While science fiction is a very broad genre encompassing hundreds of years of literature, movies, and television, my approximate definition would be: a story involving some aspect of science or technology (often taken to an imaginative extreme) and how human nature interacts with it. Some common themes include space travel, artificial intelligence, time travel, aliens, and extrapolating the consequences of contemporary scientific discoveries. While these ideas are all common, they are by no means necessary to classify a work as science fiction.
What makes science fiction especially interesting is its ability to examine human nature through the most bizarre, extraordinary ideas. Traditional fiction is usually set in our world with our rules, but science fiction asks, what if things were different? What if we could fly to other galaxies in a matter of days? What if we could travel backward or forward in time, and influence events? What if we could engineer ourselves to be super-intelligent, or super-strong? What would we do with that technology? Science fiction is able to use these kinds of ideas to tell stories about who we are, and who we could be under different circumstances.
It's nearly impossible to categorize a book, movie, or television show as belonging to only one genre, but for many people science fiction tends to set itself apart from other genres as being a fascinating mix of reality and fantasy. It is used as both a way to examine our world through satire and criticism, and to escape it through getting lost in an enthralling story.
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