Neil said:
*Anything* can be dull to read, if it's written badly enough. Conversely, almost anything can be interesting to read, if it's written in the right way.
Agreed! Even a story about watching paint dry could be made to work if it was
about Avon's thoughts as he watched it drying out.
It would be a fairly classic type of suspense story, if there was a lot riding on the state of the paint (a bomb will or won't explode based on the percentage of humidity?)
As to the SF, a lot depends on how you define it. I would say any fiction set in a hypothetical future is more or less SF of a kind by default.
I don't see how fiction about the future can be anything but hypothetical, though, and something like 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale has very little to do with science (in fact both of them feature declines rather than advances in technology).
-(Y)