I can't really articulate how I define science fiction. Generally, I would say that it is a What If engine (or, if it's written by Grant Morrison, a WTF engine), where a mostly plausible change is made to the world as it should be so that it becomes the world as it might be.
Today, I mostly enjoy comics. The Eternals, Guardians of the Galaxy, and X-men are my favorites. I also highly recommend anything Green Lantern or Booster Gold. Warren Ellis's Supergod is weird and gross and makes me swoon.
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I also read the Animorphs series when I was younger, but for some reason I never really thought of them as being Science Fiction. Looking back, it's crazy how many things I have read and movies I watched that I didn't think of as Science Fiction until someone pointed it out.
Also, I love your description of Supergod. I've never read it but now really want to.
Same on Animorphs here. I definitely didn't think of it as science fiction, just something that would be really cool if it were actually possible (other than the whole slug thing in the ear, but that's besides the point).
Wow I forgot about animorphs! My favorite was the guy who turned into the white bengal tiger. But I think that is definitely science fiction, although I never thought of it before either. Same with Alex Mack, now that I think about it.
Going back to my own post about how sci-fi has been so integrated into society these days, I think it's really interesting how there are all these things we never even think of as being in the genre.
By now we've gotten so used to the idea of people time traveling or teleporting from place-to-place that it seems more like a development for the not-so-distant future than something totally outlandish. The other day my little brother asked someone why they didn't just use their cell phone and call someone when their house was broken into (in the 90s) and his friend's mom just laughed and said "We didn't have cell phones!" He couldn't believe it.
I loved Animorphs! I read pretty much all of them. I thought about including them last Wednesday in class but decided against it haha.
Jordan - I really like and totally agree with your sentiments about sci-fi being so available to us in different forms that we almost don't even notice it anymore. It's in ads and music videos and children's television - it's really everywhere. And that's a funny story about your little brother. I sometimes can't help but think that even when I was little the idea of an iPhone would have seemed like something that a sci-fi movie would be centered around.
Science fiction seems to have a way of filtering into our world all the time. We don't notice it any more whether it is in things like advertising and television or really in our hands like the iPhone. We have become a bit desensitized to all the many representations sci-fi-esque technology around us.
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