There's a certain amount of scorn out there for science fiction. A few years ago, I gave my mother The Sparrow. A while later, we were discussing it, and suggested to my sister that she read it. She said she was not interested in science fiction, and my mother replied, "It's not really science fiction -- you'll like it!"

Whatever The Sparrow is, it is certainly science fiction. The bulk of the story takes place on an alien world, or in the space craft traveling to it. What my mother meant, however, was that it was good, that it was well-written literature, though-provoking and challenging. Those, in her mind and my sister's, are not attributes of science fiction; The Sparrow, therefore, is literature, not genre fiction.

Their viewpoint is hardly unique. In fact, among readers of a certain sophistication, similar opinions seem to be very common. And it is hard to claim that they are very wrong -- after all, most science fiction is escapist, poorly written, and features lurid covers that give a poor impression to non-fans.

Plus, genres are defined by more than their surface content. Orwell's masterpiece, 1984, could be science fiction in the same way that Jane Austen's works are romance novels. Merely being centrally concerned with love and relationship does not a romance novel make; perhaps being set on another world or in the future is not enough to condemn a novel to the ghetto of science fiction.

On a similar note, many works in literature feature the supernatural, yet never would be defined as fantasy: Beloved, by Toni Morrison, features the ghost of a dead baby; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez both feature magic and other fantastic elements. Márquez once said, "My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic." Yet no science fiction fan would claim that these were genre novels.

So what is it that makes a science fiction novel? There have been many attempts to define it; this may be my favorite, from Damon Knight:

What we get from science fiction---what keeps us reading it, in spite of our doubts and occasional disgust---is not different from the thing that makes mainstream stories rewarding, but only expressed differently. We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.

All great literature is concerned with human nature, with human relationships, and with the mysteries that permeate human beings and the world around us. Science fiction is no different; it only uses different tools.

Here is a partial list of works that are great fiction as well as being great science fiction. These are the sorts of things you might give a skeptic of the quality of science fiction, or an English teacher. I quite enjoyed all of these as well.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. This is a fascinating study of a world without gender differences. Le Guin explores themes of love and sexuality and identity in a nuanced, insightful way that may not have been possible without being science fiction.

Declare, by Tim Powers. If reading The Left Hand of Darkness is like reading Great American Literature, reading Declare is like reading John Le Carré.

The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick. This is like 1984, or Brave New World, except set in an alternate history instead of a dystopian future. Somehow, Philip Roth's uninspired The Plot Against America was met with high praise despite a clumsy final act and a certain lack of depth in the first acts -- The Man in the High Castle, in contrast, hits all of the right notes, and is the far superior World War II-era alternate history in America, despite being classified as science fiction where The Plot Against America was not.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Dystopia seems to be the only genre in which science fiction receives universal acclaim. That must say something about the literary establishment.

Drat, I am out of time. Here's a list upon which I may expand in the future: Dune, Neuromancer, the Foundation novels, Stranger in a Strange Land, Cryptonomicon, Slaughterhouse 5, A Wrinkle in Time, The Time Traveler's Wife.

It should be clear from the forgoing that science fiction, whatever it may be, is certainly not defined by lack of quality or by shallowness. Anyone who proclaims, "I don't like science fiction" either does not like reading, or does not know how to find the gems among the admittedly large amount of dross.