Why read science fiction?

I've been thinking quite a bit about why we do or don't read, write, and analyze science fiction, especially in a university setting... Some English departments or profs love using sf in class, while others loath the genre, labeling it as pulp silliness, one dimensional techno porn, or stuff that's just too foreign or weird to use with students, especially in intro classes. And still others fall into an in-between category, comfortable to teach what they know (which usually doesn't include science fiction). But I've been an sf fanatic since I first started reading (at least, I know enough that the snobs call it sf instead of scifi), so I'm drawn to the genre not just because of the challenge of teaching something a bit out of the ordinary, but also because I truly believe there is something genuine and important in science fiction that really should be taught in the classroom.

Case and point: the work of Ray Bradbury. Most of us know his name because of Fahrenheit 451, though I'm just as big a fan of The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes, which scared me pretty badly when I was a kid. Bradbury is a master of horror as much as he is a master of science fiction, and the atmosphere of many of his best stories exudes the kind of chill that makes us want to continue reading, even if we don't want to. What happens next? Why is this happening in the first place? What does all of this even mean? And the importance of meaning, of the purpose of his stories, highlights the reason why science fiction makes a lovely focus in the classroom. Setting aside the truly didactic stuff - the novels and stories that hold to well worn cliches, archetypes, and tropes so over-used they've become useless - scifi, when done well, leaves things open to interpretation. These stories can put us (both characters and audience) in situations that could never really exist so we can see how human nature adapts, or doesn't, to irreality, the surreal, the impossible. It truly encapsulates what fiction is all about (and conjures eerie allusions to what Plato famously hated about poetry).

In Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World," he opens with the question, "What would you do if you knew this was the last night of the world?" This sentence immediately puts the reader inside the story. What would you do? The characters in the story simply go about their normal lives, eating dinner together, playing with their children, washing the dishes, getting up to turn the faucet off after they've already gone to bed. Holding hands and saying good night, the last words they'll every say to each other. And what is the purpose of all this? Why give us a story that seems to have no real plot, no major, obvious theme? Is this a warning about something, like some of Bradbury's other stories in The Illustrated Man? The Veldt, The Highway, and There Will Come Soft Rains all warn of the problems with technology and our own loss of humanity. They speak of a distraction from nature and the more important things in life (like family and emotion). Yet "The Last Night of the World" isn't the kind of apocalyptic story that warns us to stop relying of technology or else we'll die (unless turning off the faucet is an ecological plea for sustainability, which I doubt). Instead, it's very tediousness, lack of real plot, and stoic characters actually point to the mundane as part of the problem. Why don't these people do anything? Why don't they care? If they had panicked, if they had tried to save themselves, could they have stopped the End of the World? This corruption of the usual End of the World trope is a twisting of the usual theme for a reason. It speaks to the banality of evil, to the way bad things happen when good people do nothing (yes, that was a reference to both Hannah Arendt and The Dark Knight in the same sentence). Suburbia, family, normality: all well and good, all safe, as long as it's kept in check, as long as we don't get too complacent. But if we get too wrapped up in our own complacency... The End of the World will catch us in our beds, fast asleep.