Amazon’s “Homecoming” show is one of my favorite low key science fiction shows. It shows immediate effects of a tiny possible discovery.

No CGI, no special effects - just Good writing, good acting, and good camera work

Mmm, not sure those stories match your idea. The only story I can think of that involves a single change in science is Vernor Vinge's Across Realtime (which is very good).

I think an Expanse author once commented that he'd never really thought about how the fusion drive thingies were supposed to work.

I was imprecise, I didn't mean to suggest that any book should be based on only a single technological change.

> How does the Epstein drive work?

> It works very well, thank you very much.

It's really nice in Across Realtime.

I'm not really a big believer in the 'science' part of 'hard science fiction' - for me, you can basically divide sci-fi into two traditions. The first is based on the old sci-fi magazines that published short stories. Short stories, being characterized by the exploration of a remarkable idea, therefore produces sci-fi that's basically about examining some imagined change, usually scientific, but it could also be social (The Dispossessed, etc). The second is based on old sci-fi comics, serials and pulp novels - and is about characters. It doesn't matter how lightsabers work because Star Wars is entirely about characters. So for me, the Expanse would be in the tradition of Star Wars, while something like Yoon Ha Lee's stuff would be in the magazine tradition, even though it's basically magic with spaceships.

What you are describing is the scifi I like, but not true for a large part of what commonly gets categorized as such.

Now that the furor is over, I'll tell you the secret:

SF, fantasy and all the rest are marketing categories, and so they cannot be depended on in the slightest.