Why Sci-Fi?

Why is it that we love science fiction? Most of it’s unbelievable, and much of it is hokey. Yet we continue to read science fiction books; watch science fiction movies and TV shows. Some even attend Trekkie conventions.

And let’s not forget the other science fiction gatherings, not just in the United States, but globally. There must be something to this activity. Couldn’t we all read romance novels or mysteries? There’s a reason we flock toward these “strange stories.”
For me, it was being in the library and browsing a copy of Ray Bradbury's "Illustrated Man." His writing grabbed my attention in a way that few others ever have.

Reading about the crew stranded on a planet of horrible rain in "The Long Rain" that Bradbury described as follows:
"The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped."

"The Veldt," that used a futuristic nursery to enhance a concerned couple's children to commit the ultimate horror of killing their parents.

These are a couple of the most unusual stories I remember from that day. Ray did it for me. I was hooked for life.
What’s yours?