Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
What SF can do better than anything else is show us the range of our possible futures, and what we can do to realize the good ones and avoid the nasty ones.
I think the rising and falling popularity of areas like hard SF and far-future SF is, to a considerable extent, the same as any other fashion.
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.
Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.
Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers. Given all the changes, both economic and technological, SF hasn't done too badly.
On an island, anything can happen. In a crime novel, it usually does.
Anything that can happen, will happen.
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.