Science Fiction

I came across this quote in the book I'm currently reading, Until the End of Time by Brian Greene. It doesn't really go into what makes a great story, but rather what prevents a story from being great:

For a concept to grab hold of our attention with enough force that we remember it and transmit it to others, the concept must be sufficiently novel to offer surprise but not so outrageous that we immediately deem it ridiculous. Invisible people? Sure, so long as invisibility is the only counterintuitive feature. A river that answers calculus problems by singing them to the theme of MAS*H? Silly, and so is dismissed by most everyone and quickly forgotten. Aligning with the larger-than-life themes of mythic tales, the protagonists we encounter are larger than life but minimally counterintuitive constructs of the human imagination. No surprise that these protagonists have physical forms, thought processes, and even personality profiles that, at the very least, are thoroughly familiar, even if their powers exceed expectations based on anything we have ever encountered.