The problem with being too inclusive is that you allow in examples that display none of the virtues of the category in question.

To my mind, science fiction is good because it provokes thought; it encourages critical thinking; it produces genuinely valuable speculation; it has a quality of cognitive estrangement and defamiliarisation (where, for example, you suddenly find your ordinary life to be quite startlingly strange); it teaches you science (or better still, makes you want to learn more science); it brings the past, the future, and distant worlds to life; and probably quite a few other things I haven't thought of.

Furthermore, I think SF should deal with the possibilities implied by the premise. If a woman discovers she can levitate, then gets involved in a lengthy series of events that have nothing whatsoever to do with her ability to levitate, one may wonder why the story wasn't about an ordinary woman.

I do not consider superhero stories to be SF, regardless of the rationale behind their superpowers. Let's face it, the existence of djinn or Greek gods randomly bestowing powers on heroes is better science than the idea of genetic mutation giving somebody metal blades in his hands. All superhero stories are fantasy, then, but then, all fiction is fantasy, and we tend to have certain expectations of things labelled fantasy. So it would make more sense simply to call them Superhero Stories.

Superhero Stories are of little interest to me, partly because they tend to have none of the virtues of SF that I listed above, and partly because it's bloomin' boring to watch people punching each other through walls and doing generally impossible things that I can't relate to, then angsting on about it.

Ah, but to mainstream literati, nothing that is good can possibly be science fiction...

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Yes, but they don't run the world, and not everybody cares about their narrow ideas about what can and cannot be worth reading.

I think SF continues to gain respectability. In a world undergoing such huge technological (or technology-driven) changes, it's no longer possible to pretend that these things are irrelevant.

I'm writing a story about an extraterrestrial character who interacts with conventional superheroes, but their only "power" besides advanced intelect is regenerating lost limbs like a sea star or salamander. Is that believable?

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That could be made believable if, for instance, it sounded as if it was based on real biological research into the animals you mention, and if it was a reasonably slow process that required them to eat enough food to build up their body mass.

I wouldn't really call those people superheroes, going by this description.

Yes, the Gadrin (The species) evolved from animals that could regenerate. Through genetic tinkering, they made it a little faster, but it's not like the movie monsters that regrow lost parts in five minutes. Regrowing a whole arm takes weeks or months for Gadrins, the equivalent of skin wounds and broken bones take less time.

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'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

And, "It works by sending tachyon particles into modevendium alloy charged with anti-protons," doesn't really tell you anything either. Star Trek's sci-fi, though, right?

How about Ringworld, with virtually unbreakable materials and luck as a biologically-based trait? Where do you draw the line?

I've got to disagree with the second. Some steampunk is fantasy-like, though I would still call it sci-fi, just very loose sci-fi. There's nothing in The Difference Engine that couldn't have really happened, had Charles Babbage not ticked off the people he needed to fund his machines.

There is a real Difference Engine, now, in The Science Museum, London, built according to the mechanical tolerances achievable at the time, and it works just fine.

I'm actually writing a novel that's partly set in a post-steampunk world--they've moved onto electromechanical technology. Nothing is impossible, and most things are very probable in the story.

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No, it doesn't tell you anything. It's technobabble, the mark of bad science fiction. The rest of the story might be fine, but there's no excuse for such nonsense.

If Geordie (or whoever) wants to talk about a new piece of technology, he would be better off simply telling us what it does (e.g. "It detects chlorine in swimming pools, Captain,") and then, if the story requires it, Picard can say, "Geordie, can your device be modified to detect fluorine in drinking water?"

Alternatively, simply naming something and letting us see what it does is a good approach. We don't know how phasers work, but we've seen what they do in earlier episodes, so when someone says, "I've got a phaser," we know what they are capable of.

These are examples of speculation and extrapolation.

In the future we may or may not acquire unbreakable spaceship hulls. But it's worth writing about them because they enable us to tell new stories. Larry Niven's Neutron Star would not have worked as well if the spaceship had merely had a "fairly strong" hull.

If Niven's stories were all about spaceship fights ("Will my irresistible beam cut through the impenetrable hull?") then they would be no better than superhero stories. But they are not about that.

Is luck a biologically-based trait? Almost certainly not. But the question is an interesting one, and SF exists to ask questions - and it doesn't matter if the answer is no.

Steampunk - I consider those parallel world stories, ones where the divergence in history was technological, at the height of the steam age.

Sure, I'd call it skiffy. You removed it from the bit you quoted, but you saw what I said in that post about skiffy, right? "Skiffy" is what you see too often on TV and in the movies. Sometimes, there are good science fiction Star Trek stories, but not when they throw in handwavium to do whatever is needed to fix a stupid plot.

I'd say Ringworld has a number of fantastic elements, but it does follow the known rules of physics except where exceptions are explicitly shown, and does show the consequences of the exceptions. I'd say it's science fiction, but it isn't as hard as some.

As for where I draw the line, any line is going to be subjective. However, I do think there needs to be some limits on what is called "science fiction," based on stories that can't be told without the science fiction elements, and can be distinguished from fantasy based on more than a few word choices.

I haven't read that, but I can believe some might not not be what I'd call fantasy. It's just that all of the steampunk I've seen has rather huge fantasy elements: Things that can't be done within the realm of known physics (for instance, heavy flying ships), let alone with steam engines, vacuum tubes, and so forth.

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Ah, like ST:TOS ("Wagon Train to the Stars") or Firefly (which didn't even use ray-guns). Gotcha.

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Star Trek was real sci-fi sometimes, and other times was formula. When they confronted moral questions directly, like "what are the implications of fighting a war entirely through computers, preserving your infrastructure but still taking casualties?" or "if you know someone you love is going to change the future to allow the Nazis to win WWII, should you allow her to die?" Those were real science-fiction episodes.
Most of Voyager, by contrast, was formula.

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I think the issue is that few people are willing to put things in different genres at the same time. Now, Rotten Tomatoes limits me to ten categories (can you believe that?), but I've put things into all sorts of odd cross-categories. I can't do Western and Fantasy/Sci-Fi, because I haven't got room for a Western category (really), but, yeah, if I did, Firefly/Serenity would go in it. When I get around to Chicago, it'll probably be Musical-Mystery/Suspense. Dear Frankie is Drama-Animation/Family. (Yes, I know--animation and family should be two separate categories. I just don't have enough categories to work with.) And so forth. It's Nu-Shimmer, kids.

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I'd never heard of 'steampunk' until running across it here on BAUT, but my favorite steampunk novel is Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!

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I don't mind putting things in multiple genres, but if you can tell the same story by changing a few words, there isn't much point. By the way, my Western comparison was based on an example I saw years ago in (I think) Galaxy magazine. It showed one paragraph that was obviously from a Western and one paragraph where the words were changed slightly, but the story was the same. The point was that it was bad science fiction (if you were willing to call it that at all) because the SF elements were irrelevant to the story.

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Found it! Galaxy ran this as an ad, showing something they wouldn't put in the magazine. One version:

Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing...and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand.

"Get back from those controls, Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last space trip."

The other version:

Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rim-rock...and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand.

"Rear back and dismount, Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts."

And from Wikipedia, which explains the issue a bit more:

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The trouble with such stylistic stringency is that if you decide to extirpate stories like that from science fiction you'll lose such material as E. E. Smith's Lensman series (which you could say is kind of a mix between a western and a spy story in space clothing).

Yet few authors contributed as much as Smith to make science fiction popular.

(I would say the same about George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry, by the way. Now, awarding a Hugo to Lord of the Rings -- that is ridiculous!)

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Those sounds like perfectly legitimate entries to the Bulwer-Lytton contest.

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To me, the idea of substitution as a test of a science fiction story (the SF/Western substitution mentioned above) is pretty irrelevant if the story is a good one. Using the Galaxy Test I don't see how The Green Hills of Earth could qualify as SF. It's just (sic) a sea story, with spaceships and atomic piles substituted for tramp steamers and steam tubes, a prose extension of Kipling's McAndrew's Hymn.

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