Every science fiction story posits a particular world. That world has very specific properties, which are often different from the properties of our own world.
There might be aliens, spaceships, time travel, shrink rays. There might be lots of things. But they all need to add up to a single coherent alternate reality.
Some of those scifi realities are grounded in the premise that people will physically gather. Others are not.
I’ve been going through different scifi realities to see which ones anticipated the restrictions of our current pandemic.
Star Trek is clearly inconsistent with social distancing. Even on the Holodeck, people spend a lot of time in close proximity to one another, in a fairly small room with no windows.
But Ready Player One is a reality very consistent with our current one. Nobody ever really needs to be in the same physical room. Your location in the social world is independent of your geographic location. That’s true of Snow Crash as well.
I wonder whether we could rank scifi stories along a COVID continuum. Some would be utterly inconsistent with the reality we now face. Others would seem eerily prescient.
Prescience is good in science fiction. Unfortunately, the reality turns out to be not so fun.