Don't give up. Also don't worry to much about paper qualifications. (They won't be much use in the near future really. For there are too many employees who've all the requisite qualifications . . . and no skills . . . and all sorts of character flaws. And other employees with skills . . . and the right characters . . . but not the right paper qualifications. Ultimately work needs to be done.)
So don't give up. Continue writing science fiction. And in the meantime consider studying computer science. Real object oriented languages in which just a few persons can do a lot. (For example, this one. And for that documentation is here.) And then study finance.
The above language for example can be learned in a few days. Yet it and similar things have an order of magnitude greater productivity than what people usually learn. The results of a few weeks might get you a job, as they can be very impressive for having been done by one person. (OOP basically just minimizes the mixing of parts in a program. So you can change one part as needed without having to change any other connected parts or bother synchronize them if they do nothing more or less than what they've done before. You get more reliable work done faster. And much easier.)
Thanks.
I'm not going to give up on my dream. Not when I'm so close to realising it. There's a lot of work to do, but the goal is within sight.