Gravity: It's Science and it's Fiction... #gravity #gravity movie

Gravity, the movie, that is.  So it's science, because it has science stuff in it, like space and satellites and such.  And it's fiction, because, well, because it's a story of things that didn't really happen.  So it's science and it's fiction, but it's not Science Fiction.

In The Handbook, I talk about my own personal rule-of-thumb for Science Fiction.

I consider Science Fiction to be fiction that has some sort of fantastic element that can be explained as falling under the laws of nature, natural laws that may or may not be understood by us at this point in our technological progress.  This would, then, include such stories as space travel and contact with aliens, stories of robots and androids, time-travel by way of scientific technology, and so on.

The movie Gravity is about space travel, in the Earth's orbit, but it has no fantastic element.  It is adventure and drama that could happen today, given our current technological progress.  There is nothing unknown or outside of our current understanding of the natural world in this movie.

That being said, did the fact that the movie is not actually "Science Fiction" detract from my enjoyment of it? 

Not one whit!  It's still on the big screen at a second-run theater here in Reno, and my younger daughter (who had seen the film previously in a first-run theater in 3D) said it was good enough that she would be willing to see it again, so we made it a family outing.  I went into it pretty much blind- almost all I knew about it was that it had Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in it, and that it was a tear-jerker.

I loved it.  I recommend it.  And as my daughter says, if it doesn't make you cry, even just a little bit, well, we just have to doubt that you have a soul.

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