Tolkien accurately describes how I feel about science fiction (and I guess to a lesser extent, fantasy). I'm looking for an internally consistent rational universe, which behaves differently and follows a different set of rules than my own. The most satisfying part is the lead-up, slowly piecing together an understanding of this universe, and what rules it contains.

"Not all authors believe that suspension of the disbelief adequately characterizes the audience's relationship to imaginative works of art. J. R. R. Tolkien challenges this concept in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", choosing instead the paradigm of secondary belief based on inner consistency of reality. Tolkien says that, in order for the narrative to work, the reader must believe that what he reads is true within the secondary reality of the fictional world. By focusing on creating an internally consistent fictional world, the author makes secondary belief possible. Tolkien argues that suspension of disbelief is only necessary when the work has failed to create secondary belief. From that point the spell is broken, and the reader ceases to be immersed in the story and must make a conscious effort to suspend disbelief or else give up on it entirely."

remember when Star Wars had internally consistent rules?

"...these successfully imagined realities do have an underlying logic to them. They are internally self-consistent. That’s part of the reason we can happily suspend disbelief, because in these fictional worlds things do make sense; because of A, then B happens, and that means C will occur in another context.

Most of us have an innate feel for that kind of self-consistency. It’s part of the physical logic that operates around us on a daily basis. We don’t expect random outcomes for phenomena that have shown themselves to be repeatable time and time again.

In that sense, a tale like Star Wars, with its own rules..."