Jo’s answer to “In Among Others, Mori is an avid SF reader. Me? Not so much (yet). What would be your top 3 recomm…” > Likes and Comments

Too bold for my own good . . .
Jo Walton, in What Makes This Book So Great, cites Lois McMaster Bujold as talking of sf as being "fantasy of political agency."
I think that you have to start, then, with a gateway into what that might mean, and I can think of no more likely gate than Asimov’s I, Robot, because it contains the rules of robotics which are a defining trope in the genre and may well amount to definitions of agency based on what’s allowable to one who does not have it. Bujold’s definition points in the direction of what gets the sub-label of soft- as opposed to hard-sf, that is, in the direction of social science fiction where alien contact and time travel figure significantly. Social science fiction is a sphere in which the work of Ursula K. Le Guin has been very significant. There is no easy way to jump into either of those spheres, but I’d recommend Le Guin’s collection of stories, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, which offers a single story with both time travel and alien contact (and, if you can find a first edition, it has an introduction that’s worth the price of admission).
Have fun.

A few titles that I have shared with folks who thought they didn't like SciFi, but now appreciate it much more:

Passage by Connie Willis
Farthing by Jo Walton
Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski
Cordelia's Honor by Lois Bujold