this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Yeah it literally wouldn't be sci fi without the sci, with the edge case of post-apocalypse scenarios aside, it would be kind of hard to do a sci fi without better tech. In fact aside from post-apocalypse or older outdated sci fi, I literally cannot think of any property we would call sci fi that doesn't have better tech.
You mean like Cassette Futurism?
That's mostly just an aesthetic, they still have scientific advancements beyond ours. Your own link continually mentions Alien (which is outdated as I mentioned) which even if it was made today, they have interstellar travel, live long-term cryogenics, futuristic vehicles and weapons beyond what we have today.
Just because they use old blinky retro computers doesn't mean they have dozens of tech advances over ours, that's literally the most surface level way to look at that setting, which really doesn't have a lot of modern stories and is mainly just an aesthetic used for art.
There's always the ones where AI are always omnicidal and all digital tech is taboo, or the ones that predate the information age where you have very manual but powerful tech... Like sure, FTL is definitely sci-fi, but without automation (even human guided automation like ripperdocs) you end up with very unequal societies where magic tech exists, but only for the rich or large organizations
The first is a newer genre so I can't think of anything well known, the second includes things like the time machine where the time machine is sci-fi, but technology regresses, and the last one could be things like dune. Or 1984, where we've surpassed the "futuristic" tech (and unfortunately was mostly used like a how-to guide in recent years)