Suspending disbelief has never been a problem for me. I am a zombie fiction fan.

However, if the fiction is old it gets a pass, but you would surely admit that no self respecting science fiction writer would have humans landing on the surface of Jupiter. I would have a problem with that today.

Larry Niven wrote a gas giant novel called The Integral Trees that propped a human colony living in huge trees in an oxygen rich layer of a gas giant.

I’ll be looking forward to reading the Vonnegut novel it sounds great

I had forgotten the guy was handicapped. It is an Avatar coincidence I expect. The idea is not so original it indicates any kind of stolen idea by Cameron.

It is a dystopia of automation and capitalism, describing the dereliction they cause in the quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class—the engineers and managers who keep society running—and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines.

Another one of my favorites was Henry Kuttner’s “Fury” (1947), set in a Venus covered by a planet-wide ocean, where the Human population lives in underwater cities called Keeps. The protagonist is a cruel brute of a man, but one determined to survive, even succeed in a world that has no use for him. He is the Edward G Robinson character in Little Caesar, the Paul Muni character in “Scarface”, the Daniel Day-Lewis character in “Gangs of New York”. I am also convinced he is the character Gully Foyle (or Geoffrey Fourmyle)of Bester’s “The Stars My Destination”(1956) was modeled on.

Come to think of it, “Stars” is a story where the science is all wrong too, but the characterization and plot more than make up for it. Damn! I wish they’d hurry up and make a movie of that.

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The Stars my destination

Science fiction needs a new technology, or some futuristic or transtemporal Macguffin to make it work, but not to celebrate or explore that wrinkle per se. It is to show how that new technolgy or discovery will interact with humanity, and show us how people and society will adapt to and exploit that change, or be changed by it. It is a controlled psychosocial thought experiment, where only one variable should be altered at a time.

People, indivdually and in groups, is what writing is really about. Everthing else; aliens, time travel, spaceships, other worlds, are just the problem we throw at them to see what happens.