As a long time SF fan, there are many that call Star Wars science fantasy, space opera or sciffy. It is great adventure but the science is very sloppy.

Many books blend lines between fantasy and science fiction. Just have good characters and a good story line and the readers will follow you.

To be considered “science fiction,” a book or story would need to have the setting, background and/or some of the elements be based on science or technology. It doesn’t matter at all whether it’s set in the past or future.

Another name for it is “speculative fiction” to emphasize that the science or technology is something we don’t have yet. The author is speculating how things might be if we did have the technology. So anything with space travel is science fiction or speculative fiction, because we really can’t do much more than get to the moon and back or orbit Earth in a stellite right now. And of course, people wrote of traveling to the moon before we could do it.

“Hard science fiction” inlcudes more of the scientific details. A space travel story might not bother saying much more than that they use a spaceship and go to an Earth-like planet. In a hard SF story, there would be more about how the spaceship works or how warp speed works, or what makes another planet able to support life.

Fantasy elements often do show up in SF books, which is why the genre is often referred to as “science fiction - fantasy.” If you think about it, some of what we call “magic” might be forces we just don’t know about yet. Fantasy creatures such as centaurs might really exist on other planets.

You can go ahead and call your creation :science fiction” if you feel that’s what it is. If it’s set in space, it will likely be labeled SF anyway.

a story is only considered Sci Fi if it is heavy into explaining the science itself. Just because it mentions computers, doesn’t make it sci fi. You have to explain how the machines actually work. Ever see the movie Event Horizon? Most people consider it sci fi when it is really horror. It was set on a spaceship, and there was a little talk of technology, but it was more like “we figured out how to bend space and poke holes in it” not actually explaining how they did it. Horror. Anne Mcaffreys stuff? Fantasy.

Robotics is not the one and only definition of all science fiction. There are subgenres of sci-fi and only one of them requires robotics as a central theme.

I don’t see how time period really matters (there are several sci-fi books and movies set in the past, and some fantasy books are set in the future). The speculatative “what if” still applies.

How is it that space ships aren’t comparable to other sci-fi technology? And what about the light sabers? It’s more than what we have now.

Just because many sci-fi stories mix fantasy elements like special powers (which in Star Wars had a scientific explanation I believe) and prophetic writings doesn’t stop it from being sci-fi. Cross-over genre maybe, but what is magic to one group of people can be simple technology to others (imagine what cavemen would have thought about a BIC lighter).

The different levels of technology of various worlds doesn’t mean it isn’t sci-fi either. There are areas of this world that exist with different levels of available technology, and some subcultures that actively reject it. We even work at preserving the natural state of some areas. Why couldn’t an advanced empire do the same?

I believe that a science fiction story is a writing within a backdrop of technology and is a work of fiction. Not certain what other requirements are needed.