I think it was Samuel R. Delany who said that science fiction is better understood as way of reading than as a property of the texts themselves. For example, consider the sentence: "Her world exploded". It could simply refer to a woman undergoing psychological trauma, or... to an actual planet exploding (I suppose the woman in question would suffer psychological trauma in that case too). See here.
It also happens with titles. In fact, some mainstream book titles would be perfect for science fiction novels! I have no idea what A Thousand Splendid Suns is really about, but to me it conjures visions of an epic voyage of space exploration.
In Search of Lost Time? What better title for a time-travel story?
One Hundred Years of Solitude is obviously the tale of posthuman astronaut marooned on an unhabited planet.
And, of course, there's Invisible Man:
Mr. Ellison said, ''Once the book was done, it was suggested that the title would be confused with H.G. Wells's old novel, 'The Invisible Man,' but I fought to keep my title because that's what the book was about.'' Mr. Erskine recalled, ''His novel doesn't have the article in its title, although the mistake keeps cropping up, and I've been telling people to drop the word 'the' ever since the book came out.''
(Ralph Ellison, quoted in this article)
On the other hand, Nabokov's Pale Fire sounds like part 1 of 5 of a trashy fantasy series. Ditto for Heart of Darkness and The Magic Mountain.
Talking about movies, it's simply criminal that Last Life in the Universe is not a piece of far-future sf. And Till Human Voices Wake Us (beautiful title!) should be about a couple that enters suspended animation shortly after a cataclysmic event, and awakes to a drastically changed future.
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