Ordinary And Extraordinary

In fantasy and sf, ordinary people regularly find themselves in extraordinary situations. For example, Poul Anderson's Malcolm Lockridge finds that he has time traveled. Yet we are confident that nothing like this will happen to us. So why do we so readily suspend disbelief when reading The Corridors Of Time? Some people don't, dismissing sf as unacceptably implausible.

However, each of us has already adjusted to regular use of technology that was science fictional earlier in our own lifetimes. A mainstream novelist setting a novel a few years in the past has to check the state of information and computer technology in that year to make sure that he gets it right. As we have adjusted to personal computers, laptops, the internet, mobile phones now with internet access and text messages, Lockridge adjusts to temporal corridors.

The way things happen is never the way they were imagined. Extrasolar planets were undetectable until recently. Now it is known that there are many and that some might bear life but such life has not yet been confirmed. Scientific progress, even if rapid, advances through stages. I still do not expect an extrasolar spaceship to enter Earth orbit in our lifetimes. And, if I were taken along a temporal corridor, then I would not then engage in heroic adventures like Lockridge who escapes from captivity no less than three times. But that is an observation about action-adventure fiction, not specifically about sf.