I know a lot of people are surprised when Flowers for Algernon is classified as science fiction.
This is Randall Garrett’s “Despoilers of the Golden Empire”
Despoilers of the Golden Empire - Wikipedia
Burgess dabbled quite a bit in SF territory - see also his The Wanting Seed and 1985.
Science Fiction, in its classical definition, examines the effect of technological innovation or change on society and individuals. Post-nuclear warfare stories count, IMO. Some SF writer once wrote that you could change a lot of near-future “SF” novels into “Political Thriller” novels by making the president the main character. I think Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain counts as science fiction, although others would disagree. Ultimately, it all comes down to which section the stocking clerk at the rapidly disappearing local Barnes and Noble store decides to place a book.
Most of what people consider “science fiction” is in fact classical fantasy which has been given a thin technological veneer. There is little to no scientific evidence for a wide variety of common tropes in SF - FTL travel, time travel, ETI, etc. But instead of a wizard waving his wand to make the hero cross long distances instantaneously, the SF author uses a “hyperdrive,” instead of being conked on the head and magically awakening in King Arthur’s Camelot the hero uses a “time machine,” instead of elves and pixies, we have Vulcans and Fuzzies.
My wife (a former bookseller) and I have this argument every once in a while. She doesn’t regard “Slaughterhouse Five” as SF. Whereas I say, hey it’s got aliens and time travel. Ditto “The Sparrow”, hey it won awards in the SF field. You may not think it SF, but people in the field, who should know, clearly do.
Sometimes folks get a “No true Scottsman” thing going where something that is clearly in a category is removed from it by virtue of being too good to be considered as part of that category. (This is also done for marketing reasons, reinforcing that ghettoization, with books like Sagan’s “Contact”.)
And nobody’s mentioned “Outland” yet?
I was thinking SciFi was supposed to examine how certain new things changes/challenges Humans through (new?) technology or conditions (like XMen/psionic powers, or Aliens (like in The Thing, or The Day the Earth stood still).
Star Wars has “the force” (aka magic), I don’t think the fancy gizmos drive the plot. The plot seems to be the “hero’s journey” (in Episode IV), rebellion against political oppression, what have you. Even the Aliens are typically portrayed as very humanlike in motivations and personalities. I would classify it more closer to “fantasy” than SciFi. (The films haven’t explore the ramifications of AI/droid sentience, which would make it more SciFi, by my reckoning. I assume the books do. I haven’t read any of the EU.)
Arrrg! That’s what I hate about labels. There’s a lot of stuff that crosses over into multiple genres. 
The film with Sean Connery? High Noon in space. 
I remember that one. I don’t remember if it was from the '50s (Astounding) or the '60s (Analog.) It would be a tricky one to classify - but probably sf from the Inca point of view. Kind of like War of the Worlds, written to some extent to make the British public think about what it felt like for the people they conquered. But clearly sf, of course.
Why? Because people paid attention to the movie, and there were no zap guns? The original story appeared in F&SF, after all, and it all depends on an invention.
Or is it a case, as Kingsley Amis wrote
SF’s no good
They say until we’re deaf.
But this is good!
Then it’s not sf.
Heh. How would we classify a story where someone fakes a sci-fi breakthrough?
So everything else in the book involves true-to-life depictions of existing tech, and the whole plot revolves around people reacting to the futuristic invention – which doesn’t actually work, but the characters don’t know that, so they of course all act exactly as if they’re in a work of science fiction?
(Except for anyone who knows the truth, but acts the same way to work a con?)
Sounds a lot like this one, Waldo:
Also, science fiction is anything written by an established SF writer. Asimov has written at least two straight novels that I can think off and they’re always in SF.
Conversely, Vonnegut decided to not write science fiction anymore because (IIRC) “critics always mistake the science fiction shelf for the urinal” (or words to that effect).
I don’t believe he changed his style or tropes, he just stopped submitting his stories to genre publishers.
I was thinking of THE MOUSE THAT ROARED, but I’m sure there are other examples. (Heck, it’s the archetypal SCOOBY-DOO plot, innit?)
At that, I’ve argued that the Phantom is a superhero who predates Superman; some folks dispute that by defining “a superhero” as “a super-powered hero”. But like his father before him, and a dozen predecessors before that, Kit fights crime and saves lives while dressed up as The Ghost Who Walks – which of course terrifies crooks who’ve heard the story and think they’re up against a do-gooder who can’t die.
“Big deal,” people reply; “I said ‘a super-powered hero’, and he isn’t one.”
“Neither is Henry Cavill,” I reply; “Henry, like Kit, is just a guy who dresses up like a fictional superhero! So even if Superman is a fictional superhero, and Kit is just a fictional hero, the Phantom is a fictional superhero in the story-within-a-story!”
What I’m getting at is, even if a story about some futuristic-technology hoax isn’t science fiction, the con artist’s story-within-the-story would be science fiction!
'Sokay; I backed off from my position anyway, and agreed to re-categorize The Bedford Incident as a “Techno-Thriller.”
Yep! I read a lot of Napoleonic Naval Series fiction (why are they always series?) and that does come up.
I thought of another genre which might be defined as a “setting” – the Western. The place and time are pretty much vital to the categorization.
(Although I also agree with those who describe the movie “Outland” as a “Space Western.” In that sense, “Western” has to do with behavior: facing down the bad guys in a shoot-out.)
Daniel Keyes was core genre. He wrote at least a half dozen other stories for sf magazines before and after “Flowers.” He edited sf magazines. He wrote comic books. He was one of us in a big way.
Then he got named an English professor at Ohio U. When I went there for grad school I of course planned to talk to him until I was told that he hated, hated, hated all the sci-fi nuts bothering him about the book and wouldn’t talk to any. Interestingly, Walter Tevis, who wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth, was also in the English Dept. at the same time and reputedly had the same attitude, although he was essentially a mainstream writer who branched out.
I don’t know if one of their attitides rubbed off against the other or just if the nerds were so obnoxious that they retreated in self-defense.
The term is Speculative Fiction and the really long, boring space walk in Outland is how we got twins, if you have to ask. Okay, maybe not THAT long, but there were boring parts after, too.
Of course they are. So is, say, Jurassic Park.
There is supposedly a discernible difference between science fiction, which explores possible scientific developments, and “skiffy” (also sometimes spelled “sci-fi”) which has SF trappings but isn’t particularly dependent on those developments. The books mentioned in the OP seem to be on the “true SF” side, though.
The belief that SF depends on expert extrapolations of science is sheer propaganda, put out jointly by writers and fans. It came out of the crippling lack of self-esteem felt by those in the field because they were so looked down upon by the mainstream community. And it’s simply not true.
I’ve recently read a bunch of novels from the 40s and 50s for an article that is in the current issue of The Digest Enthusiast. Not the Greatest Hits, but the regular books put out by recognizable names that make up the bulk of any era. I was stunned at how little real science I found. Lots of science-y words with no foundation. One book had the good guys beating the aliens because they had a weapon with hyperbolic polarization. Psi powers were omnipresent. Their social science lived up to that standard as well. The level of writing wasn’t all that bad, a quantum (or do I mean quasar*) leap over the super-science nonsense of the 1930s. Some mild awareness of post-war social issues could be found. Yet most were embarrassing to read, especially since contemporaries gave them wonderful reviews. (I keep saying most and some because I found a few exceptions: Wilson’s Tucker’s The City in the Sea, his first novel, features an all-female run society with the only three-d women in any of the books; Arthur C. Clarke’s first novel, Prelude to Space, is perfect in its extrapolation - but had been rejected by 30 publishers.)
Science Fiction is an attitude as much as it is contents. I normally make a case to include all the mainstream borderline and quasi-cases because people need to understand that SF is not spaceships. At the same time, I have to insist that an anti-science writer like Ray Bradbury is SF because his attitude and style in his heyday was pure SF. The terms can’t be fixed or hemmed in. What do you do with super-science-style scienceless battling-aliens adventures? Call it all speculative fiction? I was part of the crowd that tried hard to make that the term back in the 70s. Nobody bought it. SF or F&SF or whatever your preferred term is has become an amorphous blob out of a 50s sci-fi creature feature. It’s everywhere.
- John Simon’s hate-filled one-line summary of his review of the original Star Wars ran for months in New York magazine and read “technically a quantum — or maybe quasar — leap beyond 2001.”
It’s probably fair enough to say that SF is based on extrapolations of science, but I wouldn’t for a moment dream of calling most of those extrapolations “expert”.