The people who write SF novels know that SF fans are smarter than average. The people who make SF movies think that SF fans are morons, geeks, or both. This is why there are so many crappy SF movies and also so many good SF books that have never been adapted for the screen. And why a lot of the ones that have been have been done so poorly (looking at you, Starship Troopers).
JMS said the reason that he didn’t use pop culture in Babylon 5 and instead went with classics was because then his show would last. Once ten years had past, no one would know what that thing from the 90s was. By using Poe, Shakespeare, or classical music, it will be more universal.
If anything, that seems to be even more true now. With social media and YouTube we are fractured. My friends and family will ask if I have seen a show or YouTube video and I have no idea what it is. There are millions of hours of YT videos out there by now and while most of it wouldn’t interest me, there might be some. However, none of that will be remembered, compared to something that has a wider appeal.
I also think that Ren Faires aren’t given enough credit. Even my small regional ones can be a thousand people that are focused on the Ren Faire. The visitors aren’t but they aren’t supposed to be. The visitors can go as they want. The people who love the Ren Faire, though, stay in character the whole time. That’s no different then what we see in “A Piece of the Action.” For all we know, it’s this one city, or just the few blocks where it happened, not the whole planet.
That’s not to say I don’t get what people are saying! I merely think that by focusing on the visitors, and not the players, it’s missed how many are doing the same thing.
I think the exact opposite is likely to be true. Artificial gravity can be created by rotating the spacecraft or habitat to produce centrifugal force, but there won’t ever be the sort of artificial gravity that you see on Star Trek or Star Wars, where Earthlike gravity is exactly confined to the portions of the environment which also have an atmosphere. Gravity is not like pressurisation.
Conversely, genetic engineering and biomedical modification will almost certainly continue to advance over the next few hundred years, so that humans will become increasingly adapted to living in space. I anticipate that the citizens of the Asteroids, Mars and the moons of Jupiter in a thousand years will all be significantly different from each other, and from humans on Earth; indeed, the humans on Earth may turn out to be the most diverse of the lot. This won’t just be down to genetic engineering, but also biological modification of a non-inheritable kind. The space future won’t just be vanilla Captain Kirks sealed inside comfortable spaceships with artificial gravity, but people redesigned to thrive in many different environments.
Huxley imagined that we’d need lots of brain-damaged slaves to do boring work; nonsense. That is what automation is for. Instead of making sub-optimal Deltas and Epsilons to operate lifts, biological enhancements will probably go the other way, and improve people’s capabilities and competencies. Perhaps this will become a scary arms-race, with people afraid to miss out on the latest enhancement - but I wonder why science fiction writers always assume that improving human health and competency would be a bad thing.
Well, their heads are. So is Richard Nixon’s
It’s as if they don’t like the sound of any copywrited music for some reason.
WKRP had no issues. At least during the broadcast run. 
All that is IF gravity is not manipulatable by any humanly creatable technology. Which admittedly we don’t currently have a clue as to how we could even try. But as recently as the end of the nineteenth century our understanding of the laws of physics went through a singularity where things that respected physicists would have previously dismissed as flatly impossible were borne out. In June of 1945 atomic bombs were science fiction; in August of 1945 they changed the world. We still don’t have a theory of quantum gravity, or just what happens when a black hole is small enough to also be a quantum object, or what “dark matter” really is (the first best guesses have been ruled out), or why several puzzling things in particle physics are the way they are. Physics still has the potential to introduce Black Swan events that by definition we can’t anticipate.
But that’s my point: when BNW was written Huxley could imagine engineering humans, but the idea that a relatively simple (pre-integrated chip) electronic mechanism could completely automate the process never occurred to him.
The situation was thornier than that, with basic questions getting mutually exclusive answers from two avenues of scientific inquiry (e.g. trying to figure out the age of the earth from various observations in geology and evolutionary biology pointed to a minimum of about billion years; trying to figure it out from physics based on calculations of how long the sun could keep shining and the earth’s core could remain hot pointed to a maximum of about a hundred million years).
Whether the current puzzlements (e.g. how gravity and quantum mechanics mesh) lead to similar paradigm shifts remains to be seen…
This is just baseless wishful thinking, inspired by years of space opera showing magical underfloor gravity.
Gravity is a curvature of space, so gravity generators would need to produce a region of localised gravity within the ship, and that curvature would extend in all directions away from the generator. Try to imagine what the floor plan of a ship with artificial gravity would look like. If we place gravity generators underneath the floor of the bridge, the gravity would be strongest towards the floor, and weakest towards the ceiling; everyone would have heavy feet while their heads would be in much reduced gravity. Now imagine what would happen near the edge of the gravity generator field - if you walk outside the localised field you would suddenly feel the floor tilting sideways, and in theory you could walk right around until you are standing upside-down underneath the floor of the bridge.
Even worse would be if you place gravity generators on every floor; your head would be pulled upwards towards the ceiling while your feet were pulled downwards. You’d need genetic engineering to thrive in such a crazy mixed-up place.
As we understand it NOW. Who knows how we will understand it in a hundred years?
In a hundred years we’ll probably understand even more profoundly that artificially-generated gravity and faster-than-light travel are unphysical. But that understanding will allow us to create more realistic space opera; it just won’t be much like what we are used to.
Star ships will be spherical, with a small black hole suspended in the middle. Just big enough to produce the necessary gravity, but not so big as to suck them into oblivion.
I’m not generally bothered by sci fi conventions which are there just to either (a) make the show practically filmable (star trek aliens all being humanoid), or (b) make it easy to watch without tons of boring wasted time (universal translators).
But my standards are stricter for shows that are at least making an effort to be realistic/hard. I’m still willing to suspend disbelief on some amount of magic technology to make everything work. But I really hate when there is clearly no understanding at all of basic engineering failsafes and redundancies. Two examples:
(1) In For All Mankind, which starts out as fairly grounded alternate history, the first episode of season 3 involves humanity’s first-ever space hotel, which gets its artificial gravity by rotating. Great. Plausible. But then there’s a crisis where there’s a booster rocket was left over from when they were spinning it up in the first place, and it somehow is ignited, so it’s making the hotel spin faster and faster, so all the people in it are feeling heavier and heavier gravity, and the whole hotel threatens to shake apart. Now, at one level, “a rocket firing in the direction of rotation is increasing the rotational speed, and that is bad” is at least vaguely in the universe of making sense with physics. I’m sure someone who really understand orbital dynamics can point out fundamental issues with the premise, but it’s certainly real-physics-plausible-adjacent in a way that random Star Trek technobabble usually isn’t.
But where everything breaks down is the criminally negligent engineering preventing this from being easily solved.
(a) no reason this booster should still have fuel
(b) no reason the booster shouldn’t be disablable remotely
(c) REALLY no reason its fuel supply shouldn’t be cuttable
(d) no reason there wouldn’t be procedures well established ahead of time for this or similar crises
Instead, a macho hero astronaut has to climb outside and save the day, in tedious and predictable fashion.*
(2) In a Netflix NASA show (Away?), a near-future mission is launched to Mars (I think, I may be misremembering some details). After its launching, it attempts to deploy solar sails (again, plausible-adjacent). And one of them fails to deploy fully (plausible). But what would actually happen on a crewed NASA Mars mission if one of three solar sails failed to deploy? First of all, they’d probably be totally safe. I’m sure there would be enough redundancy in the system that two out of three solar sails would get them there. But, that aside, what they’d do is call up mission control, and mission control would talk to the person whose job was to have planned out a billion contingencies, and then NASA and the astronauts would spend several very calm weeks discussing and practicing and planning and so forth the best way to make the sail deploy. And then they’d do it, in a calm fashion.
Instead, in the show (again, one which clearly was attempting to be realistic), this was an urgent life-threatening crisis, and it was resolved by macho astronauts having basically a dick-measuring contest as to who could most quickly and effectively wing it.
Total nonsense.
The thing is, space travel IS incredibly dangerous. It’s entirely possible to write a plausible scenario in which everyone on a space vessel or hotel would be in crisis-level life-threatening danger.
But it should something going a lot worse than either of the above; or a cascading series of simultaneous failures all at once; before there was any need for hasty heroics.
*I was hoping the show was going to acknowledge the horrible hotel engineering, and have it be a critique of capitalistic corner-cutting… ie, a scene later where someone is testifying before congress about how they didn’t bother adding fuel-shutoff valves to save a few pennies or something; making it clear that the engineering was in fact much worse than it could/should have been; but nothing of that sort was ever mentioned.
You mean that isn’t the music of the spheres?
Which is always in 4/4 and always uses classical harmonies.
Maybe it’s easier to write?
If you set out to create a story where Something Goes Wrong as a challenge for People Who In Many Ways Are Like The Reader, then, fuck, you’ve maybe got the bare bones of a story right there: mysteries to investigate, discoveries to make, problems to solve, foes to fight, lessons to learn, all that stuff — and all for people who reason the way you or I could. If you can write stories that are interesting and entertaining, then maybe that starting point already suffices.
But, to the extent that you start off with Something Goes Right for People Who, In Many Ways, Aren’t Like The Reader — look, I’m not saying you can’t do it; obviously, some writers do. But: it’s more work, isn’t it? Like, if you’re out to write about an improved-competence human, in the context of an entire society of improved-competence humans, and you figure they’re pretty much living happily ever after, then (a) you’re kind of starting off with two strikes against you, and (b) you don’t yet have the bare bones of a story: you maybe still need to introduce something for them to come to grips with, and by “them” I mean “people who don’t come to grips with stuff the way a reader would, and so you’ll need to work harder at making those characters approachable.”
Yes! @Lumpy has it right: Perhaps we’ll never figure it out, or perhaps some currently unknown application of a known force will produce something that produces “gravity” as we use it, even though there is no curvature of space. The impracticalities of creating true gravity may be irrelevant, and no one walking about in a spacecraft will care as long as they stay on the floor.
Yes, we don’t know, but it seems silly to assert we already know everything there is to know about creating some gravitational effect and it’s simply not possible we’ll ever crack the code.
My beef with ‘artificial gravity’ is that no-one ever seems to set the rules consistently. In the USS Enterprise, for example, the gravity inside the ship stops as soon as you get outside. I remember a long sequence where the crew members work on the outside of the ship; as soon as they get outside the airlock they are in freefall, and need magnetic boots or they will float away. This implies that the outer skin of the ship is opaque to gravity somehow. If this effect were anything like real gravity, the gravitation would fall off with an inverse square relationship as you moved away from the generators.
One interesting possibility I once read was in Stephen Baxter’s Timelike Infinity; the Wigner craft has a network of tiny black holes under the floor, which produces a small region of reasonably realistic Earthlike gravity on its surface. If you go anywhere the edge of this region, however, there are uncomfortable and bizarre effects. Of course, the black holes add significantly to the mass of the craft, affecting its manoeuvrability and acceleration. As it happens, the tiny black holes are more useful as weapons than as gravity generators, but that is another story.
I’d suggest a more efficient and less massive alternative; everybody on board ship could be fixed in place using mechanical systems which respond to their movements; the ultimate expression of this system would be utility fog, which could emulate almost any environment.
Maybe utility fog would be vulnerable to certain types of enemy attack, but that is true of most systems on a spacecraft. You don’t really want to be on board a spaceship when it is being targetted by advanced weapons, which is why most I expect future wars will be fought remotely.
The problem with this idea is that unless the starship is huge (like the size of a planetary body), you will get tidal forces because of the large gravity gradient in the vicinity of the black hole. The tidal forces could have effects ranging from being merely uncomfortable to elongating and spaghetti-fying anyone in the vicinity. 
The starship floor is a uniform distance from the black hole. The elongating and spaghetti-fying will be scienced away.