Science Fiction, like most things worth talking about, is hard to define. It typically takes place in the future, but doesn't have to (Star Wars). It typically involves advance technology, but doesn't have to (post-apocalyptic). It frequently involves things that could exist somehow in the future or some alternate world, but sometimes involves fantasy elements. There doesn't seem to be a consistent set of properties.
I saw a description once of science fiction that I liked. The writer was saying that "normal" fiction typically dealt with a certain set of unusual circumstances. Science fiction, on the other hand, would accept that unusual things (from our point of view) had already happened, and here is the world and its affairs afterwards. But even this is not entirely satisfactory, as sometimes science fiction does indeed deal with how unusual circumstances come about in the first place.
So I lack a complete definition. This brings me back to my post's title. The nature of science fiction is a multiverse. No single definition can suffice; the only proper description is an infinite number of parallel definitions.
I agree that no single definition is adequate. I previously took a course in which we read many works generally regarded as "novellas", but in the end we could not produce a satisfactory way of determining whether a work was a novella, short story, or novel.
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