"Science fiction" is the box in which her work is usually placed, but it's an awkward box: it bulges with the discards from elsewhere. Into it have been crammed all those stories that don't for comfortably into the family room of the socially realistic novel or the more formal parlour of historical fiction, or other compartmentalized (sic) genres: westerns, gothics, horrors, gothic romances, and the novels of war, crime and spies. Its subdivisions include science fiction proper (gizmo-riddled and theory-based space travel, time travel, or cybertravel to other worlds, with aliens frequent); science-fiction fantasy (dragons are common, the gizmos are less plausible and may include wands); and speculative fiction (human society and its possible future form, which are either much better than what we have now or much worse). However the membranes separating these subdivisions are permeable, and osmotic flow from the one to another is the norm.
M. Atwood, In other worlds: SF and the human imagination (2011), 115
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