What Science Fiction Does Best Teaching innovations shouldn't just be novel, they should teach the students better than traditional methods. It can demonstrate what science really is, and how it is practiced better than a textbook approach. Science-fiction often shows scientists at work, or people using the scientific method. Textbooks usually just show the answer without any of the creative thought leading up to the solution.
Science fiction can make the abstract more concrete.
It's the abstractions that make Astronomy difficult. Science fiction makes them real. Science fiction stories are also a source of both context rich problems , and estimation problems. Textbook problems give you all the relevant information needed to solve a problem, no extraneous material, and clues to solving the problems are just a few flips of a page away. They can be very artificial.