In an essay at the back of the new edition of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon shares some of the motivations his then twenty-two-year-old self had in approaching the book. He writes of how even literature with no fantastic elements should offer the same sense of wonder delivered by science fiction:

I wanted to tell stories, the kind with set pieces, and long descriptive passages, and “round” characters, and beginnings and middles and ends. And I wanted to instill—or rather I didn’t want to lose—that quality, inherent in the best science fiction, which was sometimes called “the sense of wonder.” If my subject matter couldn’t do it—if I wasn’t writing about people who sailed through neutron stars or harnessed suns together—then it was going to fall to my sentences themselves to open up the heads of my readers and decant into them enough crackling plasma to light up their eye sockets for a week. But I didn’t want to write science fiction, or a version of science fiction, some kind of pieced-and-tattooed, doctorate-holding, ironical stepchild of science fiction. I wanted to write something with reach. Welty and Faulkner started and ended in small towns in Mississippi but somehow managed to plant flags at the end of time and in the minds of readers around the world. A good science fiction novel appeared to have an infinite reach—it could take you to the place where the universe bent back on itself—but somehow, in the end, it ended up being the shared passion of just you and that guy at the Record Graveyard on Forbes Avenue who was really into Hawkwind. I wasn’t considering any actual, numerical readership here—I wasn’t so bold. Rather I was thinking about the set of axioms that speculative fiction assumed, and how it was a set that seemed to narrow and refine and program its audience, like a protein that coded for a certain suite of traits. Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world. (Twenty-two, I was twenty-two!)

I was thinking pretty much the same thing recently while exchanging e-mails with someone about Kurt Vonnegut’s short-story collection Welcome to the Monkey House. I had forgotten how many of the stories in the book were not science fiction, and I think this was because even those stories without SF elements—such as “Who Am I This Time?,” about a man who shed his shyness when acting in community theater—always seemed to have that SF flavor to me.

And to take it a step further, not only is there much purportedly mainstream fiction which contains enough sense of wonder to have that SF feel, there’s also inversely plenty of science fiction so devoid of sense of wonder as to appear mainstream. (Though I do wish that there was a better descriptive term, as I’ve never cared for mainstream, mimetic, or mundane.)

Perhaps when I have the time someday, I’ll plot a graph, with the X-axis representing whether a work announces itself as science-fictional or not, and the Y-axis representing what each actually feels like.