That one is mostly the result of how useful detectives are for alien/non-regular day settings in general. A lot of scifi stories are in part about well, the science part of the science fiction. You need a character to explore that world/explain the tech and detectives kinda exist orthogonal to the scifi societies - a detective can walk into a slum or into a rich people mansion in the same story and it would fit the job regardless. Having tech explained at them works because you can write them as knowing about the tech, but explaining it makes sense for the sake of solving a case.
That's why detectives are so often protagonists in general, but especially in scifi. The other common approach is the fish out of water, where you introduce someone not used to the scifi society at all and use them as an excuse to explain why the scifi is the way it is. That one tends to have much heavier reader self-insert tendencies though, so writers tend to shy away from it.
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That one is mostly the result of how useful detectives are for alien/non-regular day settings in general. A lot of scifi stories are in part about well, the science part of the science fiction. You need a character to explore that world/explain the tech and detectives kinda exist orthogonal to the scifi societies - a detective can walk into a slum or into a rich people mansion in the same story and it would fit the job regardless. Having tech explained at them works because you can write them as knowing about the tech, but explaining it makes sense for the sake of solving a case.
That's why detectives are so often protagonists in general, but especially in scifi. The other common approach is the fish out of water, where you introduce someone not used to the scifi society at all and use them as an excuse to explain why the scifi is the way it is. That one tends to have much heavier reader self-insert tendencies though, so writers tend to shy away from it.