Let me ask you a question: let's say we zip back in time for a
moment. It's now the year 1944. Someone writes a science fiction story
about life 50 years from now, 1994. And in the course of that story,
which gets into nuclear powered vessels, Mars probes, space shuttles and
laser surgery...you get references to such outrageous ideas as Psychic
hotlines, crop circles, and other things.

Does it stop being a science fiction story? Perhaps...but it is
fundamentally more *real* than if you pretended none of that existed, or
tried to explain it all away. The universe it too big, and 110 episodes
is too short, to try and explain away *everything*. I think that there
should be mysteries.

Because mysteries will always be with us...and any attempt at SF that
tries to deny that basic element of our existence is being untruthful to
the history of human experience.

The whole science fiction/science fantasy argument is fairly recent
in SF, as various parties drew up sides and closed ranks. There's the
Analog crowd, and the F SF crowd...prior to Campbell and a few others
really hammering down a set of rules, SF encompassed a whole *range* of
ideas, and freely crossed borders, using various elements. The classic
Mark Twain story, "Sold to Satan" (I'm pretty sure that's the title)
combines SF elements (the purposes of this new discovery called radium)
with the supernatural (said component is a prime ingredient in Satan's
physiology).

Now obviously I'm not going to do that, I have no desire to go that
far. But I don't think that you have to sit down and quantify every single
mystery in life and reduce it to a catchphrase or some technobabble; why
can't there still be wonders and mysteries and the unsolved in 2258, as
we have them today?

Because you could write that 1944 story about 1994 without crop
circles, or dial-a-psychic hotlines...and maybe it would be (by the
lights of some) valid SF, it would *not* be valid extrapolation. It would
ESPECIALLY not be valid social extrapolation. It comes down to: do you
want an agenda behind a story, or do you want a story about where people
may be in 200 years, and the kinds of things they might experience?

jms