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I just recently caught the classic cold war film Ice Station Zebra on TV. Although it would be labeled "cold war drama" or "spy thriller" in most catalogs, the story revolves around a super-sophisticated camera and highly detailed film, capable of reading "the text on a pack of cigarettes from 300 miles up" (quoted from the film). If that doesn't qualify as science fiction, even today, I don't know what does.
The label "science fiction" is frustrating because it actually says so little about the content... imagine defining Hamlet, A Tale of Two Cities and The Three Musketeers as "historic fiction." Would you therefore imagine each story is essentially like the others?
Unfortunately, the SF label has become so commonplace, and as authors and readers are forced to use it, stories get unwittingly pigeonholed by it. But it says so little about the content. All of my books, save one, are SF... but are they all the same kind of story? Hardly.
I'd much rather define books as adventure, drama, romance, comedy, mystery, etc... then add a tag like "science," "futuristic," "technological," etc, to it... so Jurassic Park becomes "science adventure," for instance, Star Trek becomes "futuristic adventure," and Solaris becomes "science drama."
Tags like that would be much more useful and descriptive than the catch-all "science fiction."
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