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There's a Martian in my Soup! Identifying Science Fiction Literature in 3 Easy Steps

It used to be that identifying the science fiction novel in a stack of books was like watching an episode of Sesame Street's "One of these things doesn't belong." You looked for the big robot on the cover, or the epic space battle in full bloom. But as science - specifically technology - has taken in increasingly vital role in everything we do today, the lines between science fiction and other genre fiction have become significantly blurred. In this article, we're going to look at the two key elements that science fiction stories must have, and the one thing science fiction stories can't have.

You can think of pure science fiction and the other forms of speculative fiction (fantasy, horror, alternative history, magical realism) in the same way as we do basic biological classification. A fish has scales, swims, and lays eggs. Yet reptiles also can have scales, mammals can swim, and birds lay eggs too. Likewise there are many ways that each genre overlap. In the end we'll find that this is not a bad thing, it just makes classification more challenging.

Let's start with what every science fiction story has:

1. SCIENCE OR TECHNOLOGY PLAYS A CORE ROLE
This would seem obvious, but sometimes it's not. Consider that one of the most popular novelists of our time is a science fiction writer, but his works aren't always recognized as science fiction. Michael Crichton has made a name for himself not just in the literary world, but on film too, with works like Jurassic Park and Timeline. But just because he doesn't focus on the science itself, but how that science affects the characters in the story, doesn't mean it's not science fiction. Without genetic manipulation of fossilized DNA and its repercussions at the core of Jurassic Park, there wouldn't be a story.

Sometimes, the science exists as an actual character, like HAL in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Frankenstein's monster in one of the earliest pieces of science fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Other times, the story can take place so far in the future that everything within it has to be extrapolated from current science, and so can be easily identified as having one of the key characteristics of science fiction.

2. EVERYTHING MUST BE POSSIBLE
This is a difficult concept to really get a grasp on. Robert Heinlein has a series of books (The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is in this series) where he speculates that due to the

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