science fiction

Genre of fiction and film with an imaginary scientific, technological, or futuristic basis. It is sometimes held to have its roots in the works of Mary Shelley, notably Frankenstein (1818). Often taking its ideas and concerns from current ideas in science and the social sciences, science fiction aims to shake up standard perceptions of reality.

Science fiction works often deal with alternative realities, future histories, robots, aliens, utopias and dystopias (often satiric), space and time travel, natural or human-made disasters, and psychic powers. Early practitioners were Jules Verne and H G Wells. In the 20th century the US pulp-magazine tradition of science fiction produced such writers as Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Frank Herbert; a consensus of ‘pure storytelling’ and traditional values was disrupted by writers associated with the British magazine New Worlds (Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, J G Ballard) and by younger US writers (Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, Thomas Disch, Gene Wolfe) who used the form for serious literary purposes and for political and sexual radicalism. Thriving science fiction traditions, only partly influenced by the Anglo-American one, exist in France, Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia. In the 1980s the ‘cyberpunk’ school spread from the USA, spearheaded by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

Science fiction writers include James Tiptree Jr (pen name of Alice Sheldon 1915–1987, USA), Philip K Dick (USA), John Brunner (1934–1995, UK), Samuel Delany (1942– , USA), Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006, Poland), Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (1933–  and 1925–1991, USSR), Harlan Ellison (1934– ), Damon Knight (1922–2002), John Campbell (1910–1971), and Frederik Pohl (1919– ) – the last four all US editors and anthologists.

Many mainstream writers have written science fiction, including Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932), George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949), and Doris Lessing (series of five books Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979–83).

The term was coined 1926 by Hugo Gernsback (1884–1967), editor of the US science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.