I don’t have any significant experience with the genre of science fiction other that enjoying the entertainment that the various media of the genre provides and reveling in the often-revolutionary ideas that are often inherently built in.
To me, the definition of science fiction comprises a very wide array of ideas, people, technology and materials outside the realm of known possibility or probability. As a whole science fiction is a very fluid and dynamic arena that is adaptive to the author or reader’s idea of the imaginary, impossible or simply out of reach. I would argue however that whatever the theme of the work, be it extraterrestrial life, time travel, alternative histories etc., that the content is intrinsically human in nature. It seems that whatever the subject matter, one could trace the content of the work back to the author’s struggle with his or her humanity and perception and possibilities of his or her reality.
Some works that I consider to be science fiction include George Orwell’s 1984, Michael Crichton’s Sphere, and Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), which is a very recent film that is one of my personal favorites. Here is a link to one of the trailers.
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Following up on our class discussion, Orwell's novel is a good example of one still relevant, and still sf, even 25 years past the year in which it's set. The characters in the novel, after all, aren't quite sure of the year, which is one reason Orwell always spelled out the title, Nineteen Eighty-Four, to emphasize that it's a concept rather than a date.
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