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good and evil, it can sometimes be hard to tell who fits where. It points out that we may not even know what good and evil are. Morality might appear relative, or function as a concept that affects the story but lacks pure embodiment in any individual. Your villainous characters could turn out to be the good guys (the movie Blade Runner comes to mind). Or you might not have a villain at all, creating your conflict via more complex means.

Use your characters to question common assumptions, and demonstrate your weird theories about human psychology, reality, and morality. We all have a few!

4) THE FAMILIAR VS. THE UNFAMILIAR

You most likely want to keep your setting strange, wacky, and high tech, but your themes should be common and familiar. Love and hate, right and wrong, desire, identity, the corruption of power - these are all themes that work well in science fiction.

See if you can make your science fiction story a journey through questions about what it is to "be." While fantasy uses these themes as we expect them to be used, science fiction is the fictional Black Sheep who likes to throw a wrench in the works. Are people intrinsically good? Can we know who we are, or what the right thing to do is, even if we have pure intentions? While science fiction and fantasy both take on common themes, science fiction questions and criticizes our conceptions of them.

5) TECHNOLOGY

You don't have to get into too much detail about how a gadget works, unless you're sure your reader will find the gadget to be super cool and interesting (think of the infinite probability drive in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Make sure you lay down the basics about any tech that affects the characters, and use your explanations to foreshadow what could be important later.

The best way to show how an interesting tech works is to demonstrate. Show your hover-car, laser-whip, or black hole generator in action. If it's going to be a very important item later, feature it in an apparently inconsequential scene early on, so when the action happens, you won't have to slow down the pace of the plot with explanations.

6) CLICHE CONCERNS

The classic idea of science fiction brings gooey aliens, body snatchers, big black eyes, ray guns, and flying saucers to mind, but the genre in no way ends there. Science fiction isn't only about tech. It's about any science you can think of.

For example, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four is a highly acclaimed science fiction story. Why does it fit

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