Einstein said: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science."
That is one point where science and fiction would meet - at something mysterious.
The problem with SciFi is that it's so far from science. I often feel SciFi should be phrased as fictitious science (FiSci) or magic fiction (MagFi).
We love to indulge in a magical and fictitious world and call it SciFi for our ignorance in science allows us to do so.
Is Harry Potter SciFi? Critiques do not think so. How come Heroes is termed SciFi and not MagFi when there is so much magic in Heroes?
Heroes is a good story. I love(d) it. The plots are good, the characters are well developed and all that. But it breaks conservation laws - momentum and energy, defies length contraction, defies relativistic mass, defies compressive flow fluid mechanics and I can go on about the numerous theories of physics it spits on.
And this is apart from the magic about how gene alteration can make a person fly without wings. Levitation? Bending space-time? Time travel is not about bending space-time but levitation is. So they writers got their physics wrong. I can go on about how fictitious and magical the science in Heroes is.
Da Vinci Code. Let's not go to that 'history lesson'. I have friends citing the Da Vinci Code as a history resource. I suppose the author managed to convince the poor ignorant soul in to believing that what he is presenting in his work of fiction is actually factual! It took a few history critiques to debunk the Da Vinci conspiracies.
Science as we know it has managed to explain most phenomena in a logical sense. We call these theories. So these theories would tell us how things work in our universe. A starting point to a good SciFi is by changing these fundamental theories. Because all other dependent theories will follow it and that would allow a nice story to be written.
Take Star Wars for example. It's a good SciFi series. Midichlorians govern the Force. The Force can be felt by anyone because they would have Midichlorians in them.
My point is that, ignorance allows us to think magic is science and since science is factual, the magic in fiction is factual.
I remember when I was in school, in year 8, we had a poem to study for Sinhala. The author talks about a tree god called 'aiyyanayaka (අයියනායක)'. Village folk worship the tree god giving it offerings, breaking a branch in respect, etc. He talks about how us city dwellers would call that blissful ignorance when it offers solace to the village folk.
As a reader, would you tolerate bad grammar? If I am to say me is here, you would ask me to go back to school and learn some grammar. From the days of IRC and "/me" was a commonly used chat command. It allowed a user to express his/her status like for example "away from keyboard". The command presented whatever the user typed after the /me command in third person. For example if I typed "/me is AWFK", the IRC program would present it as "shehal is AWFK". But later it users stared expressing themselves using the /me command. For example "/me is hungry" was read as "shehal is hungry". So "/me is" became a form of expression among geeks because they like to express themselves in lines of code or something cool like that.
So if /me is to think that /me is a third person singular pronoun just like how the Heroes writer found that it was okay to allow Hiro to bend space-time and allow him to go back in time as opposed to levitate, would you allow it? You might even find it offensive and ridicule the writer for spitting on grammar like that.
But would you find it offensive if the writer used bad science? Why not? Is it not the same thing as using bad grammar? Just as much as grammar is used to express or describe an event, science is used to describe the phenomenon. Bad science is like bad grammar in the sense it distorts the phenomenon.