That’s only because there’s a more specific term for the latter and it happens to be unambiguous. I would call techno-thrillers absolutely a subset of science fiction (and other genres). Wikipedia agrees, and in fact says specifically that “techno-thrillers blur smoothly into the category of hard science fiction”. Some lean more on the sciency side, like Jurassic Park, while others are more on the military side (like The Hunt For Red October). The Martian is obviously more on the science side. It’s not wrong to call it either hard sci-fi or techno-thriller, depending on how you weight its various components.
Well, it’s “fiction” in that the story is not based on actual events. And it’s “science” because the entire story revolves around the protagonist trying to “science the shit” out of the main conflict.
Similarly, the film Gravity I would also characterize as “hard science”. It tells a story of astronauts trying to survive a scientifically theoretically possible disaster (Kessler syndrome).
The “hardness” part IMHO is that these films don’t involve any sort of “magic” technology that is beyond our ability to theorize into the foreseeable future - no FTL travel, teleportation, space aliens, man-portable energy weapons, infinite energy reactors, magic particles, time travel, brain uploads, telekinesis, force fields, etc.
Films like Ad Astra and Interstellar are grounded in “hard science” to an extent, but they still relay on some fantastic elements - the energy surges from the magic Lima Project reactor and some of the wormhole and temporal stuff from Interstellar. Experiencing relativistic time dilation from a black hole’s gravity is hard science. Jumping into the black hole and communicating backwards in time with your daughter back on Earth through a “tesseract” has about as much in common with hard science as the Tesseract from The Avengers. I mean other than that a “tesseract” describes a 4-dimensional cube.
But the movie took a number of liberties with the events as happened.
Does that make it historical science fiction?
I forget where it was, but I was watching a discussion about the Apollo landing, and one of the people in the discussion said, “If that’d been me, I wouldn’t have said, ‘The Eagle has landed.’, I would have been like, ‘Holy Shit! We’re on the moon!’.” The host of the discussion turned to him, and said, “That’s why you would never have been selected to go, they want people who are boring and calm. If you are that excited on landing, then would you be calm and boring in the middle of an emergency?”
Once space travel is commonplace, sure, we may send some more colorful characters up there. But the first few people to set foot on Mars are going to be very boring people. You don’t want excitement in space, you want boring.
Would that put Stargate in Sci-fi or fantasy? Or any other “science” based ancient aliens type stories.
I think, whereas Jurassic Park poses some interesting moral and ethical questions about the effects of its (speculative) science, and how it may change the human experience- The Martian does not.
Despite having a futuristic setting, and plenty of plausible science - the story of The Martian itself could have been tweaked to be set on the moon at an (alternative-history) present day, or even on a shipwrecked island in the 1800’s, without appreciably affecting the major plot or themes. I think that’s the only category in which it fails as science fiction.
Heh. I wonder how far we could take that: “So this is the story of Steve Rogers, who in WWII was eager to gun down German soldiers and liberate American POWs; and so he took some experimental steroids, and — well, gunned down some German soldiers, and, uh, liberated some American POWs. Not much else to the guy, really; I mean, there was a war on.”
True enough. “The Eagle has landed” was all part of the script. Which was stuck to.
But you can bet that just between Neil & Buzz there was a high five or two and some stress-relieving banter & laughter. Neil was one stone-cold dude by human standards; Hell, he was one stone-cold dude by astronaut standards, but he wasn’t an Vulcan android. And Buzz certainly wasn’t.
The Moon, maybe, but it is a lot closer, and a fair amount of the story involved how far away it was, how hard it was to communicate, and how long it would take for rescue. 1800’s shipwreck, I don’t know. There certainly was something to the immediacy and the hostility of the environment that was central to the plot.
If you don’t have shelter on an island, you may get rained on, you may get hot or cold or sunburned. If you don’t have shelter on Mars (or the Moon), you asphyxiate in seconds.
If stripping away the environment, the setting, and the technology wouldn’t appreciably affect the major plot and theme, I would say that that could really be said about any science fiction. You could set The Expanse in the 1700’s on sailing ships, and you could still tell pretty much the same story. Firefly could have been set on a riverboat or tramp steamer in the 1800’s. Star Wars could have been set in Medieval Europe. Star Trek pretty much just is early 20th century naval exploration. Really, most Science Fiction is pretty much just naval ships and naval warfare set in space anyway.
I agree with this.
And to those who would reasonably object that the term “science fiction” has long since evolved past that literal meaning, I would respond that, because that’s not what “science fiction” means in general, we sometimes want a term that does mean “fiction based on science.” Hence, “hard science fiction.”
It’s been done, of course! Does nobody here know it? 
1700s - Robinson Crusoe.
The book also meticulously describes all the little practical details of exactly how Robinson Crusoe survived and lived on the island.
Or Jules Verne’s “The Mysterious Island” - which featured its castaways building for themselves the highest technologies of the era (electric telegraph, explosives, etc.)
@k9bfriender: good points all, but as to this:
Shipwrecked on an Arctic or near Arctic island however … Kerguelen, Svalbard, etc. Maybe not fatal in seconds, but a loss of your “life support” system will kill you in hours, tops. And food acquisition is almost equally fraught.
The preeminent newspaper from the time agrees with you.
In Jurassic Park and many other movies in the science fiction genre, the science is there essentially as a setting. The real story of Jurassic Park was a group of people being threatened by some dangerous animals.
The central story in The Martian was a guy using science to solve some problems. So arguably it was far more science fiction than Jurassic Park or Star Wars or Avatar. It was fiction about science.
I would say that’s one of the main things that distinguishes “hard science fiction” from “science fantasy”. “Hard science” may explore the impact on society of a “magical” advance like FTL travel or human cloning. “Science fantasy” just uses FTL travel as a plot device to transport a space princess between planets so two space samurai can battle with laser swords while their fleets and clone armies reenact the Battle of Leyte Gulf in space.
Star Trek is clearly inspired by 19th century exploration, etc. But the stories it tells are not necessary easy to translate to 19th century context. I suppose Khan could be a descendant of Napoleon, determined to restore France to its former glory, defeated by Kirk and reexiled to Elba - but what about Charlie X, or the Organians. It used to be possible to have stories set on Earth, in which some hidden valley contained a civilization far more advanced than any on Earth - but we know too much about all the Earth these days for that to work - so we move them to another planet… And even a story about a 19th century Naval explorer discovering apparent primitives who turned out to have the ability to protect themselves from the dastardly French without the aid of our intrepid captain, and have the ability to impose a treaty on both the French and British would be science fiction (or fantasy) anyway.
I’d say it’s a minority of science fiction (or any genre) that really poses deep moral and ethical questions. Jurassic Park had a message, but it was fairly shallow: “try to play God and it will come back to get you”. Some sci-fi does a better job, like the ethics around AI, or the meaning of consciousness if it can be copied or uploaded to a computer, etc. But really, most sci-fi is how you describe The Martian: a translation of a conventional story (as GreenWyvern notes, basically Robinson Crusoe, which might be called the first English novel) in science/space terms.
Sure, I am always on the lookout for books (though more often short stories in my experience) that pose interesting questions. But the standard adventure/action stuff is still sci-fi.
Is Groundhog Day hard science fiction? It is, after all, a thoughtful, in-depth study of the implications of being stuck in a time loop.
In other words, is it enough for hard SF to be about science, or does it also have to describe science?
I would catalog Groundhog Day as fantasy rather than Science Fiction. Nowhere in the movie does the protagonist ever try to “Science the fuck” out of things to escape the loop. He just rides out the thousands of years until he actually learns something. He never looks for side quests or tries to game the system other than the early attempts at suicide.
Hard Science Fiction versus Soft Science Fiction versus Science Fantasy versus Fantasy. I have been reading and participating in this conversation on the Internet for the past 30 years.
My thoughts on the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy is summed up in, what else, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny.
“Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak.
“Yes—and no,” said Yama, “If by ‘demon’ you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape—then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect.”
“Oh? And what may that be?”
“It is not a supernatural creature.”
“But it is all those other things?”
“Yes.”
“Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not—so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will.”
"Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable.”
Yama, of course, is the God of Death, reincarnating endlessly and, at this point in the novel, seeking an alliance with the Buddha in his war with Brahma. It is, obviously, a Science Fiction novel. Tak is a chimpanzee.
I don’t feel there was any science in Groundhog Day. Either in the sense of an attempt being made to provide an explanation of what was happening to Phil or in the sense of Phil trying to use science to figure out what was happening to him.