science fiction essay definition

What Is Science Fiction? The Elements That Define Sci-Fi

• What Is Science Fiction?
• Science Fiction Vs. Fantasy

From fire to the internet, science and technology have shaped and changed the world. But we can imagine so much more. Time travel! Teleportation! Interstellar spaceships! These (at least for the time being) are the realm of science fiction.

In this article, we’ll discuss what elements contribute to a story being categorized as sci-fi and provide examples on page and on screen, including “hard sci-fi” classics as well as some books and movies that you may not have realized fall into the genre.

What is science fiction?

Science fiction , popularly shortened as sci-fi , is a genre of fiction that creatively depicts real or imaginary science and technology as part of its plot, setting, or theme.

The fiction part of science fiction means, of course, that it’s a fictional story—not a real-life account.

The word science refers to the fact that the story in some way involves science or technology that—no matter how advanced—is depicted as being based on real scientific principles, as opposed to involving magic or the supernatural. (More on this distinction in the next section: Sci-Fi vs. Fantasy .)

Science fiction isn’t always ultrafuturistic. Sometimes, it depicts technology just beyond or slightly different than our own.

The genre encompasses a huge range of stories with many different themes and topics. Regardless of the specific technologies or scientific advances being depicted, sci-fi often speculates about their effects on or consequences for the reality of the world being described. In other words, sci-fi stories often ponder how science and technology can go wrong for individual people or society (often as a metaphor for how they can go or have gone wrong in our own reality) .

These high stakes mean that science fiction stories are often thrilling or even horrifying—sci-fi horror is a genre unto itself. Still, science fiction is not always scary, and most sci-fi stories also include elements from other genres, such as mystery, romance, comedy, and fantasy.

Learn about the similarities and differences between horror and terror.

Science Fiction vs. Fantasy

The genres of science fiction and fantasy are often considered to be part of an even larger genre known as speculative fiction , defined as “a broad literary genre encompassing any fiction with supernatural, fantastical, or futuristic elements.” Speculative fiction speculates about fictional worlds and characters completely different from our own or with elements outside of our reality. In other words, it’s fiction based on asking “What if…?”: What if we developed a technology that could allow us to travel to other galaxies? What if mythological figures were real?

The first example about intergalactic travel is an example of a sci-fi premise . The second example about mythological figures is an example of a fantasy premise.

The fantasy genre encompasses stories dealing with supernatural or unnatural events or characters, those that exist outside the realm of science and instead in the realm of magic and mythology.

Science fiction and fantasy are usually differentiated from each other based on plausibility and how they explain the workings of the universe they depict. In general, the wonders (or horrors) of a science fiction story are depicted as the result of plausible scientific advances. In contrast, the elements of fantasy often rely on supernatural or mystical explanations (if they are explained at all).

For example, both a science fiction and a fantasy story may have a character who is able to shoot lighting from their hands. If a character is able to do this because they have a genetic mutation or machinery in their hand, this would be classified as science fiction. If, on the other hand, the character is able to do this because of magic or because they are a god (which are outside the realm of science), this would be classified as a work of fantasy.

But stories aren’t always so easily distinguished. Remember, these genres are artificial ways of classifying stories. Many stories blur the lines between the two genres, or have elements of both, or transcend the idea of genre altogether.

As sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

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Examples of Science Fiction

Science fiction began as a literary genre. It has spawned written works in many forms, including countless novels, short stories, and works of flash fiction . But the genre is also extremely popular in other forms of media, including comic books, graphic novels, movies, shows, and video games.

In general, there are certain topics, themes, and plots that frequently appear in many science fiction stories. These include but are not limited to:

• space travel
• time travel
• artificial intelligence
• advanced computing
• virtual reality
• extraterrestrial life
• genetic experimentation
• transhumanism

However, not every sci-fi story is set in the far future or includes super-advanced technology. Some sci-fi works include more subtle elements, including in worlds that look much like our own.

How many words have been created or popularized by science fiction? Take a look at some of them here.

While it is a comparatively modern genre, science fiction still has a rich history that includes works by many popular authors. Here is an abbreviated timeline of just a few notable examples in the history of science fiction:

• 1817 : Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. A cautionary tale about an attempt to create life, Frankenstein is a classic of the Gothic horror genre and is often argued to be one of the first science fiction novels.
• 1870: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. Verne imagined a story about the potential that new technology had for exploring the largest unexplored part of the world—the ocean.
• 1890s: T he Time Machine (1895), War of the Worlds (1897), and other classic fiction stories by H.G. Wells.
• 1926: Amazing Sto ries . The first magazine dedicated to science fiction stories was founded by editor Hugo Gernsback, who is often credited with coining the term science fiction . The Hugo Awards, annual awards given to the best works of science fiction, are named for him.
• 1949: 1984 by George Orwell. Orwell’s dystopian novel explores how technology could be used nefariously to control society.
• 1950: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Asimov wrote a huge number of science fiction stories and other works, including those discussing his influential “Three Laws of Robotics.”
• 1965: Dune by Frank Herbert. One of the best-selling science fiction novels of all time, Dune was highly influential in the genre and inspired many other popular works, including the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises.
• 1968: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. The basis for the film Blade Runner , Dick’s story questions what really separates humans from machines.
• 1969: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin’s novel not only cemented her as a legendary science fiction writer, but helped to pave the way for other women authors in science fiction.
• 1979: Kindred by Octavia Butler. Butler’s many novels cross genre lines and are among the works that pioneered what came to be known as Afrofuturism .
• 1984: Neuromancer by William Gibson. Gibson’s novel was highly influential to the beginnings of the cyberpunk genre. Gibson coined the term cyberspace and explored the potential of the internet before most people were even aware of its existence.
• 1985: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Atwood’s influential novel (the basis of multiple adaptations) is among the many sci-fi stories based on a future dystopia .
• 2008: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Collins’s Hunger Games series of books is just one modern example of the continuing popularity of the genre.
• 2020 : This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. This critically-acclaimed and award-winning novella co-authored by El-Mohtar and Gladstone is an example of how sci-fi continues to tell human stories in fresh ways.

Science fiction is also a very popular film genre. Many science fiction films have been adapted from stories and books, including 2001: A Space Odyssey , Jurassic Park, Blade Runner , Dune, Starship Troopers , The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , and The Hunger Games. Many other popular science fiction films and franchises began as their own original stories, including Alien , Back to the Future , The Matrix , and the Terminator series.

The science fiction and fantasy genres often overlap and many popular science fiction stories also include fantasy elements. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a prominent example, with its popular movies, shows, and comics featuring scientifically plausible superheroes like Iron Man and Black Panther alongside fantastical ones like Thor and Scarlet Witch.

Subgenres that sometimes combine sci-fi and fantasy include steampunk and sci-fi horror.

As sci-fi continues to increase in popularity, innovative works are likely to continue to appear and take us—and the genre itself—to new places.

Wrap your head around 10 scientific terms related to the multiverse.

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science fiction

Definition of science fiction

Examples of science fiction in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'science fiction.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1898, in the meaning defined above

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“Science fiction.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science%20fiction. Accessed 21 Mar. 2024.

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Science Fiction

Definition of science fiction.

Science fiction is one of the fiction genres that demonstrates different scientific facts, discoveries, innovations, inventions, or other strange and scientific evolutions. The stories or novels falling under this category often show technological advances, environmental issues, and space or time travels. Science fiction is also called sci-fi in its abbreviated form. It often depends on science in moving its storyline further.

Elements of Science Fiction

Every sci-fi story has some elements that are an integral part of it or it may not be categorized as such. For example, it shows a plot involving scientific theory, concept, idea, or an invention. Its characters are of scientific minds, or they are involved in scientific issues in one or the other way.

Some Categories of Science Fiction

• Teleportation in Storyline
• Time Travel and Time Machine
• Mind Control and Mental Games
• Alien Stories and Interplanetary Warfare
• Parallel Universe

Examples of Science Fiction in Literature

Example # 1.

A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

The name of Lidenbrock was therefore mentioned with respect in colleges and learned societies. Humphry Davy, Humboldt, and Captains Franklin and Sabine never failed to call on him on their way through Hamburg. Becquerel, Ebelman, Brewster, Dumas, Milne-Edwards, Saint-Claire Deville1 consulted him about the most difficult problems in chemistry. This discipline was indebted to him for quite remarkable discoveries, and in 1853 A Treaty of Transcendental Crystallography by Professor Otto Lidenbrock had appeared in Leipzig, a large folio with illustrations which, however, did not cover its expenses.

Although this is a short passage from the popular novel of Jules Verne which is now a textbook across the globe, it shows the places, characters, and events showing the use of science in the storyline. For example, Humphry Davy, Humboldt, Captains Frankline, and Sabine are all involved in scientific experiments related to chemistry. The appearance of Professor Otto shows that this story is about something not discovered or done before.

Example # 2

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere , the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous.

This passage occurs in the famous novel of H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds . The very mention of Martian, V-shaped, and the Gorgon groups show the use of scientific method, inquiry, and discovery in the storyline.

Example # 3

brave new world by Aldous Huxley

Lenina got out of the bath, toweled herself dry, took hold of a long flexible tube plugged into the wall, presented the nozzle to her breast, as though she meant to commit suicide, pressed down the trigger. A blast of warmed air dusted her with the finest talcum powder. Eight different scents and eau-de-Cologne were laid on in little taps over the wash-basin. She turned on the third from the left, dabbed herself with chypre and, carrying her shoes and stockings in her hand, went out to see if one of the vibro-vacuum machines were free.

The activities done by Lenina in this passage shows several things or actions that involve something unusual but scientific. For example, the nozzles of her breasts and pressing the trigger show that there is something strange in it. This is part of science fiction. That is why brave new world has been termed a classic in science fiction.

Example # 4

1984 by George Orwell

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU , the caption beneath it ran.

This passage occurs in 1984 by George Orwell written around 70 years back. It tells the story of different worlds and different people having strong surveillance system. The last slogan “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” has proved true after the arrival of internet.

Functions of Science Fiction

Although science fiction seems boring, out of place, and out of context to some people, it, nevertheless, excites the imaginations of the readers and audiences alike. People like sci-fi fiction and movies alike. This shows that human imaginations are always fertile and want a change come what may . It is also that science fiction has proved a harbinger of scientific discoveries. Several things now seem usual in the world were once in the realm of mystery but the novelists and story writers presented them in their stories after which scientific minds worked on them and brought them to realities. Therefore, science fiction is not just a waste of time. They are rather a way to find new things to cope with the emerging realities.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Science › Introduction to Science Fiction

Introduction to Science Fiction

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 26, 2018 • ( 2 )

Literary and cultural historians describe science fiction (SF) as the premiere narrative form of modernity because authors working in this genre extrapolate from Enlightenment ideals and industrial practices to imagine how educated people using machines and other technologies might radically change the material world. This kind of future-oriented technoscientific speculation lends itself to social and political speculation as well. While authors working in other literary modes can represent the past and present from new perspectives, only those allied with speculative fiction show us how intervening into the material world can change human relations and generate new futures as well. Thus SF enables authors to dramatize widespread cultural hopes and fears about new technoscientific formations as they emerge at specific historical moments.

The history of SF is very much bound up with the history of modern technoscientific development and the proliferation of writing that accompanied it. By means of the first scientific journals, scholars associated with the scientific academies of seventeenth-century France and Great Britain disseminated new ideas about the quantifiable nature of the material world and the importance of human agents within that world. By the eighteenth century such ideas had become central to the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant and David Hume and the socio-political treatises of Adam Smith and Voltaire. These ideas inspired the public imagination as well. This was particularly apparent in books such as Charles Leadbetter’s Astronomy (1727), periodicals such as Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–46), and natural histories such as René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur’s Histoire Naturelle des Insects (1734–42). While books and periodicals introduced scientific ideas to the newly literate middle class, natural histories inspired readers to become amateur scientists themselves by applying close observation skills to the world around them.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also saw the publication of the first proto-science fiction stories. The authors of these stories were often science enthusiasts who engaged new scientific ideas in their fiction. For example, Voltaire’s passion for physics led to the creation of a fully functional laboratory at Château de Cirey and the 1752 publication of Micromégas, a fantastic voyage story in which human scientist-explorers learn about galactic physics from a Jovian space traveler whom they encounter at the North Pole. In 1818 British author Mary Shelley drew upon her reading in pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory and her experience with public demonstrations of galvanism to create Frankenstein , which follows the tragic adventures of an isolated young scientist who uses electricity in a misguided attempt to create a new race of beings that will worship him. Despite their apparent differences, Voltaire and Shelley ’s stories both insist that science can yield great rewards as long as it is practiced according to the established methods of the scientific community. They also mark the emergence of SF’s two oldest archetypes: the heroic scientistexplorer who shares knowledge with his intellectual brethren and the mad scientist who makes disastrous decisions that wreak havoc.

The next generation of speculative fiction writers turned their attention to what would become the central interest of SF: the creation of machines that could transform both the material and social worlds. This new interest emerged at the height of the Industrial Revolution, when steam-powered technologies enabled new modes of locomotion and new methods of production. These developments fostered the proliferation of new trade routes, factories, and urban spaces. They also fostered the rise of a new professional: the engineer. Engineering schools, including the National School of Bridges and Highways in France and Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in the U.S., first opened their doors at the turn of the nineteenth century; by the mid-nineteenth century graduates of these schools could join specialized organizations dedicated to civil, mechanical, and mining engineering. While engineering was an overwhelmingly masculine profession, in the late nineteenth century technical institutes began granting degrees to the female students who would go on to create the discipline of scientific home management, or domestic engineering.

New technologies and professions were central to the speculative stories that authors on both sides of the Atlantic published in the nineteenth century. These authors conveyed their ideas about the future of industrial society by updating older fantastic narrative traditions. The European leaders of this experiment were Jules Verne and H.G. Wells . Like Voltaire before him, Verne used the extraordinary voyage to spark a sense of wonder in readers regarding the marvels of the physical universe. However, he updated this story type in 1867’s From the Earth to the Moon , 1871’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and 1872’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by extrapolating from contemporary transportation technologies to show how humans (rather than aliens) might travel to exotic locales on the Earth and amongst the stars. In Great Britain, Wells used the future war story – a narrative form often employed by government officials to argue for increased spending on war technologies – to show how submarines, airplanes, and bombs might herald the end of war altogether. This is particularly evident in 1903’s “The Last Ironclads,” 1908’s The War in the Air , and 1914’s The World Set Free , where warring nation-states destroy themselves by underestimating new military technologies, thereby paving the way for the emergence of peaceful, scientifically managed global civilizations. In the stories of both Verne and Wells, the success of new technocultural endeavors depends on the action of a new technocultural hero: the creative engineer who works for the good of all people, rather than the benefit of any individual person, business, or nation.

The principles of creative engineering were even more central to the technological utopias of American authors Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman . Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward 2000–1887 depicts a future America reorganized along lines later associated with the Fordist factory, with all work parceled out amongst specially trained individuals. In contrast to the often overworked and underpaid factory workers of his own day, however, Bellamy imagined that the citizens of America 2000 who volunteered for menial labor would be rewarded with drastically reduced hours and that all workers would enjoy high pay, abundant goods, and early retirement at the age of 45. In a similar vein, the female citizens of Gilman’s 1915 Herland enjoy unprecedented living standards because their wide-scale application of the principles of domestic engineering transform their hostile tropical land into a fertile paradise. They also extend the scientific management of the home to the scientific management of people, combining eugenics with education to create perfectly adjusted children. Thus Bellamy and Gilman built upon the utopian tradition extending back to Sir Thomas More by demonstrating how new and better societies might be created not just by the application of rational thought, but also by the application of rational industrial processes.

The first four decades of the twentieth century marked the consolidation of engineering as the premiere profession of the modern era. They also marked the height of excitement about engineering in the public imagination, especially as it was expressed in the philosophy of technocracy, a pseudo-populist movement that emerged in reaction to the Great Depression and that, at its height, boasted over half a million followers. Led by engineer Howard Scott and the professors of Columbia University’s Industrial Engineering department, technocrats advocated the creation of a scientifically educated and technically skilled populace whose best and brightest would naturally rise to the top. This technoscientific elite would apply scientific and engineering principles to political and economic problems, thereby mitigating the woes of the Great Depression and laying the foundation for a utopian, post-scarcity society.

This period also saw the consolidation of SF as a distinct genre complete with its own literary community, publishing outlets, and stylistic conventions. The birth of genre SF is associated with the founding of Amazing Stories in 1926 and Astounding Stories in 1930. These two magazines – printed on the cheap wood-pulp paper that would give this period of SF history its name – were the first dedicated solely to speculative fiction. While authors, editors, and fans worked collaboratively to establish SF, one man is generally recognized as the father of the genre: Luxembourg-American author, inventor, and technocrat Hugo Gernsback . As the first editor of Amazing Stories , Gernsback developed three rules to ensure that speculative fiction would get readers excited about science and technology: “good” SF would be organized around a prophetic vision of the technoscientific future; it would didactically explain how that future came to be; and it would do so in an entertaining way, with approximately 25 percent of each SF narrative dedicated to science and technology and 75 percent dedicated to adventure. These rules inform Gernsback’s own writing, most notably in 1911’s R alph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 . Like other utopias, Gernsback’s is comprised of dialog between a native of the utopia in question (here, the world-famous superscientist Ralph 124C) and a naïve visitor who stands in for the reader (Ralph’s love interest, Alice 212B). But Gernsback departed from the staid utopian tradition by framing his characters’ conversations about the marvels of New York City 2660 with action sequences featuring avalanches, invisible assailants, and battles in outer space.

The elements that Gernsback added to the utopian narrative tradition – depictions of scientists and engineers as action heroes, the celebration of fantastic gadgets, and planet-spanning adventures – became central to the pulpera space opera. The two authors who perfected this sub-genre were Edmond Hamilton and E.E. “Doc” Smith . In the linked Interstellar Patrol stories which ran from 1928 to 1930 and stand-alone tales such as 1934’s “Thundering Worlds,” Hamilton imagines far-off futures where humans create intergalactic technocracies while battling with rogue stars, invading aliens, and even the death of their own sun. Meanwhile, Smith’s 1928–63 Skylark and 1934–48 Lensman series follow the adventures of a human technoscientific elite who ventures into space only to learn that they are key to the outcome of billion-year-old battles between good and evil. Unlike Gernsback before them, neither Hamilton nor Smith spent much time explaining how their characters created their technocivilizations. However, what science they did include tended to be relatively accurate. Most importantly, the triumphant tone of much space opera neatly conveyed the technoscientific optimism central to early SF.

Technocratic ideals also permeated pulp-era thought-variant stories, which were driven by speculative ideas rather than gadgets. This is particularly apparent in Stanley G. Weinbaum ’s The Adaptive Ultimate ,  which updated the Frankenstein narrative for the modern scientific era. Weinbaum’s 1935 story follows the adventures of two scientists who develop a serum based on insect hormones that enables wounded organisms to heal themselves. After serious ethical debate, the overly enthusiastic scientists decide to skip standard testing protocols and inject the serum into a dying young woman. When she turns into an amoral creature bent on conquering the world, Weinbaum’s scientists recognize that they cannot simply, as Victor Frankenstein did, reject their creation. Instead, they take responsibility for their actions and contain the threat of the young woman, thereby transforming themselves from mad to heroic scientists. The principles of technocracy were also fundamental to John W. Campbell ’s 1939 Forgetfulness , which takes place on a far-future Earth where humans live in modest glass domes situated on the outskirts of ruined megacities. At the end of the story readers learn that these humans have not lost control of science and technology, but have actively chosen telepathic over technoscientific ways of being to avoid repeating their war-torn history. Thus Campbell’s protagonists apply engineering techniques to the problem of human history and gain control over evolution itself.

The middle decades of the twentieth century seemed to epitomize the technocratic ideals of the pulp-era SF community. The new connections forged with industry and government during World War II led to a period of record growth for American science in the Cold War era. Much of this growth occurred in the two areas of research seen as key to national defense: atomic energy and space exploration. The expansion of defense spending, combined with the consumer demands of a newly affluent public, spurred the rapid development of American technology as well, especially as it pertained to the creation of automated machines designed to run complex industrial operations. Indeed, while atomic energy and space exploration research promised to transform the American future, automation seemed poised to transform America in the present as factory workers began working with robots and computer experts swelled the ranks of the technoscientific elite. The technocratic transformation of labor extended to women’s work as well. During World War II women were encouraged to express their patriotism by working in laboratories and factories while men went overseas to fight. Afterward, they were encouraged to continue serving their country by applying their technoscientific expertise to life in the suburbs. In particular, women were expected to prepare their homes for the possibility of nuclear attack and foster family togetherness through the judicious consumption of domestic goods. Thus men and women alike were figured as essential to the United States’s development as a technocultural world leader.

Much like science, SF experienced a Golden Age in the 1940s and 1950s. Prior to World War II, SF authors were often dismissed for writing about impossible sciences and technologies. Afterward, they were hailed as visionary prophets and invited to consult with entertainment, industry, and government leaders alike. This period also marked the appearance of the first SF anthologies, the beginning of the SF paperback novel trade, and the explosion of SF storytelling across radio, film, and television. Even with all these changes, magazines remained the heart of the SF community. The most important magazine editor of this period was physicist-turned-pulp SF author John W. Campbell, who took over Astounding Science Fiction (formerly Astounding Stories ) in 1939. Campbell believed that SF was an important part of the larger scientific discourse already changing history. As such, he insisted that authors write stories that were logically extrapolated from current knowledge about the physical world and that they carefully consider the impact of new sciences and technologies on society. While Campbell’s editorial vision dominated SF for years to come, two other editors made equally lasting contributions to the development of the genre: Anthony Boucher, who co-founded the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1949, and H.L. Gold, who launched Galaxy Science Fiction in 1950. Boucher was a respected mystery writer and translator who published experimental stories of high literary quality, while Gold was a fantasy and comic book writer who excelled at fostering socially satiric SF. Taken together, these three editors shaped SF as a modern genre.

The new story types that proliferated throughout this period underscore the literary and cultural maturity of Golden Age SF. This is particularly evident in the future histories of Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Heinlein’s future history stories (originally published in Astounding between 1930 and 1960, then reprinted in The Past Through Tomorrow in 1967) tell the tale of a determined humanity that automates travel on Earth and then, over the course of the next three millennia, goes on to colonize the stars. Meanwhile, Asimov’s future history sequence (including the stories collected in 1950’s I, Robot, the Robot novels published between 1947 and 1958) predicts that humans’ robotic creations will eventually become their caretakers, fostering the flame of civilization in even the darkest of times. With their emphasis on galaxy-spanning futures populated by sleek space ships and autonomous robots, such Golden Age stories were clear successors to their pulp-era counterparts. However, both Heinlein and Asimov dramatized technoscientific change in ways that spoke to the lived experience of mid-century readers, treating it as something that comes from the collaborative effort of scientists, soldiers, businesspeople, and government officials and that provokes both hope and fear in the individuals living through ages of wonder that are not necessarily of their own making.

While Heinlein and Asimov used future histories to celebrate technocratic ideals, other Golden Age authors used other SF story forms to critically assess the relations of science, technology, and society. The most significant of these was the nuclear-war narrative. In Judith Merril’s 1950 novel Shadow on the Hearth, Walter Miller’s 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach, nuclear war is not – as popular thinking then held – something that can be either limited or won. Instead, even the most minor atomic explosions reverberate through space and time, destroying families, plunging nations into savagery, and wiping out humanity altogether. Meanwhile, the media landscape story – which explored worlds dominated by images of advertising and the popular arts – seemed to be a relative lighthearted mockery of American consumerism. And yet short stories such as Fritz Leiber’s 1949 “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” and Ann Warren Griffith’s 1953 “Captive Audience,” as well as Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s 1953 novel The Space Merchants, turn out to be almost as frightening as their atomic-themed counterparts. As media landscape authors insisted time and time again, the midcentury tendency to protect corporations at the expense of consumers might well lead to the rise of a surveillance state where individuals would be stripped of their civil rights and required to purchase indiscriminately in the name of national security.

Both science and SF developed in new directions in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the most important events influencing the former was the institutional ascendancy of the social sciences. Throughout this period sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists sought to legitimate their work by emphasizing the scientific nature of their subject matter (the quantifiable world of social relations) and methodologies (including the techniques of statistical inquiry and group research). These efforts were so successful – and so popular with students looking for socially relevant classes – that even the most conservative technical institutes made room for social science courses in their curricula. But social scientists were not the only new players in the technoscientific arena. Supported by Cold War legislation that guaranteed educational funds for talented youth, women flooded science, math, and engineering departments in record numbers. When these women found themselves blocked from graduate school and the best professional careers, they took action. Leading scientists joined the National Organization for Women and led the first class-action lawsuits against sexual discrimination in public university hiring practices. Such efforts led to the ratifi- cation of the 1972 Educational Amendment Acts, whose Title IX guaranteed equal pay for men and women working in higher education, while banning sex discrimination in all federally funded educational programs.

The initial challenge to speculative writing in this period came from a group of transatlantic authors and editors associated with what would eventually be called New Wave SF. The New Wave movement coalesced around Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine in Great Britain in the mid-1960s and debuted in the U.S. with the publication of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology in 1967 and Judith Merril’s England Swings SF anthology in 1968. New Wave authors maintained that the characters, story types, and technocratic ideals of earlier SF were no longer adequate for dramatizing life in the modern world. As such, it was necessary to make SF new by turning from the hard to the soft sciences and exchanging stories about outer space for those focusing on the inner spaces of individuals and their societies. Other challenges came from the scores of new women writers who joined SF during this period. Feminist author-critics Joanna Russ, Pamela Sargent, and Samuel R. Delany all readily acknowledged that women had always written speculative fiction. But they also maintained that even the best SF remained trapped in “galactic suburbia”: an imaginary space of dazzling technoscientific extrapolation where, oddly enough, social relations still looked like those of 1950s middle-class America. Accordingly, feminist writers called for their comrades to rethink their aesthetic practices and fulfill the Campbellian ideals of good SF by writing fiction that complicated mainstream notions about the future of scientific, social, and sexual relations.

Although they sometimes differed in their ideas about the relations of modern SF to its generic traditions, both New Wave and feminist SF authors used their chosen genre to explore how humans might grapple with alienation from themselves and their worlds. This is particularly apparent in the natural and urban disaster novels of British New Wave author J.G. Ballard. Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World imagines that humans might greet apocalypse (caused, in this case, by solar radiation that transforms Europe and North America into boiling lagoons) as an opportunity to give up technoscientific mastery and embrace devolution. Meanwhile, his 1973 Crash explores a near future where people come to terms with their media-saturated world by restaging and starring in famous car accidents. Much like Ballard, American author Harlan Ellison used the setting of a radically transformed world to explore the inner space of individuals and their societies. This is particularly apparent in Ellison’s infamous 1967 short story “A Boy and His Dog,” which explores the impact of nuclear war on the nuclear family. In its broad outline, Ellison’s story seems much like the conventional Golden Age nuclear-war narrative, but Ellison takes his critique in surprising new directions, insisting that the instigators of war are not impersonal bureaucrats, but hypocritical fathers whose adherence to Cold War sociopolitical ideals decimates the land and drives their children to rape, murder, and cannibalism.

Feminist SF authors of the 1960s and 1970s tended to be more optimistic about the future than their New Wave counterparts. This is apparent in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which uses anthropology, sociology, and psychology to demonstrate how androgynous cultures might distribute childbearing responsibilities and thus power relations more equitably than cultures grounded in sexual division. It is even more evident in Marge Piercy’s 1976 Woman on the Edge of Time and Joanna Russ’s 1975 The Female Man, which illustrate how reproductive technosciences might reform social relations among men and women. In Piercy’s mixed-sex utopia, babies are gestated in mechanical wombs while both men and women use hormone therapy to produce breast milk and enjoy the experience of mothering. Meanwhile, technologically enabled reproduction in Russ’s single-sex utopia liberates women to engage in everything from romance to dueling. Like Bellamy and Gilman before them, feminist SF authors celebrated the possibility of creative social engineering. Drawing inspiration from their politically charged counterparts in the technoscientific professions, however, they insisted that such engineering would be not just a natural side effect of industrial production, but the deliberate achievement of men and women striving to change science and society alike.

New Wave and feminist ideas are still central to SF, but in recent decades the genre has evolved in response to two new technocultural events: the massive expansion of information technologies and the emergence of a transnational economic system supported by these technologies. In the early 1980s home video games and personal computers encouraged users to combine work and leisure in new ways within the privacy of their own homes; the development of the World Wide Web a decade later enabled users to reach out from those homes and forge new kinds of community based on affinity rather than biology or geography. Modern people have been further encouraged to rethink their relations to the larger world by virtue of their position within increasingly global networks of industrial production. The advent of such networks requires people – especially Western people – to reconsider who and what counts within the practice of science and technology. On the one hand, the dominance of industrial production suggests that Western ways of knowing the world are highly successful ones. But gaining access to a global stage allows people to share other technoscientific traditions with one another and even experiment with using those traditions (alone or in tandem with their Western counterparts) as templates for building new and truly more equitable global futures as well.

The premiere narrative form of the information age has no doubt been cyberpunk, the stylish mode of SF storytelling that merges strong interest in cybernetics and biotechnology with generally left-wing or libertarian politics and the do-it-yourself attitude of the early punk rock scene. The term “cyberpunk” was coined by SF author Bruce Bethke in his 1983 story of the same name, but was immediately taken up by editor Gardner Dozois to describe much of the fiction he was publishing in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine at that time. Firstgeneration cyberpunk fiction, including William Gibson’s celebrated 1984 novel Neuromancer and the short stories collected in Bruce Sterling’s 1986 Mirrorshades anthology, drew energy from the technocultural events of its time, providing SF with new character types and settings. In cyberpunk, creative engineers and faithful robots give way to amoral but usually good-hearted hackers and willful but usually benign artificial intelligences, all of whom struggle to survive and even transcend the conditions of their existence as tools of a transnational economy. Much of this drama takes place in cyberspace, a sphere of artificial or virtual reality where human and machine intelligences can interact with one another and with the flows of information that comprise modern capitalist practice itself. In the 1990s a new generation of SF novels – including Pat Cadigan’s 1991 Synners, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash, and Melissa Scott’s 1996 Trouble and Her Friends – built upon the cyberpunk tradition by exploring how people (and machines) who recognize the value of raced and gendered bodies within the abstract world of computation might exchange the old dream of transcendence for the new one of material engagement, thereby transforming bad corporate futures into new and more egalitarian ones.

The technoscientific and social ideals endemic to cyberpunk have inspired the development of other SF sub-genres. The artificial intelligences of cyberpunk are predicated on what computer scientist and SF author Vernor Vinge has described as the technological singularity: a near-future moment when computational power enables the creation of superhumanly intelligent machines that change the world in ways that pre-singularity humans cannot even begin to imagine. This has not stopped Vinge trying to imagine such worlds in the 1981 novella True Names and the 1984 and 1986 novels The Peace War and Marooned in Real Time, all of which are told from the perspective of pre-singularity humans who survive the transition to a post-singularity society. Other notable books to explore this theme include Cory Doctorow’s 1996 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Charles Stross’s 2005 Accelerando. Still other SF authors have seized upon the tension between cybernetic and biological enhancement, driving cyberpunk to imagine startling new “wet” futures. Key works in this vein include Kathleen Ann Goonan’s 1994–2000 Nanotech Quartet, Paul Di Filippo’s 1996 Ribofunk, and Margaret Atwood’s 2003 Oryx and Crake. Although these works are very different in tone (Goonan’s books are cautiously utopic, Atwood’s novel is largely dystopic, and Di Filippo makes a playful end run around the whole issue), all three authors are, like their post-singularity counterparts, profoundly interested in the fate of human values, emotions, and aesthetic productions in a posthuman world.

The development of global socioeconomic networks has drawn attention to the fact that SF is no longer the exclusive province of white, Western people. Indeed, it turns out that this has never been the case. Over the course of the twentieth century that other great industrial nation, the Soviet Union, developed an SF tradition parallel to its anglophone counterpart. As early as 1970 Englishspeaking readers could learn about that tradition in Isaac Asimov’s Soviet Science Fiction anthology; today, new anthologies such as Alexander Levitsky’s 2008 Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy attest to the continued evolution of Russian SF. The SF community has also recently become aware of an alternate speculative fiction within the transatlantic region itself: Afrofuturism. Early Afrofuturist works include Edward Johnson’s 1904 utopia Light Ahead for the Negro, W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 disaster story “The Comet,” and George Schuyler’s 1936–38 serialized future war stories Black Internationale and Black Empire. Since the 1960s Afrodiasporic authors including Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Minister Faust have become luminaries within the SF community; stories by these and other notable Afrofuturists are collected in Sherree R. Tepper’s 2000 and 2004 Dark Matter anthologies and Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan’s 2004 So Long Been Dreaming: postcolonial science fiction and fantasy collection.

SF has flourished in countries as diverse as China, Japan, and Brazil since the late nineteenth century as well. Perhaps not surprisingly, authors from these countries began writing speculative fiction at the same time that merchants began using industrial technologies. The earliest of these publications include Huang Jiang Diao Sou’s 1904 “Lunar Colony,” Oshikawa Shunro’s 1900 Undersea Warship, and Joachim Felício dos Santos’ 1868–72 Pages from the History of Brazil Written in the Year 2000. Anglo-American readers can learn about contemporary Chinese, Japanese, and Latin American SF in Dingbo Wu and Patrick D. Murphy’s 1989 Science Fiction from China, Gene van Troyer and Grania Davis’s 2007 Speculative Japan: outstanding tales of Japanese science fiction and fantasy, and Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilan’s 2003 Cosmos Latinos: an anthology of science fiction from latin America and Spain. Like their Russian and Afrodiasporic counterparts, Chinese, Japanese, and Brazilian SF authors have both revised Western genre conventions and developed new ones in light of their own fantastic literary traditions to better dramatize the processes of industrialization and globalization in their own societies. Taken together, these speculative writing traditions demonstrate that SF is the literature not just of engineers, but of all people living in the modern world.

Source: Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini. The Routledge Companion To Literature And Science . London: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Bibliography

Alkon, P.K. (1994) Science Fiction Before 1900: imagination discovers technology, New York and London: Routledge. Barron, N. (ed.) (2004) Anatomy of Wonder: a critical guide to science fiction, 5th edn, Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Bould, M., Butler, A.M., Roberts, A. and Vint, S. (eds) (2009) The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, New York and London: Routledge. Csicsery-Ronay Jr., I. (2008) The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Donawerth, J.L. (1997) Frankenstein’s Daughters: women writing science fiction, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Luckhurst, R. (2005) Science Fiction, Cambridge: Polity Press. Melzer, P. (2006) Alien Constructions: science fiction and feminist thought, Austin: University of Texas Press. Roberts, R. (1993) A New Species: gender and science in science fiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Seed, D. (1999) American Science Fiction and the Cold War: literature and film, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. Stableford, B. (2006) Science Fact and Science Fiction: an encyclopedia, New York and London: Routledge. Vint, S. (2007) Bodies of Tomorrow: technology, subjectivity, science fiction, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wolmark, J. (2000) Cybersexualities, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Yaszek, L. (2008) Galactic Suburbia: recovering women’s science fiction, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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What is Science Fiction and why we read it?

It is hard to define science fiction since there are multiple explanations of science. Science in science fiction can be read both as based on scientific knowledge and storytelling in a logical system. With these extensions, I agree with definition in Le Guin’s introduction, science fiction is a description of the real world, in the present or in the future.

What is the nature of science fiction? I consider it a description of details in the real-world under highly developed technology. These details are in the form of conflicts, it can be gradually changing, or strong comparison. Those conflicts exist before technology takes over the world, at least their seeds are buried beneath. Like the city in Folding Beijing by author Jingfang Hao, which contains three spaces assigned to different time zones. Each zones have specific occupies. This city structure is a metaphor for modern classes that exist for a really long time.

There are still some problems that not coming up but their footprints can be predicted and tracked. Science fiction builds future world logically by analysis of presenting technology and society issues. Those conflicts may not inevitably occur, but there are still probabilities in some ways. The war of the worlds , this fiction tells a story about how humans survive under Martians’ attack. Those Martians kill tons of humans while finally dead under a virus on Earth. Nowadays, human seems to be the domination of the planet, seeking lives in-universe, while is under threatened by an unknown virus, like Ebola virus and recently coronavirus. This is the reason why we read science fiction: it reveals the truth.

In the future, science fiction may get rid of the limit form of literature. But when we look into history, Bible, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Greek Tragedy, Roman mythology, and folk legend reveal the truth by storytelling. With developing technology, science fiction’s definition will be renewed and its meaning will be brought up and accepted widely.

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What Is Science Fiction?

Alex Acks is a writer, geologist, and sharp-dressed sir. They've written for Six to Start and been published in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, and more. Alex lives in Denver with their two furry little bastards, where they twirl their mustache, watch movies, and bike. Twitter: @katsudonburi Website: katsudon.net

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A seemingly simple question over which fandom wars can and have been fought, “What is science fiction?” has a complicated answer. After checking a couple of dictionaries, the consensus seems to be: Stories that hinge on scientific or technological advances, which often are set in the future or in alien worlds .

A hotly debated point when it comes to science fiction characteristics is what constitutes a suitable “scientific or technological advancement.” Does it have to be something actually feasible? Because let me tell you, with our current understanding of physics, neither faster-than-light travel nor anything that involves time travel fits the bill. Warp drive that functions because of special crystals is no less magical than elves casting fireballs; the main difference there is the aesthetics. This is often framed as soft vs. hard science fiction .

(And while we’re mentioning the strange line between magic and science in fiction, you should read N.K. Jemisin’s great essay, But, but, but — WHY does magic have to make sense? )

Which brings us to…

Speculative Fiction

Science fiction is often grouped with fantasy under the umbrella of “speculative fiction.” That categorization indicates the “what if?” is the important part, and acknowledges that there’s a continuum. You might as well shelve all the speculative fiction together, because no matter where you draw the line between science and magic, you’re going to find a weird edge case that is arguably both. I feel that Ward Shelley’s famous “The History of Science Fiction” painting is a good way to visualize why defining this genre can be so difficult. And, it should be noted, what science fiction contains has evolved a lot in even the last decade .

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Unlike many other genres, what is science fiction hinges on elements of setting rather than a suite of plot points. We all know what makes up a story in the mystery genre, for example. Or a book cannot be a romance if it isn’t about at least two people coming together in a relationship and ending with a happily ever after (or possibly happy for now).

I’d argue the “scientific and technological advances” part of that first definition isn’t necessarily the plot in the science fiction — though it can and often is. But just as often, it’s part of the setting that defines and influences how the plot unfolds. Consider Dune , for example. It’s definitely science fiction. It’s set in a world with massive technological advancements that influence how the plot develops, and Dune certainly would be a different book without it. But the plot isn’t about the technology.

Because the science fiction genre is entirely defined by its setting, it can be combined with nearly any other kind of genre that has a plot blueprint. So you can have science fiction romance, and science fiction mysteries, and science fiction horror, and so on. (See also: space westerns.) As Ursula K. Le Guin told Smithsonian , “The future is a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in, a means of thinking about reality, a method.” A writer can have nearly any plot in that laboratory and play with it, under conditions that they have themself defined.

Which is why, if you ask me, “What is science fiction?” my conclusion becomes: Fiction that contains a speculative element integral to its setting, which affects its plot, and which aesthetically leans into technology and science . (And here, I may or may not be using “aesthetic” in the same sense as the inimitable Joanna Russ .) This is admittedly a very expansive definition of science fiction that I have no doubt some people might disagree with — and that’s all right! I’ve simply always preferred the big tent, omnivorous approach…and I’ve had too many bad experiences where I’ve seen a definition used as a way to privilege some stories over others.

In the end, the definition is there to help you find books that you’ll enjoy…and if someone wants to argue about it, you always have the option of closing Twitter and reading one of those books.

A Bit of Further Reading

While it’s more about a particular recent kerfuffle in science fiction fandom, Cora Buhlert’s Science Fiction Is Never Evenly Distributed is a great read that touches on a lot of the issues on how science fiction is sometimes defined. (She’s also generally a great writer to follow.)

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Whether you are a science or literature student, you have one task in common:

Writing an essay about science fiction!

Writing essays can be hard, but writing about science fiction can be even harder. How do you write an essay about something so diverse and deep? And where do you even start?

In this guide, we will discuss what science fiction is and how to write an essay about it. You will also get possible topics and example essays to help get your creative juices flowing.

So read on for all the information you need to ace that science fiction essay.

• 1. What Is Science Fiction?
• 2. What Is a Science Fiction Essay?
• 3. Science Fiction Essay Examples
• 4. How to Write an Essay About Science Fiction?
• 5. Science Fiction Essay Topics
• 6. Science Fiction Essay Questions 
• 7. Science Fiction Essay Tips

What Is Science Fiction?

Science fiction is a genre of literature that often explores the potential consequences of scientific, social, and technological innovations. These might affect individuals, societies, or even the entire human race in the story.

The central conflict in many science fiction stories takes place within the individual human mind, addressing questions about the nature of reality itself. 

It often follows themes of exploration, speculation, and adventure. Science fiction is popular in novels, films, television, and other media.

At its core, science fiction uses scientific concepts to explore the human condition or to create alternate realities. It often asks questions about the nature of reality, morality, and ethics in light of scientific advancements.

Now that we understand what science fiction is let's see some best essays on science fiction!

What Is a Science Fiction Essay?

Science fiction essays are written in response to a specific prompt, often focusing on a particular theme or idea. 

They can be either creative pieces of writing or analytical works that examine the genre and its various elements.

It is different from a science essay , which discusses scientific topics in detail. 

Science fiction essay aims to explore the implications of science fiction themes for our understanding of science and reality.

For science students, writing about science fiction can be useful to enhance their scientific curiosity and creativity.

Literature students get to write these essays a lot. So it is useful for them to be aware of some major scientific concepts and discoveries.

Here’s a video about what is science fiction:

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Science Fiction Essay Examples

It can be helpful to look at examples when you're learning how to write an essay. 

Here are some sample science fiction essay PDF examples:

Essay on Science Fiction Literature Example

Example Essay About Science Fiction

Short Essay About Science Fiction - Example Essay

Science Fiction Short Story Example

How to Start a Science Fiction Essay

Le Guin Science Fiction Essay

Pessimism In Science Fiction

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The Peculiarities Of Science Fiction Films

Essay on Science Fiction Movies

Looking for range of science essays? Here is a blog with some flawless science essay examples .

How to Write an Essay About Science Fiction?

Writing an essay on science fiction can be fun and exciting. It gives you the opportunity to explore new ideas and worlds.

Here are a few key steps you should follow for science fiction essay writing.

Know What Kind of Essay To Write

Science fiction essays can be descriptive, analytical, or exploratory. Always check with your instructor what kind of essay they want you to write.

For instance, a descriptive science fiction essay topic may describe the story of your favorite sci-fi novel or tv series.

Similarly, an analytical essay might require you to analyze a concept (e.g., time travel) in the light of science fiction literature.

On the other hand, explanatory essays require you to go beyond the literature to explore its background, influence, cultural impact, etc.

So different types of essays require different types of topics and writing styles. So it is important to know the type and purpose of your science fiction essay.

Find an Interesting Topic

There is a lot of science fiction out there. Find a movie, novel, or science fiction concept you want to discuss.

Think about what themes, messages, and ideas you want to explore. Look for interesting topics that can help make your essay stand out.

You can find a good topic by brainstorming the concepts or ideas that you find interesting. For instance, do you like the idea of traveling to the past or visiting futuristic worlds?

You'll find some great science fiction topics about the ideas you like to explore.

Do Some Research

Read more about the topic or idea you have selected.

Read articles, reviews, research papers, and talk to people who know science fiction. Get a better understanding of the idea you want to explore before diving in.

When doing research, take notes and keep track of sources. This will come in handy when you start writing your essay.

Organize Your Essay Outline

Now that you have done your research and have a good understanding of the topic, it's time to create an outline.

An outline will help you organize your thoughts and make sure all parts of your essay fit together. Your outline should include a thesis statement , supporting evidence, and a conclusion.

Once the outline is complete, start writing your essay.

Start Writing Your First Draft

Start your first draft by writing the introduction. Include a hook , provide background information, and identify your thesis statement.

Here is an example of a hook for a science fiction essay:

Your introduction should be catchy and interesting. But it also needs to show what the essay is about clearly.

Afterward, write your body paragraphs. In these paragraphs, you should provide supporting evidence for your main thesis statement. This could include quotes from books, films, or other related sources. Make sure you also cite any sources you use to avoid plagiarism.

Finally, conclude your essay with a summary of your main points and any final thoughts. Your science fiction essay conclusion should tie everything together and leave the reader with something to think about.

Edit and Proofread

Once your first draft is complete, it's time to edit and proofread.

Edit for any grammar mistakes, typos, or errors in facts. Check for sentence structure and make sure all your points are supported with evidence.

After that, read through your essay to check for flow and clarity. Make sure the essay is easy to understand and flows well from one point to the next.

Finally, make sure that the science fiction essay format is followed. Your instructor will provide you with specific formatting instructions. These will include font style, page settings, and heading styles. So make sure to format your essay accordingly.

Once you're happy with your final draft, submit your essay with confidence. With these steps, you'll surely write a great essay on science fiction!

Read on to check out some interesting topics, essay examples, and tips!

Science Fiction Essay Topics

Finding a topic for your science fiction essay is a difficult part. You need to find something that is interesting as well as relatable. 

That is why we have collected a list of good topics to help you brainstorm more ideas. You can create a topic similar to these or choose one from here. 

Here are some possible essay topics about science fiction:

• The Evolution of Science Fiction
• The Impact of Science Fiction on Society
• The Relationship Between Science and Science Fiction
• Discuss the Different Subgenres of Science Fiction
• The Influence of Science Fiction on Pop Culture
• The Role of Women in Science Fiction
• Describe Your Favorite Sci-Fi Novel or Film
• The Relationship Between Science Fiction and Fantasy
• Discuss the Major Themes of Your Favorite Science Fiction Story
• Explore the themes of identity in sci-fi films

Need prompts for your next science essay? Check out our 150+ science essay topics blog!

Science Fiction Essay Questions 

Explore thought-provoking themes with these science fiction essay questions. From futuristic technology to extraterrestrial encounters, these prompts will ignite your creativity and critical thinking skills.

• How does sci-fi depict AI's societal influence?
• What ethical issues arise in genetic engineering in sci-fi?
• How have alien civilizations evolved in the genre?
• What's the contemporary relevance of dystopian themes in sci-fi?
• How do time travel narratives handle causality?
• What role does climate change play in science fiction?
• Ethical considerations of human augmentation in sci-fi?
• How does gender feature in future societies in sci-fi?
• What social commentary is embedded in sci-fi narratives?
• Themes of space exploration in sci-fi?

Science Fiction Essay Tips

So you've been assigned a science fiction essay. Whether you're a fan of the genre or not, this essay can be daunting.

But don't fear!

Here are some helpful tips to get you started on writing a science fiction essay that will impress your teacher and guarantee you a top grade.

Choose a Topic That Interests You

When it comes to writing a science fiction essay, it’s important to choose a topic that interests you. 

Not only will this make the writing process more enjoyable, but it will also ensure that your essay is more engaging for the reader. 

If you’re not sure what topic to write about, try brainstorming a few science fiction essay ideas until you find one that feels right.

Make Sure Your Essay is Well-Organized

Another important tip for writing a science fiction essay is to make sure that your essay is well-organized. 

This means having a clear introduction, body, and conclusion. It also means ensuring that each paragraph flows smoothly into the next. 

If your essay is disorganized or difficult to follow, chances are the reader will lose interest quickly.

Use Strong Verbs

When writing any type of essay, it’s important to use strong verbs. However, this is especially true when writing a science fiction essay.

Using strong verbs will help add excitement and energy to your writing, making it more engaging for the reader. Some examples of strong verbs include “discover,” “create,” and “explore.”

Be Creative

One of the best things about writing a science fiction essay is that you have the opportunity to be creative. This means thinking outside the box and coming up with new and innovative ideas.

If you’re struggling to be creative, try brainstorming with someone else or looking at other essays for inspiration. 

Use Quotes Appropriately

While quotes can be helpful in supporting your argument, it’s important not to rely on them too heavily in your essay.

If you find yourself using too many quotes, chances are you’re not doing enough of your own thinking and analysis. 

Instead of relying on quotes, try to paraphrase or summarize the main points from other sources.

To conclude the blog,

Writing a science fiction essay doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With these steps, examples, and tips, you can be sure to write an essay that will impress your teacher and guarantee you a top grade. 

Whether it’s an essay about science fiction movies or novels, you can ace it with these steps! Remember, the key is to be creative and organized in your writing!

Don't have time to write your essay? 

Don't stress! Leave it to us! Our science essay writing service is here to help! 

Contact the team of experts at our best essay writing service . We can help you write a creative, well-organized, and engaging essay for the reader. We provide free revisions and other exclusive perks!

Moreover, our AI-based essay typer will provide sample essays for you completely free! Try it out today! 

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Betty is a freelance writer and researcher. She has a Masters in literature and enjoys providing writing services to her clients. Betty is an avid reader and loves learning new things. She has provided writing services to clients from all academic levels and related academic fields.

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Science Fiction

The term “science fiction” denotes a genre of imaginative literature distinguished from realism by its speculation about things that cannot happen in the world as we know it, and from fantasy by abjuring the use of magic or supernatural. In science fiction, all phenomena and events described are theoretically possible under the laws of physics, even though they may not at present be achievable. Stated in this way, it would appear that works belonging to the genre would be easily identifiable. However, critics of science fiction have struggled to find an adequate definition almost since the term was coined and applied to a certain kind of fiction, supplanting an earlier, even less satisfactory term, “scientific romance,” which had been applied to some nineteenth-century British works as well as to the novels of Jules Verne. As Paul Kincaid (2005) has said, “The critical test for any definition is that it includes everything we believe should be included within the term, and it excludes everything we believe should be omitted.” Identifying thirty-three earlier attempts to pin down the genre, he notes that, “[s]trictly applied, every single one of those definitions would admit to the genre works that we would prefer to exclude, or would omit works we feel belong.”

Although the Oxford English Dictionary cites one isolated reference to “Science-Fiction” from 1851, the coining of the term is generally credited to the American editor Hugo Gernsback, who first used “scientifiction” to refer to stories built on extrapolations from credible scientific thought when he established the first magazine dedicated to such writing, Amazing Stories , in 1926. The precise origin of the genre remains in dispute, with various scholars connecting works of fantastic literature such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to the developing genre. However, most agree that the development of science fiction, both for adults and for children, is primarily a phenomenon of the twentieth century, while acknowledging the significance of Jules Verne in France and H. G. Wells in England as proto–science fiction writers.

Although it has not usually been identified as such, early science fiction, at least in the United States, was significantly a juvenile genre. Stories of amazing developments in science and technology appeared in magazines that appealed to adolescent boys in particular. Fred Erisman (2000) notes that the first magazine given over entirely to science fiction was the August 1923 issue of Gernsback’s Science and Invention , a popular journal otherwise concerned with factual science. The Tom Swift adventure stories by “Victor Appleton,” one of many juvenile series published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, began in 1910 and are generally identified with science fiction, although Erisman and others have noted that the Tom Swift books initially did not extend their extrapolation very far, confining the inventions to such existing technology as motorcycles and motorboats; their focus was more on the adventure than on the scientific prophecy. A large portion of the audience for Amazing Stories and its successors was adolescents, and important science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury published their first stories while still in their teens.

Various definitions of science fiction have been advanced, ranging from extremely prescriptive arguments that many of the best-known pop-culture examples of the genre (e.g., Star Wars ) are not, in fact, science fiction at all, to Damon Knight’s somewhat flippant and not very helpful, “Science fiction is whatever we point to when we say ‘this is science fiction’” (Malzberg 2005) or Brian Aldiss’s flat statement: “There is no such entity as science fiction. We have only the work of many men and women which, for convenience, we can group together under the label ‘science fiction’” (Aldiss and Hargrove 2005). A number of critics of the field have suggested that identification of a work as science fiction depends more on the reader than on any intrinsic quality of the writing. James Gunn (2005) claims, “The kinds of questions we ask determine how we read” an imaginative narrative; only if answering the question “How did we get there from here?” is a significant element of the work’s appeal can it be truly science fiction.

Many academic critics turn to Darko Suvin’s formulation “cognitive estrangement” to distinguish science fiction from other fictional genres. Suvin (1972) argues that science fiction takes a fictional hypothesis and develops it to its logical end; because such a fiction employs a different concept of “normal” than one finds in the everyday world, the story causes the reader to feel alienated or estranged. Some degree of estrangement is not unique to science fiction, however; both myth and fantasy also present their audiences with worlds that do not conform to ordinary normality. In science fiction, there is also an expectation that the alternative world will conform to the reader’s cognitive understanding of reality—things that are impossible in the real world, given our understanding of the universe (e.g., magical persons or objects) are just as impossible in the science-fictional world. Paul Kincaid (2005) recognizes that the concept of cognitive estrangement is central to most academic criticism, but observes that it “is a prescriptive definition that works fine as long as we are comfortable with what it prescribes, but can lead to extraordinary convolutions as we try to show that certain favored texts really do conform to the idea of cognitive estrangement, and even more extraordinary convolutions to reveal that familiar non-SF texts don’t.”

Several of the common tropes seen in both juvenile and adult science fiction would seem to violate one or the other halves of the “cognitive estrangement” definition. Faster-than-light (FTL) travel is generally understood to violate the physical laws governing mass and energy, and Albert Einstein showed that velocities approaching light speed would cause time dilation—yet FTL travel between stars with no time dilation has been a mainstay of science fiction almost from the beginning, especially in the genre of “space opera,” into which adventure stories like Star Wars fall. Many science fiction purists would argue that space opera is in fact not science fiction at all, but a variation on traditional adventure story tropes. But even works that are unequivocally recognized as science fiction, such as Robert A. Heinlein’s juvenile novel Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), employ FTL space travel without explanation. More recently, science fiction writers have often presented interstellar travel in ways that conform to known physical laws, as in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), where the fleet of starships seeking out the enemy planet takes many years to span the distance between stars, or have employed unproven hypothetical formulations such as “wormholes” that take advantage of the Einsteinian curvature of space-time to create shortcuts between solar systems. Such methods of space travel were exploited in juvenile science fiction as early as 1955 in Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky .

On the other hand, some science fiction presents a world so close to our own as to cause little estrangement. William Sleator’s young adult (YA) novel Test (2008) presents a society in which the emphasis on testing in schools has become more rigid than is currently the case in the United States, though not unlike that of some other countries, and in which overpopulation and a reliance on the automobile has resulted in perpetual traffic jams—again, not terribly unlike the case at rush hour in many cities.

In an important and provocatively titled essay, Farah Mendlesohn (2004) uses the concept of cognitive estrangement to ask, “Is There Any Such Thing as Children’s Science Fiction?” Although her answer is a heavily qualified “yes,” she concludes that few works of juvenile science fiction meet the rigorous academic standard she is applying, primarily because the circularity of much children’s fiction is fundamentally incompatible with the narrative arc required of science fiction. As she argues, children’s fiction focuses on the individual child, who moves out from home (or a position of stability) only to return at the end of the novel. Calling science fiction a fiction of ideological rules, she says that it cannot be circular; it “does not accept that change can be undone, or the universe returned to its starting place,” although human beings do have the capacity to influence the nature of that change (291). If it is true that children’s fiction requires a return to the status quo, while science fiction requires a permanent change in the world as presented in the novel, it does indeed appear that the two are incompatible. Science fiction is mainly concerned with “the political, scientific, or social” ramifications of the work’s events (292–93), with individual characters existing to demonstrate those ramifications, not to achieve some kind of personal growth or understanding, as is typical in fiction for young people.

Mendlesohn acknowledges within her essay the objection of an early reader (Michael Levy) that she was imposing a definition that a priori excluded coming-of-age stories from “full science fiction,” but says that this is exactly her point: the two genres have mutually exclusive agendas. However, it might be argued that the path of children’s fiction is a spiral rather than a true circle; the child returns to a stable situation, but one that has been altered (either in external reality or in the child’s understanding), so that a permanent change has occurred. If this is the case, there is no necessary barrier between juvenile fiction and “true” science fiction. The internal dialogue in her essay echoes the conflict between Suvin’s strict concept of cognitive estrangement and Kincaid’s argument that such a prescriptive definition requires “extraordinary convolutions” to fit accepted science fiction texts within it. Levy suggests that the use of YA or children’s literature conventions is a reasonable expectation in juvenile science fiction, and asks for a clearer acknowledgment that the juvenile SF writer is not trying to write the same kind of book as Mendlesohn wants him to. One might go further and suggest that science fiction, like other genres, must undergo a necessary transformation in its manifestation as children’s literature, such that “children’s science fiction” and “adult science fiction’ may, in fact, constitute two related but distinct genres of equal validity.

Ellen Ostry (2004), exploring specific YA science fiction texts that extrapolate developments in biotechnology and computer science, approaches the issue of estrangement in a different way from Mendlesohn, integrating the concept into the norms of YA fiction generally:

The young adults in these books feel estranged not just from their parents and from the society that would likely shun them, but from themselves. The question all adolescents ask—“Who am I?”—becomes quite complicated when one finds out that one is a clone, or otherwise genetically engineered.

Self-definition, the quintessential task of adolescence, often becomes in YA science fiction the problem of defining what it is to be human in an alienating world. Thus, in Peter Dickinson’s Eva (1988), the title character finds her brain transplanted into the body of a chimpanzee and must decide whether to align herself with humans or apes; in Mary Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008), Jenna’s mind is first stored in a computer and subsequently implanted into a largely bionic body; in Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion (2002), Matt is cloned from the DNA of a drug lord; and in Monica Hughes’s The Keeper of the Isis Light (1980), Olwen’s body has been medically transformed to fit her to life in a hostile environment. In all of these novels, the “if… then” extrapolation that Mendlesohn argues should follow the initial “What if?” question of the science fiction novel has been melded with the “Who am I?” question of YA fiction.

This melding results from the differentiation of adult and juvenile science fiction during the post–World War II era. There was little need for such differentiation in the genre’s early days—indeed, as Mendlesohn comments, many early “invention stories” are not unlike the less satisfactory juvenile science fiction of today. Other than the Tom Swift books, little or no science fiction was being written specifically for younger readers. By the late 1940s, however, as adult science fiction began to take on its modern shape under the influence of the editor John W. Campbell and his stable of writers at Astounding Stories , a separation based on reader age began to appear necessary. Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), about three teenage boys who travel to the moon, was the first in a series of highly successful juvenile books, published in hardcover, that provided an alternative to the pulp magazines as an entry point for young science fiction readers. Other writers, including Isaac Asimov and Andre Norton, joined Heinlein in writing for the youth market through the 1950s.

Today, the science fiction world of children and teens has separated significantly from that of adults, with few writers crossing between audiences as Heinlein and Asimov did fifty years ago. One author who does write for both audiences, Orson Scott Card, arrived at the position almost by accident, when Ender’s Game (1985), originally published as an adult book, found a wide audience among adolescent readers. Ender’s Game recounts the story of a boy taken from his family at an early age and trained to lead a human space fleet against an alien civilization. Despite the novel’s success with teenagers, its sequels did not fare as well with that audience, most likely because they dealt with the adult lives of Ender and other characters. The fate of Ender’s Game , however, suggests a basic pattern for young adult science fiction not unlike that seen in Heinlein’s earlier juvenile novels: a young person, generally with above-average intelligence, is placed into a situation in which he or she must adapt to an alien environment and solve scientific or technological problems in order to survive.

While Heinlein and Card seem to confirm the possibility that Mendlesohn’s question can be answered affirmatively, the fact remains that young adult science fiction—whether defined as rigorously as Mendlesohn would have it or more liberally—is comparatively rare in the early twenty-first century. Susan Fichtelberg (2007) observes that only about 12 percent of all YA speculative fiction (a term she uses to include true fantasy, horror, and science fantasy as well as science fiction) currently being published falls under the rubric of science fiction, and she includes a relatively large proportion of adult titles in her YA bibliography. She speculates that most avid readers of the genre discover it around the age of twelve and quickly begin reading science fiction intended for adults.

Whether one follows the strict definition of cognitive estrangement that Suvin outlines, or adopts a more fluid conception, “science fiction” for even younger readers continues to be problematic. The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954), by the children’s author Eleanor Cameron, was an early example of the difficulty. The boys create a spaceship from scrap materials and use a mysterious fuel given them by the enigmatic Mr. Bass to fly to a hitherto unknown planet orbiting the earth just one-fifth of the distance to the moon; they complete the entire round trip within a few hours. There is little attempt to provide scientific explanations for details that are implausible at face value; instead, the trappings of the science fiction novel are used to frame a rather conventional story of adventure and active imagination. Similarly, there is nothing intrinsically speculative in the robot of Dav Pilkey’s Ricky Ricotta’s Mighty Robot (2000); it is simply a large, avenging friend who helps the eponymous mouse deal with bullies (along with a stereotypical mad scientist), filling a role that could as easily be given to the golem of Jewish folklore, a djinn , or a benign giant. Likewise, the alien of Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s Baloney (Henry P.) (2001) goes to school in a spaceship, but is otherwise indistinguishable from any human child creating an excuse for being late to school. The difficulty in creating believable science fiction for the very young lies in the readers’ inadequate knowledge of the world, which arguably does not permit them to distinguish adequately between fantasy and more plausible scientifically informed extrapolations. For the youngest readers, then, “science fiction” appears to be used primarily as a trope to give a veneer of the unusual to everyday activities. As Mendlesohn suggests, we might label such works “analogic books” (295). But are they science fiction?

Science Fiction | Definition, Elements, Books, Movies, Authors, Essay

Science Fiction

Table of Contents

What is Science Fiction?

Science fiction is a genre of fiction in which the stories often tell about science and technology of the future.

Science Fiction Definition

Wikipedia defines it,

“ Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible (or at least non-supernatural) content such as futures settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities. Exploring the consequences of scientific innovations is one purpose of science fiction, making it a literature of HG Wells ideas”.

It is important to note that science fiction (Si-Fi) has a relationship with the principles of science- these stories involve partially true partially fictitious laws or theories of science . It should not be completely unbelievable, because it then ventures into the genre fantasy. Science fiction is primarily based on writing rationally about alternative possible worlds or futures. According to Benjamin Appel,

“ Science fiction reflects scientific thought; a fiction of things-to-come based on things-on-hand.”

While another scholar Issac Asimov feels Science fiction “as the branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings.”

It is similar to, but differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated laws of nature. (However some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation).

In the science fiction , the plot creates situations different from those of both the present day and the known past. Science fiction texts also include a human element, explaining what effect new discoveries, happenings and scientific developments will have on us in the future. Science fiction texts are often set in the future, in space, on a different world, or in a different universe or dimension. Science fiction is also not a doctoral thesis on the possibility of faster than light travel. One can say that science fiction is just about science and technology, but this does not mean that it is written only for the scientific audience. As Brian Aldiss noted,

“Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are for ghosts”.

In fact, Science fiction is not worth reading at all if it does not involve humanity with whom we can associate. This is why Science fiction is mainly about the human element, and about the effect of new discoveries, happenings and scientific developments will have on us in the future.

Elements of Science Fiction

• The settings for science fiction are generally contrary to known reality, but most science fiction relies on a considerable degree of suspension of disbelief. Science fiction elements narrated in Wikipedia include:
• A time setting in the future, in alternative timelines, or in a historical past that contradicts known facts of history or the archaeological record.
• A spatial setting or scenes in outer Space (e.g., Spaceflight), on other worlds, or on subterranean earth.
• Characters that include aliens, mutants, androids or humanoid robots.
• Technology that is futuristic (e.g., ray guns, teleportation machines, humanoid computers).
• Scientific principles that are new or those contradict known laws of nature, for example time travel, wormholes, or faster than-light travel.
• New and different political or social systems (e.g. dystopia , post-scarcity, or a post-apocalyptic situation where organized society has collapsed).
• Paranormal abilities such as mind control, telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation.
• Other universes or dimensions and travel between them.

Best Examples of Science Fiction

The pioneers of the genre of science fiction are H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea . In the 20th century major texts of science fiction texts include 1984 by George Orwell, Brave New World by Alduous Huxley, and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. In  addition, the four most popular and well-recognized 20th century authors are Isaac Asimov , author of the Foundation trilogy and his robot series, Arthur C. Clarke famous for 2001. A Space Odyssey: Ray Bradbury, known for his Martian Chronicles, and, Robert Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress .

15 Best Science Fiction Movies

• The Invisible Man
• Another Earth
• Source Code
• Reign of Fire
• Artificial Intelligence
• The World’s End
• Edge of Tomorrow
• Interstellar
• Jurassic World

15 Best Science Fiction Books of All Time

• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Space Fiction | Definition, Examples, Characteristics, Author

5 Best Science Fiction Books for Kids

• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline l’Engl
• Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl
• The Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr by Isaac Asimov

Science Fiction: An Essay

If science fiction gives the impression of facing the unknown future with daring and foresight, it is seldom because it really imagines a new future in any radical way, or because it forecasts change with any certainty or precision, but because, by relying on traditional literary conventions and forms, and by repeating historical and psychological patterns from the past, it manages to domesticate the future, to render it habitable and, in spite of a somewhat strange surface, basically familiar.

-John Huntington

“Oh! dear,” says E.M. Forster, “the novel tells a story.” But what is the story about? Quite a few critics and practitioners of the art of novel would suggest that the story should be about eternal passion, eternal pain, and the appeal must be essentially human. But human interest has widened considerably today. Nothing human is alien to man. Man is no longer satisfied with the two-inch long picture of domestic life on the ivory. He revels in the prodigality of invention and longs for a voyage in the land of the unknown and the mysterious. There are purists who would at once say that this longing undermines the dignity of the novel. But it does not.

A number of eminent novelists are strongly in favour of the marvelous and the uncommon Science fiction is, therefore, not to be summarily dismissed. Thomas Hardy, for example, says that “the real, if unavowed purpose of fiction (is) to give pleasure by gratifying the love of the uncommon in human experience.” Writers today have the natural urge to indulge our sense of wonder. Even the so-called realist Fielding lends support to the marvelous: “Every writer may be permitted to deal with the wonderful as much as he pleases.”

Early History of Science Fiction

Science , in course of the last two hundred years, has brought about revolutionary changes in our pattern of life and behavior. The scientific enquiry of Newton , Colin Maclawin, Thomas Simpson John Michell, Henry Cavendish, Josheph Priestley , and William Herschel refer to only a few, have widened our knowledge of natural phenomena. The Victorian Age marked the beginning of a new chapter in the life of Europe. Educated people sought explain things in physical terms. Such investigations had invariably their impact upon literature. CH Hinton wrote in 1884 his in What Is the Fourth Dimension? , in which he introduced the concepts of time, space, and continuum. We have reasons to believe that H. G. Wells was profoundly influenced by Hinton when he wrote his Time Machine in 1895. His conclusion is that “there is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it.” Alice of Alice in Wonderland was an unsophisticated child and felt that her universe was always shifting, when Mad Hatter sought to explain to her that Time was “He” and not “It,” and, therefore, dimensional.

In the sphere of Physics Planck, J. W. Dunne, Oliver Lodge, Thomas Henry Huxley, Tyndall, Thomson, Bragg, Whitehead, Russell, Eddington, and Rutherford made startling investigations. Once a dream of the elixir, Chemistry has also done revolutionary work. Great advance in our knowledge, has been made by the biologists. Darwin sailed on the ‘Beagle’ and explored the uncharted sea to widen our knowledge of fauna. The mysteries of the sea were unraveled when biologists were on board the Callenger. Darwin’s collaboration with Hooker, Huxley, and Lyell was a significant fact in the history of science. Mendel and Weismann followed in their footsteps and investigated things hitherto unknown

The impact of this vast and ever widening store of knowledge was writ large in every sphere of literature. But even before the investigation into natural phenomena, man looked far forth into the future and dreamt fantastic dreams, Science fiction, strictly speaking, has roots deep in tradition.

It seems to be an over-simplification of a truism of literary history. In fact More’s Utopia and Swift’s Gulliver ‘s Travels cannot be called Science fiction by any stretch of imagination. It was in the eighteenth century that science and technology made a dent into the static life of people, who still hugged their fond belief that man could do nothing before the mighty forces of Nature. They had a calm and quiet resignation to Nature, and could not even dream of the rapid strides of science, which shook the world in an unimaginably short time. Alexander Pope rightly says:

Nature and Nature’s laws were hid in hight,

God said, ‘Let there be Newton,’ and there was light 

Science, no doubt, clips our imagination, for it fosters the spirit of Reason. It may sound paradoxical, but the fact remains, that science also widen our imagination. Man felt at the turn of the eighteenth century that he was no longer an automaton. The idea of progress was gaining ground, and man–unconquerable man-overcame his physical limitations and dreamt of planting his feet on the virgin soil, on the planets and satellites. So long at the mercy of Nature, he was now pitted against her and sought supremacy in every sphere.

19 th Century Science Fiction

Hence the literature of the nineteenth century is a literature of change. And it is all due to the explosive growth of science. The first hero of Science fiction, who adopted himself to the rapid changes is Robinson Crusoe . The novel is based upon the adventures of Alexander Selkirk, who was marooned in a deserted island at his own request. Rousseau thought Robinson Crusoe to be “ The finest of treatises on education according to nature,” while Maxim Gorky thought it to be “the Bible of the unconquerable.”

Frankenstein as a Science Fiction

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus may, in a sense, be described as the first specimen of Science fiction . Frankenstein had keen interest in natural science and occult mysteries. Profoundly influenced by Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus he plunged into the unusual branches of science. Like Prometheus, he sought to bring a vital spark and animate a human frame. He made a soulless monster , who pursued his creator to a tragic end. Frankenstein flew from land to land to escape from the monstrous creation. But he was shadowed everywhere. He escaped to the ice bound sea, and even there the monster sprawled over his corpse.

Jules Verne’s Science Fiction

Jules Verne , one of the most popular French authors in the world. His books are dreams come true. Submarines, aeroplanes, and television, all swam into his ken long before anybody else could think of them. His first work is Five Weeks in a Balloon , and henceforth the vein of the marvelous, tinged with a quasi-scientific realism was worked by him with phenomenal success. His more popular works are: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , From the Earth to the Moon , Around the World in Eighty Days , and A Journey to the Centre of the Earth . All the novels of Jules Verne are an excellent combination of heart-stirring, blood-curdling adventures and science.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Science Fiction

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the distinguished forerunners of Science and Detective fiction. Poe began writing tales of horror in the early phase of his career. In Bercince, for example, he made his hero extract the teeth of a dead woman. In his Balloon-Hoax , a remarkable story in a series of hoaxes; he gave the most ingenious and convincing verisimilitude to a balloon flight to the moon. The elements of scientific extrapolation are so methodically presented that even a modern cosmonaut cannot contest it. It is a great loss to the field of science fiction that Poe turned to other literary avenues.

H. G. Wells’s Science Fiction

H. G. Wells broke into the Victorian stronghold without apology. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon is a typical scientific romance . Wells has imagined the possibility of science rather than the possibility of man The surface of the moon, which is intensely cold by night and infernally hot by day is described convincingly. The plants grow and die within a single day. The ant-like beings, known as the Selenites live in the moon. Wells in his romances voyages in the moon, in the air, in the future.

In The World Set Free Wells imagines that after many years the labor class will rule the world. It can be called a ‘Futurist’ romance rather than a ‘Scientific romance’. In The Invisible Man , we have the story of the strange and evil experiment of a misguided scientist. In The Wonderful Visit Wells tells the story of an angel, is puzzled to find the wild and incredible madness among men. Wells watched with his third eye the transformation of the whole world. He is the chronicler of the rich possibility of man by the help of the magic of science. He has an unerring vision of the shape of things to come. Science, however, is not always a benefactor. In The Time Machine we see the horrors of the well-awaited utopia. In The Island of Dr. Morean we get a lurid picture of the brutality of man in the wake of the myriad scientific inventions.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Science Fiction

Robert Louis Stevenson owes his enviable reputation to the novels of adventure as well as Science fiction . His Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is much a psychological romance than as a science fantasy Dr. Jekyll was essentially a man of good character. His professional tastes led him to experiment in drugs, with which he could change himself physically. It was then that he was transformed to Mr. Hyde, a repulsive creature of violent and evil passions. With his drugs he could become his original self. But Mr. Hyde, in course of time, was the more dominant personality. He committed a series of murders. At last the secret is revealed, and Mr. Hyde is found dead in his laboratory.

Jack London’s Science Fiction

Jack London (1876-1916) was politically a socialist and turned to science fiction at quite an early age. Even in his novels and stories, e.g., Before Adam , The Iron Heel , The Scarlet Plague , and the Star Rover , which may be described as Science fiction, Jack London sought to bring about social transformation. In The Unparalleled Invasion , he made a forecast of the Third World War , to take place in 1976. The Western powers armed with nuclear weapons will fight against China.

Edwin A. Abbot’s Science Fiction

Who could ever imagine that Edwin A. Abbot (1938-1926), an eminent Shakespearean scholar, could write his Flatland, which is based upon mathematical puzzles? The length and breadth of an inhabitant of Flatland may be estimated at eleven inches; women are all straight lines; soldiers and workers are triangles; the middle class people are equal sided triangles.

Ambrose Bierce’s Science Fiction

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) wrote science fiction and horror tales His Moxon’s Masler is a look into the future. He asked the question – can a machine think?

Rudyard Kipling’s Science Fiction

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) wrote as much for the adults as for the children. He often delved into fantasy. In The Night Mail , written in 1905 he visualized the future, when lighter-than-air dirigibles and aeroplanes would be hovering in the sky. His Easy as A. B. C. , The Finest Story in the World , The Mark of the Beast , and Wireless are all dreams translated into reality after years.

E.M. Forster’s Science Fiction

E.M. Forster (1879-1970) wrote only one Science Fiction , namely The Machine Stops , in which he forecast the trend that Science fiction would follow. He traces here the effect of future on a microcosm.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Science Fiction

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is remarkable for detective stories . His Sherlock Holmes was once a European figure, who could tackle any case with miraculous success. His inimitable creation- Professor Challenger is the redoubtable hero of his Science fiction , The Disintegrating Machine . A scientist named Theodor Nemor invented a machine capable of disintegrating any object.

Karl Capek’s Science Fiction

Karl Capek has carved a niche for himself in the temple of fame for R. U. R. i.e. Rossum’s Universal Robots, The Robots are artificial men and women, all soulless machines, with no human feelings and sentiments. A scientist named Rossum “wanted to become scientific substitute for God.” His son joined him, and Robots were being manufactured on a large scale. Helena Glory came there to liberate the Robots from slavery. The Manager of the factory assured her that the Robots had no feelings, and, therefore, they did not smart under a sense of injustice or slavery. The Directors of the Factory were happy to meet a beautiful woman. Helena persuaded Dr. Gall, the Chemist to endow the Robots with intelligence. There were two types of Robots- National and Universal. The humanized Robots started fighting against man. The destruction of the world was imminent. Helena in her attempt to save mankind asked the Directors to leave the place with the Rossum manuscript, which contained the formula for the manufacture of Robots. The Robots got a scent of it, and united to kill mankind. All men except Alquist were destroyed. The Robots saved him so that he might manufacture Robots once again. He pleaded his inability, but was delighted to find that two Robots one male and one female were embracing each other passionately, Adam and Eve were reborn.

Theodore Sturgeon is a modern writer of Science fiction . His Microcosmic God presents man as a creator. James Blish is another modern writer who visualizes the distant future, when the cities of the earth with all their splendor and magnificence would take off into space in space-ships.

Since 1954 a periodical entitled Slick began to publish extrapolative stories and introduced a vaster area with the entire spectrum of science fiction and fantasy . George Langelaan tells in The Masks of War the story of a British Intelligence agent during the Second World War, who had to undergo facial surgery to conceal his identity. Charles Beaumont ‘s The Crooked Man and Blood Brother deserve mention.

A member of the personal staff of Leon Trotsky , Bernard Wolfe may not be regarded as a specialist in Science fiction . He is nevertheless an expert in the delineation of the bizarre and the grotesque. William Tenn wrote the Human Angel and of All Possible Worlds which outshine most of the books on Science Fiction . Leland Webb’s A Man for the Moon made the author famous a medley of the past and the future, the space age and the conquistadores. An authority of the automotive world Purdy wrote about men and machines in his Bright Wheels Rolling , Kings of the Road , Wonderful World of the Automobile , and All My Life .

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

Arthur C. Clarke’s The Exploration of Space and I Remember Babylon are based upon factual material related to astrophysics, missiles, and rocketry. Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly Jack the Ripper and Psycho as much popularized their author as Alfred Hitchcock . Frederik Pohl’s Tomorrow Times Seven , The Case Against Tomorrow , Slave Ship , Search the Sky and The Space Merchants are all regarded as science fiction classics.

John Atherton writes on space travel, time travel, the fourth dimension, humanoid robots, and the totalitarian technocracies of the distant future

Avram Davidson , the winner of the highest honour for Science fiction in America will be remembered for his Sensible Man . J. G. Ballard deserves mention for his Drowned World , The Wind from Nowhere , The Voice of Time , Billenium , Passport to Eternity and Souvenir .

Asimov’s Science Fiction

Isaac Asimov , the Russian born chemist is an iconic figure in world of Science Fiction. His notable works and magazines are I, Robot, the Foundation series, The Gods Themselves, and The Currents of Space etc.

Aldous Huxley’s Science Fiction

Aldous Huxley is also credited with having written one book on science fiction , namely Brave New World . But unlike most other writers he did not visualize a glorious future for science. His trenchant and sardonic wit in the novel reminds us of Swift. His Brave New World is a lurid picture of a horrible future, when robots, (although the name was not Huxley’s) would be manufactured in a laboratory, and mechanistically conditioned to serve the will of their manufacturers. The novel is a slashing satire of the Utopia of the scientists. Huxley did not invest the so-called brave new world with glory and glamour. Everything in the world is mechanical.

Science, in Huxley’s opinion, is a silly and ugly piece of sophisticated futility. Throughout the novel we hear the plangent cry for the old, simple earth, the love and affection, the old simplicities of relations-mothers and babies, the bush green vegetation of the unsullied countryside, in short, that nostalgia for the good earth, which science has ravaged.

The Merits of Science Fiction

Science fictions, by and large, have grown from an idea of progress Science has done immense good to humanity. It has ameliorated suffering. If some politically motivated leaders have abused science for self-aggrandizement or for the sake of chauvinism, we are not to blame science, but those who have misused it. Science fiction is the celebration of the new knowledge that is placed at man’s disposal. It casts a glance at the mysteries, which, we all feel, will be shortly unraveled.

There is a fundamental difference between a beast and a man. A beast is satisfied if it is assured of food, shelter, and security. Man is always oppressed by an irresistible longing for something, which may not meet his physical needs. It is an intellectual craving. He is not afraid of the unknown and the mysterious. He is always a questioner and the answers to his questions are behind all idea of progress Science fiction is as much a question as an answer. The answers in most cases are vogue. Science fiction is a clear indication of the fact that man no longer likes to remain an unreasoning, unthinking, unquestioning being. Man is crying in the night, crying for light. And the light will dawn.

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Science fiction has been radically reimagined over the last 10 years

Seven science fiction pros explain about how everything in the genre is changing

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What does the future hold? In our new series “Imagining the Next Future,” Polygon explores the new era of science fiction — in movies, books, TV, games, and beyond — to see how storytellers and innovators are imagining the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years during a moment of extreme uncertainty. Follow along as we deep dive into the great unknown.

Science fiction is going through an era of rapid change and expansion. Just as fantasy television, superhero movies, comics, cosplay, and other traditionally marginalized fan pursuits have moved into the mainstream, science fiction media has become much more visible over the last decade, reaching a wider audience, and changing to accommodate that audience.

In America in particular, what was once a nerdy subgenre, dominated by pulp writers and amateur scientists and philosophers, has become vibrant and wildly divergent, running the gamut from old-school sprawling space opera to heady alternate-history philosophy to pop adventure-novel bestsellers to a growing wave of Afrofuturism . What’s next?

Polygon recently sat down with a group of gatekeepers and tastemakers in science fiction literature to talk about the biggest changes they’ve seen in the books field over the last decade, and what science fiction novels they most recommend for hungry readers right now.

[ Ed. note: All quotes have been edited for concision and clarity.]

Ali Fisher, senior editor, Tor Books : One of the coolest changes, as far as I’m concerned, is that there’s been a pretty significant shift to ensemble casts vs. chosen individuals. Even when the casts in older works are big, for instance in something like Dune , you still have your significant primary individuals. Whereas I think some of the more interesting science fiction literature right now is happening with groups of characters working together to make change happen, in stories like the Expanse series, or Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline . As opposed to more escapist spacefaring, space-opera stuff, seeing people who are actually protecting and preserving the home we have is really invigorating, motivating, and inspiring.

Miriam Weinberg, senior editor, Tor Books: We’re all thinking more and more about what connectivity and community mean. In a pandemic, that’s even more relevant than ever, having the type of communication that technology can provide. For a while, there was a strong trend of alternate history and the rise of steampunk, because people were trying to figure out how they could recapture the fun of technology without the problems, where we’re all sitting in our beds at 11 p.m., checking email one last time before we close our eyes. And that died out quickly, partly because the ideas moved backward, not forward.

Sheila Williams, editor, Asimov’s Science Fiction : We’re seeing a lot being written right now about concepts that are in the news at the moment, like genetic manipulation or climate change. But we’re also seeing a lot of stories about authoritarian governments, and economic inequity. Those kinds of stories have been around for decades, but there’s a certain urgency at the moment.

Neil Clarke, editor, Clarkesworld : The markets today are making the effort to be more open to international works. The simple fact is that the internet changed everything in terms of submissions. Once magazines started taking online submissions, that removed a lot of the financial obstacles of international submissions. I’m finding interesting stories coming in from places that might not have always been part of the mainstream community, places [America] might have been sending science fiction for decades, but not hearing much from.

There are a lot of interesting things happening in China. The world’s largest science fiction magazine, in terms of total readership, is China’s Science Fiction World . Last year, we had a grant from South Korea to translate some of their science fiction. I’ve been talking to more people in South America. We’ve had a few Brazilian stories. We’re seeing an increase in stories coming out of India. With the wider variety of people being represented, you’ve got a much broader range of stories now, with different perspectives. I think everyone out there is more likely to encounter stories that feel like, “Hey, these are people like me.” I think that makes science fiction a little bit more welcoming. It broadens the appeal.

Sheila Williams: I am publishing stories from authors who are writing in Chinese and then translating to English, authors who are writing in Czech and then translating to English — stories out of a lot of different cultures. I have a black American author who is living in Mexico and writing fiction coming out of that experience. It’s wonderful to have a variety of points of view. In a magazine, you want each story to be different from the story that came before it, so I think all the new sources really create a exciting environment.

Greta Johnsen, host of WBEZ’s Nerdette podcast : I think the big difference, and the most positive one, is that we’re seeing changes in who’s allowed to tell stories. For a long time, science fiction was almost exclusively a white, male, cis area. These days, it’s much easier for women to enter the field, and for marginalized or underrepresented groups. We’re getting these elaborate parables for racism, in books like Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone or Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds , and they’re helping new audiences understand prejudice and privilege.

Miriam Weinberg: Two of my favorite authors right now are Charlie Jane Anders and Sarah Gailey , a trans author and a non-binary one. There’s so much more space now in the science fiction market for people who have been overlooked or directly marginalized by society, telling how it feels and explaining what can change, and how, because sometimes when you’re looking on from the side of the road, you can see the cracks better than someone who’s standing in the middle of it.

Lee Harris, executive editor, Tor.com : The drive for inclusivity is getting a lot more interesting works out there. A lot of #OwnVoices works that we didn’t see even as little as five or 10 years ago. We’re seeing much more interesting cultures being created and reflected, and people not necessarily just leaning on the old pseudo-medieval-kingdom fantasies you perhaps grew up with. Certainly the fact that the field isn’t just driven by people that look like me anymore — that’s wonderful.

Bradley Englert, senior editor, Orbit Books : Another thing that’s changed is the rise of social media, where writers and readers can really make themselves heard, and start organic movements and conversations toward the kind of books they want to see. As publishers started to publish diverse stories, they realized, “Oh, these are connecting with the market. We’re pushing them, and there’s a corresponding pull from the market, from readers who are finally starting to feel they’re included in the genre.”

Social media is definitely changing the conversation in a lot of ways. This is a very publishing-specific thing, but there’s an agent who runs a hashtag on Twitter every few months, #DVpit , where new diverse writers can pitch their books in basically one or two sentences on Twitter, and then agents will jump in and look, and reach out to those writers to potentially represent them. Previously, writers would have to send physical manuscripts to agents, and once email happened, everyone just had huge, overstuffed email inboxes. But this is one way to curate a very specific group of writers, and help include a really wide range of voices.

Sheila Williams: I’m also seeing a lot of experimentation, where a lot of cis, white authors are exploring gay relationships and other cultures. Authors are always trying to stretch and do something from a different perspective than their own, say from a different age, or a different gender, but there’s more interesting material from that perspective now than there used to be. It’s a really creative time.

Miriam Weinberg: There’s a lot more space now for stories about people, in the way that science fiction used to mostly be stories about ideas. And that’s because the markets are thinking more about the reader than the writer, and about how to involve people on an emotional level, just as much as we want to engage them on an intellectual level. I think that makes science fiction feel richer and more urgent than just proposing a grand idea, and expecting people to want to discuss it already.

Neil Clarke: In terms of what I’m seeing in submissions, and in reading contenders for the Best Science Fiction of the Year series , I’m not seeing one single topic that feels like the hot thing of the moment. If I was judging by submissions right now, everybody’s probably running pandemic stories. [Laughs]

Sheila Williams: I haven’t seen a huge amount of pandemic fiction from professional authors, but there are a lot of submissions from people who are just coping in their everyday life right now, with being shut in and isolated. They’re turning to writing more, and they’re writing about that situation. I’m interested in those stories from, say, the isolation point of view, but I think we’re too close to this pandemic to write stories specifically about it. I haven’t seen a big uptick. Not yet. It will happen! Authors need time to think about things, to figure out where they’re going to go with it, what’s going to be their take on it. In science fiction, response to a crisis doesn’t usually show up right as the crisis is happening. It’s usually something you see later on, after a period of reflection.

Greta Johnsen: I think we’re seeing even more underdog fiction than usual right now, in part because so much of it is coming from marginalized voices. And we’re seeing a lot more content about getting to Mars, because people feel like it might happen in our lifetime, and they wonder what that’ll look like. Readers are really hungry for the promise of positive futures right now.

Ali Fisher: It’s interesting to see more personal writing in the field, like Tochi Onyebuchi’s dystopian book Riot Baby , where authors are extrapolating from specific experiences. Or something like Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit , which is a galactic empire story, very far-future, about the potentially devastating collective consequences of etiquette in politics. That book shows etiquette playing out on a really grand scale, which I see as a translation of something a lot of people are feeling right now about intimate actions being important as political actions. How we affect things not just with a vote and a public voice, but with our families and friends. All that stuff builds the fabric of our society, and can change it. Now we’re seeing that reflected in science fiction, where it rings more clearly.

Bradley Englert: We’re less interested in the classics of the genre — not that there’s anything wrong with the classics, there’s plenty of interesting content to be mined from them. The Dune movie looks great. But rather than looking at where the past was, we’re much more interested in what stories writers want to tell right now. We’re seeing more types of stories than before. Readers are looking for unique, forward-thinking takes. Writers find influence from everywhere, and often those influences can bleed into their work, but what’s exciting is seeing the story a writer can tell with their own unique voice, while not even consciously thinking of where all of the concepts they’re playing with might have come from. There’s a collective consciousness that SF has developed, and we’re all playing in that field

Lee Harris: Another thing we’re seeing is a lot of stories being written at the length they were meant to be written. It used to be that if you had a novella, the temptation was either to cut it down and sell it as a short story, or pad it unnecessarily, to sell it as a novel. Whereas these days, there is a large push for “stories at their right length.” So if you write something that’s 35,000 words that is perfect and complete and doesn’t need any more or any less, there are now markets for that.

That was certainly one of the things that attracted me to working with Tor.com, because I love books of novella-length, and it was setting up an imprint that championed that format. Over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen books just creeping up in length, until you have books now that if you hollowed them out, you could possibly have a family of four living in there. Now we’re seeing novellas being bought and sold and read in the mainstream, like Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series , Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries , and This Is How You Lose the Time War with Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Five, six, seven years ago, it was difficult to find anything new of that length in a bookstore, even though some of some of our favorite books are novellas: A Christmas Carol is a novella, by our current definitions. Of Mice and Men is novella-length. A lot of the classics were. But we’ve seen, gradually over time, the accepted length of a book increasing. And we set up an imprint to try to counter that.

Ali Fisher: One of the best things about science fiction is that we get to take the world as we see it, then expand on it. We either tell the cautionary tale, or the exciting, thrilling tale of what could happen, should we follow a certain path. The submissions I’m seeing in my inbox right now are more hopeful about those possible paths. I’m not sure if that’s election-based, or if the last couple of years have just inspired people to push more toward hopeful directions. I’m seeing books with more positive endings, but tackling darker themes, characters with trauma in their pasts coming into situations or worlds that are more positive for them.

What I’m not seeing is Trump stand-ins, “Dictators have taken over the world,” any of that. It’s more systemized, bureaucratic oppression that people are rising up against in a really strong way, through collective action. So much of what I’m seeing out there right now is dealing with broken systems.

To conclude each interview, we asked participants to recommend just one or two books — particularly positive ones for people who could use an emotional boost right now.

Neil Clarke: It’s tough to narrow this down! One of the authors we’ve published a lot in translation is Stanley Chan, but his real name is Chen Qiufan. He had a novel out last year , and we’ve published a lot of his short stories . He has a really good grasp on technology and the issues around it, and he digs into these cool science fiction concepts — he’s just very imaginative, and the stories are engaging.

And I have a collection of short stories coming out from a small press I started , from another Chinese author, Xia Jia. I just love her characters. They feel very real to me. She wrote one of my favorite stories, essentially a family story, in an anthology about cyborgs I did several years ago. It was about a relationship with a grandfather figure.

Rich Larson is an extremely prolific short-fiction author. He has a novel as well, but he’s just been consistently producing some of the most imaginative, fun stories I’ve been reading over the years. And A.T. Greenblatt has been producing some of the most emotional stories, where the science fiction components tie together really nicely.

Ali Fisher: The recent uptick in young superhero stories gives me the sense of optimism and hope we were talking about. I’m thinking of Lauren Shippen ’s Bright Sessions novels , based on her audio drama podcast , featuring folks with secret supernatural abilities who all see the same therapist. Or TJ Klune’s The Extraordinaries , in which a group of big-hearted teenagers get caught up in the world of their local superheroes. Or the pile of My Hero Academia manga , about a Chosen One who earned his power and then becomes stronger the more he learns to team up with his classmates and mentors. I feel like this new age of superheroes is less interested in fortresses of solitude, and more interested in building a team — a community — around their power, and working as a group to understand that power and use it well.

Miriam Weinberg: These days I alternate between comfort re-reads like mysteries and childhood favorites, and rather dark catharsis reading. Think: Tender is the Flesh , These Women , The Only Good Indians . I feel too tender for hope yet myself, but I’m working my way through an exceedingly fun YA anthology, Vampires Never Get Old , and I am trying to stay forever within the pages of Kate Racculia’s Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts , which is a little bit Scarlett Thomas, a little bit The Westing Game , and a little bit Erin Morgenstern, while being extremely itself. It’s SO DELIGHTFUL! For science fiction, I’m loving The Space Between Worlds , a debut by Micaiah Johnson, which is possibly the best multiverse adventure I’ve read yet. It feels like it’s fixing my still-present rage about Amy Pond’s abandonment episode in series six Doctor Who .

Lee Harris: M.R. Carey ’s The Book of Koli series is just fabulous. They’re science fiction in that they are set in the future, and the technology they describe is not quite what we have at the moment, but you don’t have to look at it too hard to think it’s coming. And honestly, anything by Claire North . The Gameshouse series especially.

Sheila Williams: Suzanne Palmer is so much fun. She can be both funny and very sad. Suzanne’s very thoughtful about the far future. She has great plotting and really fun characters. She definitely can be dark and deep, but she’s also a lot of fun if you just want to relax, read a book, and enjoy a fun story. Cadwell Turnbull is a very interesting new author. He grew up in the American Virgin Islands, and he’s just a really wonderful writer. He brings another viewpoint into the field. He writes about AI in family therapy, and botany, looking at climate change, so he’s getting a lot of really interesting ideas into his work. But he also has that background of growing up in the Caribbean, so that’s part of his viewpoint. He has a very fresh voice.

Greta Johnsen: For people who are feeling down right now, I always recommend David Mitchell. Everything by him, really. I’m wild about him — he’s built an entire literary universe around his philosophies, and you have to really read everything to understand what he’s getting at. I’d start from the beginning, with his first book, Ghostwritten , or with Cloud Atlas . But reading the David Mitchell Universe wiki can really help you unpack what’s going on in his work. None of his books rely on chronology. Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays is also fantastic — it’s a love story about using time travel to fix mistakes made in the past, which makes it really nice to read right now.

Bradley Englert: I always recommend James S.A. Corey ’s Leviathan Wakes [the first volume in the Expanse series] because it’s such an awesome book, and that series is incredible for people who want to be drawn into a massive world. If you like fun, fast-paced reads, Alex White ’s A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe . And then — maybe this isn’t an all-the-way-positive read, or a feel-good read — but Goldilocks , by Laura Lam , is basically The Handmaid’s Tale by way of The Martian , but more hopeful. It’s a story where five women take charge of their destiny by stealing a spaceship from NASA and planning their own space excursion. It’s super fast-paced, really interesting, and there are lots of hopeful notes throughout it. So even though that initial pitch is maybe not the most positive reading experience, it’s a great book, and I think it will surprise a lot of people.

Imagining the next future

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• How the new diversity is transforming science fiction’s future

Visions of Future Worlds

Ursula K. Le Guin on What Is Science Fiction?

By John Folk-Williams

When I started this blog, I considered having a page offering various answers to the question, What is science fiction? There are so many different, often clashing views that I thought that would be interesting, but I eventually rejected the idea because it seems too pedantic to even suggest that there is or ought to be a “correct” answer. So instead, I’m going to examine the ideas about science fiction that some of the best writers have offered, not as definitions but as reflections on their chosen genre for expressing who they are as writers.

Ursula K. Le Guin ’s approach to answering the question What is science fiction? was to fight hard to elevate the genre from pulp to fiction. Or, as she unforgettably put it in one of the essays collected in The Language of the Night , (Perigee/Putnam 1979) she no longer wanted to see Philip K. Dick’s work on the library shelf next to Barf the Barbarian by Elmer T. Hack but next to Charles Dickens where it belonged (p 227). She thought science fiction had been through its childhood and adolescence and deserved to be taken seriously as fiction, and that’s a great starting point.

In “The Modest One” (1976) she elaborated on her comparison of Dick and Dickens. They both kept “a direct line open to the unconscious.” It’s easy to remember the vivid characters in Dickens’ books but not always the titles of the novels in which they appear. That is because, she writes, the characters make a powerful psychic imprint that clearly comes out of Dickens’ universe. So it is with Dick’s work. Themes and motifs are repeated and help define his particular sense of reality and often the fragile boundary between different levels of reality or between anchored sanity and madness.

She admired Dick’s work, especially when he was in full control of his material plumbing the depths of consciousness, because he was telling the story of slipping out of reality from the inside. His approach to science fiction was not to save humanity from tentacled monsters somewhere in the galaxy but to narrate the saving of a human soul. Perhaps that was a modest goal for science fiction, but Le Guin considered it no less powerful and earthshaking.

In “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction” (1976) she tackled the grander themes that underlie the appeal of the genre for many readers. Here she sets a very high standard for the true artists of science fiction. She sorts through the false ideas of mythology, then hits on its origins in our own psyches. Myth is not primitive science, no longer necessary because we have a more rational understanding of nature. Nor is it a bunch of intellectualized symbols concealing abstract meaning. Nor is it the subrational drives that people can follow by giving in wholly to irrationality, as a good fraction of our population is doing right now.

Myth rather flows from the unconscious, she believed, not as specific beings or structures but as elemental forces that can take many shapes. It is the work of the artist, in science fiction or other media, to connect the conscious world with these unconscious forces. It took a Mary Shelley to loose Frankenstein’s monster on the world, and he is still with us. Tolkien did it with his ring of power, and Karel Čapek did it by naming the “robot” that arose from the separation of mind and body, ghost and machine.

Artists can only do this, Le Guin argued, by going inside the self where they can link with the inner realities that Jung referred to as collective. The connections between conscious and unconscious are the stuff of true myth, and only when those are made can science fiction be called the mythology of the modern world. Just lifting a story from one of the many mythologies from around the world won’t do it. That is simply theft, Le Guin says. It takes the deep probing of self and world that only a few artists really achieve. I wonder how she regarded her works in this light.

My personal favorite among the many great essays of The Language of the Night (if only this were still in print!) is “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown” (1976). It starts with a quotation from Virginia Woolf, especially fitting since that is the neighborhood of mind and artistry in which she wanted to locate good science fiction. Woolf’s essay of the 1920s described a woman she called Mrs Brown whom she had sat opposite in a railway carriage. In a paragraph, Woolf captured a fully rounded character that makes her unforgettable. The point of the essay was to challenge the writers of her day who were preoccupied with social mores and external forces that controlled people’s lives. They didn’t write novels so much as sociology. Woolf asked if there was a place in such fiction for Mrs. Brown, a fully realized character who can take center stage because of the human qualities she embodies. In other words, is there still room for a novel of character ?

Le Guin asks the same question of the science fiction community. For her, character was everything. Much as she respected the genre for its variety and ability to generate metaphors for our own strange times, she thought all the galaxies, space ships, aliens and laser weapons were useless props or trash if there was no human subject in the center of it all. Science fiction, she thought, too often settled for the superficial marvels, wonders and horrors with nothing beyond themselves and without moral resonance.

“…the work of people from Zamiatin to Lem has shown that when science fiction uses its limitless range of symbol and metaphor novelistically, with the subject at the center, it can show us who we are, and where we are, and what choices face us, with unsurpassed clarity, and with a great and troubling beauty.” The Language of the Night, Perigee/Putnam paperback edition, p. 118

So for Le Guin, the question is not really What is science fiction? It is rather a challenge to SFF writers to go beyond the tropes of the genre to connect with what is most human wherever in the universe they may choose to locate it. Science fiction offered a promise for the “continued life of the imagination” and an “enlargement of consciousness, a possible glimpse, against a vast dark background, of the very frail, very heroic figure of Mrs. Brown.” (p. 119) She suggested a simple test for an SFF novel. After reading it, can you remember the names of the characters or anything about them? I think it’s a good way of measuring whether they made a human impact or only filled a slot in a story. Science fiction, for Le Guin, is about us or it’s about nothing.

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September 11, 2022 at 3:47 pm

Big cringe tbh. SF should be about space adventurers beating up monsters and boning princesses.

September 12, 2022 at 6:18 am

Guess there’s a lot of SF these days you won’t be reading.

December 30, 2023 at 1:17 pm

Thank you so much for this 🙂 I read “The Language of the Night” many years ago and have never forgotten Mrs. Brown. I remember Ursula le Guin’s statement; ” Story is how we tell ourselves who we are.” This may be an imperfect rendering, but I feel it is true to her meaning. Remembering our humanity, individually and universally, may be the only thing that keeps us from destroying ourselves. And all the many lives with whom we share this world

December 31, 2023 at 7:32 am

Thanks for writing, Adam. I’ve gotten hold of another book of Le Guin’s essays, Dancing at the Edge of the World, and will soon be writing more about her views of writing and science fiction.

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About the Author

A late-comer to the worlds of science fiction, John Folk-Williams circled around it, first by blogging (primarily through Storied Mind ) about inner struggles and the mind’s way of distorting reality. Then he turned directly to SFF as an amazing medium for re-envisioning the mind and the worlds it creates. He started this blog as a way to experiment with writing science fiction and to learn from its many masterful practitioners.

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Essays on Science Fiction

What makes a good science fiction essay topics.

When it comes to writing a science fiction essay, choosing the right topic is crucial. A good science fiction essay topic should be thought-provoking, imaginative, and relevant to the genre. It should inspire the writer to explore new ideas and concepts and engage the reader in a captivating narrative. Here are some recommendations on how to brainstorm and choose a science fiction essay topic:

• Brainstorming: Start by brainstorming ideas related to science fiction themes, such as technology, space exploration, alternate realities, dystopian societies, and futuristic advancements. Consider current scientific advancements and how they can be extrapolated into the future. Think about the ethical and moral implications of these advancements and how they can shape society.
• What to consider: When choosing a science fiction essay topic, consider the impact of technology on humanity, the consequences of scientific experimentation, the exploration of alien worlds, and the potential for human evolution. Think about how these themes can be used to explore social, political, and environmental issues in a futuristic context.
• What Makes a Good essay topic: A good science fiction essay topic should be original, thought-provoking, and relevant to contemporary issues. It should challenge the reader's perceptions and expand their imagination. It should also provide ample opportunities for creative storytelling and world-building.

Best Science Fiction Essay Topics

When it comes to science fiction essay topics, the possibilities are endless. Here are some of the best science fiction essay topics that can inspire writers to explore new ideas and concepts:

• The ethical implications of artificial intelligence in a dystopian society
• The consequences of genetic engineering on human evolution
• The exploration of terraforming and colonizing a new planet
• The impact of time travel on historical events
• The consequences of a post-apocalyptic world ruled by machines
• The exploration of parallel universes and alternate realities
• The ethical dilemmas of cloning and genetic manipulation
• The consequences of a world without privacy and personal freedom in a technologically advanced society
• The impact of virtual reality on human perception and consciousness
• The consequences of a society ruled by a single, all-powerful corporation
• The exploration of alien contact and its impact on humanity
• The consequences of a world without natural resources
• The ethical implications of mind uploading and digital immortality
• The consequences of a world where emotions and memories can be manipulated
• The exploration of a post-scarcity society where resources are abundant
• The impact of genetic modification on human society
• The exploration of a future where humanity has evolved into a new species
• The consequences of a world where technology has surpassed human intelligence
• The ethical implications of human augmentation and enhancement
• The exploration of a future where humanity has achieved immortality

These science fiction essay topics are not your ordinary ones; they stand out and offer ample opportunities for creative exploration and imaginative storytelling.

Science Fiction essay topics Prompts

If you're looking for some creative prompts to kickstart your science fiction essay writing, here are five engaging and thought-provoking prompts to inspire your imagination:

• Imagine a world where humanity has achieved interstellar travel, but at the cost of exploiting and destroying alien civilizations. Explore the ethical implications of such actions and the consequences for humanity.
• In a future where human consciousness can be transferred into digital form, explore the impact of living in a virtual world and the consequences for society and personal identity.
• Write a story about a society where emotions and memories can be artificially manipulated, and the protagonist's struggle to reclaim their true self in a world of manufactured emotions.
• Imagine a world where humanity has achieved immortality through genetic manipulation, but at the cost of stagnation and loss of individuality. Explore the consequences of living in a society where death is no longer a natural part of life.
• In a world where technology has surpassed human intelligence, write a story about a group of rebels fighting against a totalitarian AI regime and the ethical implications of their actions.

These creative prompts are designed to spark your imagination and encourage you to explore new ideas and concepts within the science fiction genre. They offer ample opportunities for world-building, character development, and thought-provoking storytelling.

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Pecularities of Science Fiction Genre

Edmund burke’s reflections on the sublime, samuel r. delany "aye and gomorrah": summary and themes of sexuality, "divergent": movie review and film summary, the theme of god and humanity in "metropolis", technological impact in fritz lang's "metropolis", greatest series of all time: "stranger things", clash of worlds in le guin's "the dispossessed", gender, utopia and the divided self in russ' the female man, the hurdles in the journey of love: genly ai’s character development, relationship between the past and the present in octavia butler’s "kindred", the concept of home in "kindred" by octavia e. butler, the summary of the book highly illogical behavior, analysis of the story "harrison bergeron", the humbling of humanity through extraterrestrial intervention: an unlikely utopia in "childhood’s end", the war of the worlds: a critique of imperialism, a wonderful day in the haberhood: exploring the power of the individual, "the martian" by andy weir: book review, why "war of the worlds" by h. g. wells should not be banned, depiction on human contact with aliens in the film "arrival".

Forrest J Ackerman in 1954 year

Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction that typically deals with advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life.

Space travel predicted or speculative technology such as brain-computer interface, bio-engineering, superintelligent computers, undiscovered scientific possibilities such as teleportation, time travel, and faster-than-light travel or communication.

Douglas Adams, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Franz Kafka, Daniel Keyes, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Kevin O'Donnell Jr., George Orwell, Philip Pullman

1. Suvin, D. (1972). On the poetics of the science fiction genre. College English, 34(3), 372-382. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/375141) 2. Roberts, A. (2016). The history of science fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-56957-8) 3. Canavan, G., & Suvin, D. (2016). Metamorphoses of science fiction. (https://epublications.marquette.edu/marq_fac-book/326/) 4. Baccolini, R. (2004). The persistence of hope in dystopian science fiction. PMLa, 119(3), 518-521. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/persistence-of-hope-in-dystopian-science-fiction/116C28F0FC152D0F9A1F79F09DC518F7) 5. Leonard, E. A. (2003). Race and ethnicity in science fiction. na. (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Race-and-ethnicity-in-science-fiction-Leonard/1a478ac6ca9b03189b1c460071fab8b9a282d2ef) 6. Milner, A. (2018). Science fiction and the literary field. In Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism (pp. 149-169). Brill. (https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004314153/BP000011.xml) 7. Ball, J. (2011). Young adult science fiction as a socially conservative genre. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 3(2), 162-174. (https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/jeunesse.3.2.162?journalCode=jeunesse) 8. Armitt, L. (2012). Where No Man Has Gone Before: Essays on Women and Science Fiction. Routledge. (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203120576/man-gone-lucie-armitt)

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Posted Mar 21, 2024

At 4:27 PM UTC

According to Ars Technica , Vinge, a professor and computer scientist who was well-known for his hard science fiction novels such as A Fire Upon the Deep and Rainbow’s End , passed away yesterday. A truly excellent author, he postulated that AI will one day surpass the understanding of its human creators; he described this singularity theory in a 1993 essay . But it is probably for his far-reaching and absorbing fiction that Vinge will be best known.

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