Precedents for science fiction are argued to exist as far back as antiquity, but the modern genre primarily arose in the 19th and early 20th centuries when popular writers began looking to technological progress and speculation.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written in 1818, is often credited as the first true science fiction
novel.
Jules Verne and
H.G. Wells are pivotal figures in the genre's development. In the 20th century, expanded with the introduction of
space operas,
dystopian literature,
pulp magazines, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
Science fiction has been called the "literature of
ideas", and continues to evolve, incorporating diverse voices and themes, influencing not just literature but film, TV, and culture at large. Besides providing
entertainment it can also criticize present-day society and explore alternatives, and inspiration a "
sense of wonder".
According to
Isaac Asimov, "Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in
science and
technology."[1]
Robert A. Heinlein wrote that "A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the
scientific method."[2]
American science fiction author and editor
Lester del Rey wrote, "Even the devoted aficionado or fan—has a hard time trying to explain what science fiction is," and the lack of a "full satisfactory definition" is because "there are no easily delineated limits to science fiction."[3]
Another definition comes from The Literature Book by
DK and is, "scenarios that are at the time of writing technologically impossible, extrapolating from present-day science...[,]...or that deal with some form of speculative science-based conceit, such as a society (on Earth or another planet) that has developed in wholly different ways from our own."[4]
There is a tendency among science fiction enthusiasts as their own arbiter in deciding what exactly constitutes science fiction.[5] David Seed says it may be more useful to talk about science fiction as the intersection of other more concrete subgenres.[6]Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying "Science fiction is what we point to when we say it."[7]
Forrest J Ackerman has been credited with first using the term "sci-fi" (analogous to the then-trendy "
hi-fi") in about 1954.[8] The first known use in print was a description of Donovan's Brain by movie critic Jesse Zunser in January 1954.[9] As science fiction entered
popular culture, writers and fans active in the field came to associate the term with low-budget, low-tech "
B-movies" and with low-quality
pulp science fiction.[10][11][12] By the 1970s, critics within the field, such as
Damon Knight and
Terry Carr, were using "sci fi" to distinguish hack-work from serious science fiction.[13]
Peter Nicholls writes that "SF" (or "sf") is "the preferred abbreviation within the community of sf writers and readers."[14]
Robert Heinlein found even "science fiction" insufficient for certain types of works in this genre, and suggested the term
speculative fiction to be used instead for those that are more "serious" or "thoughtful".[15]
Isaac Asimov and
Carl Sagan considered Somnium the first science fiction story; it depicts a journey to the
Moon and how the
Earth's motion is seen from there.[28][29] Kepler has been called the "father of science fiction".[30][31]
By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision... Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive. They supply knowledge... in a very palatable form... New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow... Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written... Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well.[51][52][53]
Science fiction and
television have consistently been in a close relationship. Television or television-like
technologies frequently appeared in science fiction long before television itself became widely available in the late 1940s and early 1950s.[137]
In 1963, the time travel-themed Doctor Who premiered on BBC Television.[145] The original series ran until 1989 and was revived in 2005.[146] It has been extremely
popular worldwide and has greatly influenced later TV science fiction.[147][148][149]
The space-Western series Firefly premiered in 2002 on Fox. It is set in the year 2517, after the arrival of humans in a new star system, and follows the adventures of the renegade crew of Serenity, a "Firefly-class" spaceship.[176]Orphan Black began its five-season run in 2013, about a woman who assumes the identity of one of her several genetically identical human clones. In late 2015
SyFy premiered The Expanse to great critical acclaim, an American TV series about humanity's colonization of the Solar System. Its later seasons would then be aired through
Amazon Prime Video.
Science fiction
has predicted several existing inventions, such as the
atomic bomb,[186]robots,[187] and
borazon.[188] In the 2020 series Away astronauts use a real-life Mars rover called InSight to listen intently for a landing on
Mars. Two years later in 2022 scientists used InSight to listen for the landing of a real spacecraft.[189] The potential for science fiction as a
genre is not just limited to being a literary sandbox for exploring otherworldly narratives but can act as a vehicle to analyze and recognize a society's past, present, and potential future
social relationships with
the other. More specifically, science fiction offers a medium and representation of
Alterity and differences in
social identity.[190]
Brian Aldiss described science fiction as "cultural wallpaper".[191] This widespread influence can be found in trends for writers to employ science fiction as a tool for advocacy and generating cultural insights, as well as for educators when teaching across a range of academic disciplines not limited to the natural sciences.[192] Scholar and science fiction critic
George Edgar Slusser said that science fiction "is the one real international
literary form we have today, and as such has branched out to
visual media,
interactive media and on to whatever new media the world will invent in the 21st century. Crossover issues between the
sciences and the
humanities are crucial for the
century to come."[193]
Robots,
artificial humans, human
clones, intelligent
computers, and their possible conflicts with human society have all been major themes of science fiction since, at least, the publication of Shelly's Frankenstein. Some critics have seen this as reflecting authors' concerns over the
social alienation seen in modern society.[200]
Feminist science fiction poses questions about social issues such as how society constructs
gender roles, the role
reproduction plays in defining
gender, and the inequitable political or personal power of one gender over others. Some works have illustrated these themes using
utopias to explore a society in which gender differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, or
dystopias to explore worlds in which
gender inequalities are intensified, thus asserting a need for feminist work to continue.[201][202]
One of the great benefits of science fiction is that it can convey bits and pieces, hints, and phrases, of knowledge unknown or inaccessible to the reader . . . works you ponder over as the water is running out of the bathtub or as you walk through the woods in an early winter snowfall.
In 1967, Isaac Asimov commented on the changes then occurring in the science fiction community:[212]
And because today's real life so resembles day-before-yesterday's fantasy, the old-time fans are restless. Deep within, whether they admit it or not, is a feeling of disappointment and even outrage that the outer world has invaded their private domain. They feel the loss of a 'sense of wonder' because what was once truly confined to 'wonder' has now become prosaic and mundane.
Max Gladstone defined "hard" science fiction as stories "where the
math works", but pointed out that this ends up with stories that often seem "weirdly dated", as scientific
paradigms shift over time.[222]Michael Swanwick dismissed the traditional definition of "hard" SF altogether, instead saying that it was defined by characters striving to solve problems "in the right way–with
determination, a touch of
stoicism, and the
consciousness that the
universe is not on his or her side."[221]
In her 1976 essay "Science Fiction and Mrs Brown",
Ursula K. Le Guin was asked: "Can a science fiction writer write a novel?" She answered: "I believe that all novels ... deal with
character... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise, they would not be novelists, but poets, historians, or pamphleteers."[240]
Orson Scott Card, best known for his 1985 science fiction novel Ender's Game, has postulated that in science fiction the message and intellectual significance of the work are contained within the story itself and, therefore, does not orequire accepted literary devices and techniques he instead characterized as
gimmicks or literary games.[241][242]
Jonathan Lethem, in a 1998
essay in the Village Voice entitled "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction", suggested that the point in 1973 when
Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for the
Nebula Award and was passed over in favor of Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, stands as "a hidden tombstone marking the death of the hope that SF was about to merge with the mainstream."[243] In the same year science fiction author and physicist
Gregory Benford wrote: "SF is perhaps the defining genre of the twentieth century, although its conquering armies are still camped outside the
Rome of the literary citadels."[244]
Science fiction is being written, and has been written, by
diverse authors from around the world. According to 2013 statistics by the science fiction publisher
Tor Books, men outnumber women by 78% to 22% among submissions to the publisher.[245]A controversy about voting slates in the 2015
Hugo Awards highlighted tensions in the science fiction community between a trend of increasingly diverse works and authors being honored by awards, and reaction by groups of authors and fans who preferred what they considered more "traditional" science fiction.[246]
The earliest organized online
fandom was the SF Lovers Community, originally a
mailing list in the late 1970s with a text
archive file that was updated regularly.[264] In the 1980s,
Usenet groups greatly expanded the circle of fans
online.[265] In the 1990s, the development of the
World-Wide Web exploded the
community of online fandom by orders of magnitude, with thousands and then millions of
websites devoted to science fiction and related
genres for all media.[266]
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^El anacronópete, English translation (2014), www.storypilot.com, Michael Main, accessed 13 April 2016
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^SciFi Film History – Metropolis (1927)Archived 10 October 2017 at the
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^"Metropolis". Turner Classic Movies.
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^Moran, Caitlin (30 June 2007).
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^"Special Collectors' Issue: 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time". TV Guide (28 June – 4 July). 1997.
^British Science Fiction Television: A Hitchhiker's Guide, John R. Cook, Peter Wright, I.B.Tauris, 6 January 2006, page 9
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^Kilgore, De Witt Douglas (March 2010). "Difference Engine: Aliens, Robots, and Other Racial Matters in the History of Science Fiction". Science Fiction Studies. 37 (1): 16–22.
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^Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters: Science and Soul in Science Fiction Films, Per Schelde, NYU Press, 1994, pages 1–10
^Elyce Rae Helford, in Westfahl, Gary. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Greenwood Press, 2005: 289–290.
^Hauskeller, Michael; Carbonell, Curtis D.; Philbeck, Thomas D. (13 January 2016). The Palgrave handbook of posthumanism in film and television. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
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^Barlowe, Wayne Douglas (1987). Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials. Workman Publishing Company.
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^Baxter, John (1997). "Kubrick Beyond the Infinite". Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. Basic Books. pp. 199–230.
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^Gary K. Wolfe and Carol T. Williams, "The Majesty of Kindness: The Dialectic of Cordwainer Smith", Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, Volume 3, Thomas D. Clareson editor, Popular Press, 1983, pages 53–72.
^Le Guin, Ursula K. (1976) "Science Fiction and Mrs Brown", in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, Perennial HarperCollins, Revised edition 1993; in Science Fiction at Large (ed. Peter Nicholls), Gollancz, London, 1976; in Explorations of the Marvellous (ed. Peter Nicholls), Fontana, London, 1978; in Speculations on Speculation. Theories of Science Fiction (eds.
James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria), The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Maryland, 2005.
^Lethem, Jonathan (1998), "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction", Village Voice, June. Also reprinted in a slightly expanded version under the title "Why Can't We All Live Together?: A Vision of Genre Paradise Lost" in the New York Review of Science Fiction, September 1998, Number 121, Vol 11, No. 1.
^Benford, Gregory (1998) "Meaning-Stuffed Dreams:Thomas Disch and the future of SF", New York Review of Science Fiction, September, Number 121, Vol. 11, No. 1
^Peter Fitting (2010), "Utopia, dystopia, and science fiction", in Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, Cambridge University Press, pp. 138–139
^Hartwell, David G. (1996). Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction. Tor Books. pp. 109–131.
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General and cited sources
Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, 1973.
Raja, Masood Ashraf, Jason W. Ellis and Swaralipi Nandi. eds., The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction. McFarland 2011.
ISBN978-0-7864-6141-7.
Reginald, Robert. Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, 1975–1991. Detroit, MI/Washington, D.C./London: Gale Research, 1992.
ISBN0-8103-1825-3.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: on the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven : Yale University Press, 1979.
Weldes, Jutta, ed. To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
ISBN0-312-29557-X.
Wolfe, Gary K. Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.
ISBN0-313-22981-3.