Fiction about science, and science fiction itself, began with
mythology; robots, for example, appear in the Iliad. Then as now,
science tried to understand how the natural world works,
although today’s science is less entangled with gods and religion.

These days half the fun is knowing there are no final explanations
and no end to new questions. Fictional science becomes richer in the boundless delight that humans find in stories about the adventures
of other humans. The fiction I like best is when people grapple with
the intricacies of the so-called real world—including one another.