Mode is actually pretty standard among critics these days. See the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. And it gets us a lot further for all the reasons you then list in the post.


SF is a mode which steals the plots of other genres and gives them an attitudinal twist.

Both I and Paul Kincaid are convinced that sf and fantasy should be understood as *attitudes* and this is why you can have sf with no actual speculation, and fantasy with no magic. (And also why you can have "futuristic thrillers" that leave sf readers dissatisfied, and slipstream novels that we "know" aren't fantasy.)