Delany, in "Letter to a Critic" (I think):
"the science fiction enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction"
when pressed for an explanation, in interview (43), Delany responds: "I was simply saying that the number of possible word combinations was greater for science fiction texts than for mundane fiction texts [...] In naturalistic fiction you can say, 'The door opened,' or 'The door swung back,' or 'The door eased in...' and that pretty much suggests, if it does not exhaust, the limits on what predicates ordinary doors, in ordinary fiction, can ordinarily combine with when opening. In science fiction, you can write all those, of course; but you can write as well, 'The door dilated...,' "The door deliquesced...," "The door appeared from nowhere..." Thus, and by extension, there are a greater number of possible sentences for science fiction than for mundane."
"science fiction writers [could] use [this idea] as a goad to search out the full richness, at the sentence level, at the level of word choice and combination, of what they can write"