do actually have substantial connection to or influence on the grand arc of history, however implausible that may be.

That might be a good description of much SF written before 1960. It is not a good description of SF written after 1960. More recent science fiction is more often about how technology might change the lives of ordinary people.

Star Trek is about grand arcs, but is not about heroic scientists. Many things pre-1960 also don’t fit the pattern; the writings of Cordwainer Smith or Alfred Bester, for example, as well as the vast Edgar Rice Burroughs/Buck Rogers/EE Doc Smith space opera literature.

I think your observation applies to SF from the John Campbell school, and to anything published in Analog, past or present.

Why do you call the conceit “basically false”? Who has made our modern world powerful more than scientists have?

That doesn’t strike me as the core conceit of science fiction at all. In fact, very little of the science fiction I have read features scientists as heroes. Or do you not mean to imply that science fiction has scientists as hero characters but rather that the heroism of scientists is somehow implicit?

Saying that science is not what makes modern civilizations powerful is like saying brains are not what make humans powerful. After all, without a pancreas we’d be dead, even with all the brains in the world. This is of course true, but absolutely obvious and completely unhelpful.