I’ve been rereading the Venus Equilateral stories. They were written circa WWII. An element of pulp in that some things are giant (really high voltage, high G travel, fast between the planets), but some level of reality to the technical stuff
I.
But the stories are really about the interaction of tge technical people. George O. Smith was in electronica cs, so he’s writing about technical people solving problems, the setting merely being in the future and in an manned relay station in space.
Despite Gernsback’s early stories where he wanted to show off inventions, science fiction was something to entertain readers. They wanted adventure, but unlike westerns, the adventure was in the future or around invented hardware. The best was well written, but some if it coukd be fairly mundane. I remember one Asimov story which existed just to tell a joke.
So some wrote about a different future, loading it with what they hoped for. Some invented strange aliens, because they wanted to explore that. Some wrote about tgeir world, but set it in the future or space. Heinlein seemed to write about Woody Guthrie, and one story set on Venus hints at chain gangs.
Some writers had lofty ideals, others just wanted to write.
