by John Devera

Created on: July 21, 2009

Pick up any reputable book about the history and nature of science fiction and you will soon discover the intricate complexity of attempting to define a genre that so many disparate novels have claimed. The only reason there is such a classification is for the purposes of publishing and marketing, since the bookseller needs to know which books to shelve together. No one can really explain, otherwise, how a book like Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, is not classified as science fiction, while all the Star Wars novelizations are dumped securely into the science fiction shelves. But classification is one of the higher order thinking skills, so let's give it a shot.

SCIENCE FICTION AVOIDS MAGIC

Science Fiction, as a genre, looks to science to explain and motivate its stories. A book like Philip K. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep, or Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 introduce uncanny and unbelievable novelties to the universe. But everything is grounded in a universe that operates by rational rules and physical laws. In this sense, something like The Lord of the Rings, which posits the existence of otherworldly creatures, magical swords, and sinister enemies with magical powers is classified as fantasy, and not science fiction. By the same token, no matter how many droids or spaceships there are, not a single one of the Star Wars Franchise novelizations can ever be classified as science fiction because the Force is just another kind of magic, light sabers that you can magically pull to your hand from a distance are magical swords and Emperor Palpatine is just Sauron with bad skin.

SCIENCE FICTION INSISTS ON A SCIENTIFIC INNOVATION AS THE FOUNDATION OF ITS STORY

If you look at any decent piece of science fiction, the entire story is based in a scientific or at least technological innovation. Without that innovation, the story falls apart, doesn't exist at all. If you take out Victor Frankenstein's scientific research that discovers the secret nature of life, that single brilliant fictional innovation, there is no novel. If you remove the single creation of Ice-Nine, a potent but actually conceptually possible invention, Kurt Vonnegut's novel becomes meaningless. You see, the science must be the core of science fiction. Let's take out space travel, androids, laser swords and aliens from Star Wars, A New Hope. What you get is a basic Western or Samurai movie. In fact, George Lucas based the entire movie on the structure of Kurasawa Akira's

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