On a recent podcast (plotpoints.com) our new co-host Jeff Lyons was tasked to create a top ten list of science fiction films. These were his choices, not necessarily by any measure of performance or popularity. In other words, they were films he deemed worthy of a top ten list. He did not put them in any order.
His first step was to try to define a genre that has constantly defied definition.
Or has it?
Many say science fiction is about extrapolated science (in any form) impacting the lives of people and civilizations. So "Star Wars" "Ready Player One" even "Downsizing" and "Lost In Space" would fit. But sociological extrapolations of future events or alternate realities or worlds also can be science fiction like "Handmaids Tale."
Some definitions are rather narrow.
Someone who is off-times quoted is Darko Savin, a essayist and academic: Science fiction is "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.
My hero, Rod Serling, is a bit slippier: Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible