Another axis of 'science fiction writers (often) don't understand scale':
One of the other things a lot of science fiction handles very badly is the economic impact of space travel. Reaching low Earth orbit requires around 32 MJ/kg. The median human body weight in the world is 60 kg, but that's skewed by places with poor nutrition, 70 kg is more plausible for a human civilisation (or subset of a civilisation) that can travel in space. So we're talking over 2 GJ to put a person in LEO.
To put that in perspective, that's around 500 kWh, or close to a month's median energy consumption for a household.
Assuming a magical machine that is 100% efficient, that's quite affordable, but it also means that the demand would be very high. If you need a shuttlecraft, then you're not just lifting a person you're lifting the mass of the vehicle as well. Now we're talking a cost equivalent to a typical household energy budget for a few years for each launch.
And, note, that we're not even talking about getting as high as geostationary orbit, or leaving orbit, which add in more effort. Maybe once you're in orbit you have a magical drive that doesn't require any energy to get between planets.
100% efficiency is not even theoretically possible. In practice, it's much worse. If you're using a reaction drive, you need to carry fuel as well. I've seen space elevator efficiency estimates as low as 1%. Even getting power along the span of a space elevator is a hard problem! I prefer the framing of them as 'space bridges' rather than 'elevators' because you definitely don't want to be moving thousands of kilometres of cable to move the cars up and down, you're goint to want a fixed structure that crawlers can ascend and descend. And that means you need to power them. Either they carry a powerplant (and so have the rocket problem of having to carry their own fuel up) or you get power to them (in which case you need efficient power transmission over an enormous span, which probably means magical superconductors of some kind).
At that price, the cost of a space elevator ticket is close to the lifetime energy consumption of an household in a wealthy country today. This means one of two things:
Option 1: The cost of going into space is incredibly high and totally out of reach for most people. And that includes business travellers. This isn't like a company paying for a business-class flight across the Atlantic. That may cost as much as a person's salary for a few weeks. This is like paying a typical person's lifetime salary for one trip.
Option 2: Energy is really cheap. If getting to orbit is something that the equivalent of a typical middle-class person can afford, then things like melting aluminium at home is easily affordable. That also means that basically any commodity good whose availability is limited by energy today (i.e. most things other than custom artwork) is effectively free. Things like broadcast power, which we don't use because they're ludicrously wasteful, are totally feasible.
Note that this also applies if you assume something like the Star Trek transporter that can ignore the potential-energy changes when it moves things. If you can make wormholes, put one end above the other and a waterwheel between them then pour mercury through the bottom one. Leave it in some gravity field (e.g. near a planet) and now you've got a nice perpetual motion machine. Or, with the transporter, just keep beaming depleted uranium to the top of a massive tower and dropping it down connected to a pulley. Any machine that lets you sidestep the energy cost of something can be used as a power source.
