Reading Science Fiction as a Skill

I'm a big reader of science fiction, with some top-of-mind recommendations the Torchship trilogy by Karl K. Gallagher, the Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal, the Old Man's War series by John Scalzi, and Shades of Grey by Jasper Fford. What I've had to learn several times is that reading different genres is a skill, and some people bounce off science fiction because they don't (yet) have the skills and vocabulary, and similarly I picked up some habits reading sci-fi that do not translate to other genres.

Credit to michael.chabon on Threads

Useful Habits I Picked Up

When I've tried to get someone into a science fiction book (or other story) and they don't habitually read "genre" fiction (i.e. science fiction or fantasy), I've seen them struggle. Seeing this and trying to explain what's going on has made me realize that science fiction has many conventions on how to transmit world-building, and the vocabulary often used. For example, a civilization might have faster-than-light travel. This might be abbreviated "FTL" (with or without explanation), which by itself means "they can go faster than light, don't worry about it." But other standard vocabulary might be a "jump" (discrete near-instantaneous leaps across vast distances", hyperspace travel (think Star Wars, sometimes with maneuvering inside hyperspace), or "gates" (jumps with fixed infrastructure on at least one end to effect the jump). To an experienced reader, those different words carry lots of information about the technology of the universe. Similarly, political divisions like "Belter", "Core", or "Periphery" worlds evoke levels of wealth and political power with little initial explanation needed. But not having that vocabulary makes the stories harder to get into.

Picking up a new science-fiction story often means being comfortable with not knowing what's going on and trusting the author to tell you what you need to know. For a novel set in the modern day, you know (roughly) how people spend their days and participate in society. In a novel set in the distant future, it might be a post-scarcity world or grimdark eternal warfare or a decaying galactic empire. You have to collect the clues as they're laid out and expect that some elements that were mysterious at the beginning will make sense by the end. This may also be why I find re-reading books rewarding: not only do I get to re-experience the world and see the foreshadowing better, but the world itself makes more sense now because I understand it better.

Science fiction is often more tolerant of "exposition", where the author might take a few paragraphs to explain the history or technology or society of the world because they cannot assume that you know how it works. A background in science itself can be helpful, especially in "hard" science fiction (where few or no laws of physics are broken): knowing that delta-V is essential to orbital maneuvers explains a critical plot point in The Martian (hard sci-fi), but will not help you enjoy Star Trek (soft sci-fi).

Bad Habits I Picked Up

I realized my science-fiction skills were building bad habits in high school when reading Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. A key to understanding the novel is to realize that the first-person narrator/protagonist is deeply in denial about his emotional life, but my reading habits had not included unreliable narrators and so I missed all of the subtext. Some of this was the fault of science fiction, some was just that I wasn't as widely-read at the time and was most familiar with omniscient narrators. At this point I can handle unreliability better (I think - by definition I don't know what I'm missing) but that same trusting relationship that's helpful when learning about a world can get you in trouble in other genres.