" I don’t accept the judgment that in using images and metaphors of other worlds, space travel, the future, imagined technologies, societies, or beings, science fiction escapes from having human relevance to our lives. Those images and metaphors used by a serious writer are images and metaphors of our lives, legitimately novelistic, symbolic ways of saying what cannot otherwise be said about us, our being and choices, here and now. What science fiction does is enlarge the here and now.
What do you find interesting? To some people only other people are interesting. Some people really don’t care about trees or fish or stars or how engines work or why the sky is blue; they’re exclusively human-centered, often with the encouragement of their religion; and they aren’t going to like either science or science fiction. Like all the sciences except anthropology, psychology, and medicine, science fiction is not exclusively human-centered. It includes other beings, other aspects of being. It may be about relationships between people—the great subject of realist fiction—but it may be about the relationship between a person and something else, another kind of being, an idea, a machine, an experience, a society. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (Hainish Cycle, #6.6)