: Re: Is every story set in the future "science fiction"? Science Fiction is a "big tent" genre, and we all know it when we see it. Even if we argue about the specific tropes – and what might

@Phylliss352

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As other answers have said, it depends on the story.

Another frequently-used genre is Future History. There are many examples of this, varying from the dry-as-dust textbook to complete classic. As a category, it can be hard to distinguish what's Future History and what's simply a novel set in the future. Generally though, a series of novels or short stories/novellas following a future society over a generation or more can be considered to be Future History, in addition to any other category they may fall into.

Future History does require the time period to be in the future relative to ourselves, or perhaps for our own planet to be unrelated to the story so that the time period relative to ourselves is immaterial. Where the time period is in the past and changes facts we know about the past, or where the time period may be in the present or future but with past events changed, we are instead dealing with Alternate History.

As time progresses, fiction set in the future will inevitably be overtaken by elapsed time. 1984, 2001 and 2010 have all come and gone. This does not generally change the categories for fiction set in the future at the time of writing - instead it is viewed as a window onto social attitudes at the time of writing, by what changes the author expects to occur over that time period.

If the author continues writing as elapsed time overtakes him, the result may be an Alternate History with a recognisable divergent point. Alternatively (as with Tom Clancy) the Alternate History may end up being some combination of real-world events and previous events in the Alternate History timeline. (In general it doesn't pay to try to look too closely at how the two tie up in that case, because you can only fit so many Presidential elections and other events into that timespan.)

Alternate History can be past, present or future, of course, which means this is not restricted to science fiction. There is an entire sub-genre of Alternate History considering "what if the Nazis won WWWII?", with novels set in varying eras. Other popular Alternate Histories from the past consider "what if the Roman Empire never fell?" or "what if the South won the American Civil War?" Tom Clancy is an example of Alternate History in the present. Near-future Alternate History might include Games Workshop's Dark Future setting, or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Neal Charles Stross's later series of Merchant Princes novels (starting with Empire Games) is unusual in being a near-past Alternate History, with a divergence point in the mid-2000s where a nuclear attack from a parallel universe puts the USA onto a total-war footing; the resulting novels are set slightly in our past, but the technology level is significantly different from the present day.

It is also possible for writers to go the other way, which generally comes as a plot twist. For one example of this, Battlestar Galactica appears to be Future History until the final season, but turns out to be Alternate History instead.

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