Yes; I love the scope SF gives for warping time and space and consciousness. I think you can do a lot with that which you can't do with litfic, and those are the kinds of ideas I'm interested in. (But I've actively backed off from the space opera and tech-progress porn, because it annoys me too much.)
On the other hand, I'm quite sure that if someone gave me cat detective fiction, or Elizabethan court intrigue fiction, to read I would read it "stupidly", and I'm not convinced that's a bad strategy *even if it's intrinsically as well-written as anything else I read*. Whereas with my current genre of choice, which is deindustrial SF, I probably read it *less* stupidly than it objectively deserves, because those are the settings and counterfactual possibilities I'm most interested in.
I think having genre-preferences is inevitable, under the current proliferation of books such that you can't possibly read everything you might want to even within a genre, and I can see how one might decide sensibly that aliens aren't one's priority. (Though it's harder to see how one decides sensibly that cat detectives are...)
Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga
On the other hand, I'm quite sure that if someone gave me cat detective fiction, or Elizabethan court intrigue fiction, to read I would read it "stupidly", and I'm not convinced that's a bad strategy *even if it's intrinsically as well-written as anything else I read*. Whereas with my current genre of choice, which is deindustrial SF, I probably read it *less* stupidly than it objectively deserves, because those are the settings and counterfactual possibilities I'm most interested in.
I think having genre-preferences is inevitable, under the current proliferation of books such that you can't possibly read everything you might want to even within a genre, and I can see how one might decide sensibly that aliens aren't one's priority. (Though it's harder to see how one decides sensibly that cat detectives are...)