WHAT IS THE REAL APPEAL OF SCIENCE FICTION?

It is mainly the Sense of Wonder if you have the sensitivity to experience it and the right novel or story that contains it.
It is only this element that actually distinguishes science fiction from other literary genres. This expression is used to indicate the typical feeling of wonder deliberately sought in works of science fiction, especially in relation to the "Golden Age of Science Fiction" of the forties and fifties of the twentieth century, but not only of course.
The Sense of Wonder is an emotional reaction that the reader has when confronted, trying to understand or being confronted with an absolutely new and non-existing concept necessary to take in new information.
It can be associated with the action of paradigm shift, an act typical of science fiction whereby one accepts a futuristic technology or society and its basis in order to continue the understanding of the work or part of it.
Sense of Wonder does not require a complete understanding of the situation that causes it.
The expression is often used in correlation with suspension of reality or the more literary voluntary suspension of disbelief mentioned by the poet Coleridge.
For example, Arthur C. Clarke's 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama, if you read it without knowing the plot at all before reading it, has all the potential of Sense of Wonder if you are willing to grasp it.
Unfortunately, recent science fiction literature is playing the Sense of Wonder card more and more rarely, preferring to conform to film or television standards, and other commercial clichés, already seen and heard a thousand times to play it safe, on the familiarity of "already heard" and the easy appeal of repetition and the most banal and imitative lazy seriality.

(note: the author of the illustration below, inspired by "Rendezvous with Rama" is me).