4c17a43c$1@news.povray.org...
> Gilles Tran wrote:
>> The problem with that definition is that is probably excludes most of 
>> what has been produced, sold and accepted by the public under that name,
>
> Sadly true.

Really I don't feel that sad at all. As a literary genre, what makes SF 
special is that it does not have the formal constraints of other genres when 
it comes to describe a particular universe, though it can freely borrow 
tropes from other genres. At its best, it's a playground for ideas and 
concepts that cannot be expressed in other normal settings. For instance, 
Dick's SF is mostly about what defines reality and our perception of it. 
People use spaceships in his novels but that's ancillary: SF was just the 
best vessel for what he had to tell. Ditto for Bradbury (who doesn't like to 
be called a science fiction writer) and a whole lot of major SF authors. 
Science are just one of the topics that SF can talk about. Most SF is using 
handwavium and unobtainium because it's usually about something else, and 
more than often that something is related to the issues of the time.

>> "A clockwork orange" is one of the most powerful and influential SF movie 
>> ever, except that there's 0 science in it.
> I've never heard that called science fiction.  Is 1984 also considered to 
> be science fiction?

It's right there in Wikipedia in any case, filed both under "social SF" or 
"dystopian  SF". Of course everybody knew in 1948 that 1984 was all about 
communism and fascism so it's better known as a political work.

> In the book there is, certainly. You can't tell the story of 2001 without 
> aliens setting up a monolith.

True, but lots of the sci-fi thingies described in the novel, like the alien 
Grand Central Station and the atomic bomb at the end, were left out of the 
movie for a good reason: this made the movie more puzzling, ambiguous and 
intellectually stimulating than the novel ever was.

G.

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