Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.
Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.
Fear is the brother of hate.
Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.
SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.