Science fiction

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"Sci Fi", "Scifi", and "Sci-Fi" redirect here. For other uses, see Scifi (disambiguation).
Artwork by David Revoy for the preproduction of the fourth open movie of the Blender Foundation, "Tears of Steel" (project Mango).

Science fiction (often shortened to SF, sci-fi or scifi) is a genre of speculative fiction, typically dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a "literature of ideas."[1] It usually avoids the supernatural, and unlike the related genre of fantasy, historically science-fiction stories were intended to have a grounding in science-based fact or theory at the time the story was created, but this connection is now limited to hard science fiction.[2]


For more details on this topic, see Definitions of science fiction.
Cover of Imagination, August 1958

Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a wide range of subgenres and themes. Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying "science fiction is what we point to when we say it",[3] a definition echoed by author Mark C. Glassy, who argues that the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography: you do not know what it is, but you know it when you see it.[4]

Hugo Gernsback, who was one of the first in using the term "science fiction", described his vision of the genre: "By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision."[5]

In 1970 or 1971, William Atheling Jr. (James Blish) wrote about the English term "science fiction": "Wells used the term originally to cover what we would today call ‘hard’ science fiction, in which a conscientious attempt to be faithful to already known facts (as of the date of writing) was the substrate on which the story was to be built, and if the story was also to contain a miracle, it ought at least not to contain a whole arsenal of them."[6]

According to science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, "a handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method."[7] Rod Serling's definition is "fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible."[8] Lester del Rey wrote, "Even the devoted aficionado—or fan—has a hard time trying to explain what science fiction is", and that the reason for there not being a "full satisfactory definition" is that "there are no easily delineated limits to science fiction."[9]


A person reads from a futuristic wraparound display screen.

Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possible worlds or futures.[10] It is related to, but different from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated physical laws (though some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation).

The settings of science fiction are often contrary to those of consensus reality, but most science fiction relies on a considerable degree of suspension of disbelief, which is facilitated in the reader's mind by potential scientific explanations or solutions to various fictional elements. Science fiction elements include:


For more details on this topic, see History of science fiction.

As a means of understanding the world through speculation and storytelling, science fiction has antecedents which go back to an era when the dividing line separating the mythological from the historical tends to become somewhat blurred, though precursors to science fiction as literature can be seen in Lucian's True History in the 2nd century,[15] some of the Arabian Nights tales,[16][17] The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter in the 10th century[17] and Ibn al-Nafis's Theologus Autodidactus in the 13th century.[18]

A product of the budding Age of Reason and the development of modern science itself, Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1620–1630). Francis Bacon' The New Atlantis (1627),[19] Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657), his The States and Empires of the Sun (1662), Margaret Cavendish's "The Blazing World" (1666),[20] Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Ludvig Holberg's novel Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741) and Voltaire's Micromégas (1752) are some of the first true science fantasy works,[21][22] which often feature the adventures of the protagonist in fictional and fantastical places, or the moon. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered Kepler's work the first science fiction story.[23] It depicts a journey to the Moon and how the Earth's motion is seen from there.

Following the 18th-century development of the novel as a literary form, in the early 19th century, Mary Shelley's books Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826) helped define the form of the science fiction novel, and Brian Aldiss has argued that Frankenstein was the first work of science fiction.[24] Later, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a flight to the moon.[25] More examples appeared throughout the 19th century.

Then with the dawn of new technologies such as electricity, the telegraph, and new forms of powered transportation, writers including H. G. Wells and Jules Verne created a body of work that became popular across broad cross-sections of society.[26] Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with advanced weaponry. It is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth.

In the late 19th century, the term "scientific romance" was used in Britain to describe much of this fiction. This produced additional offshoots, such as the 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott. The term would continue to be used into the early 20th century for writers such as Olaf Stapledon.

In the early 20th century, pulp magazines helped develop a new generation of mainly American SF writers, influenced by Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine.[27] In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, the first of his three-decade-long series of Barsoom novels, situated on Mars and featuring John Carter as the hero. The 1928 publication of Philip Francis Nowlan's original Buck Rogers story, Armageddon 2419, in Amazing Stories was a landmark event. This story led to comic strips featuring Buck Rogers (1929), Brick Bradford (1933), and Flash Gordon (1934). The comic strips and derivative movie serials greatly popularized science fiction.

In the late 1930s, John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Science Fiction, and a critical mass of new writers emerged in New York City in a group called the Futurians, including Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Donald A. Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Judith Merril, and others.[28] Other important writers during this period include E.E. (Doc) Smith, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Olaf Stapledon, and A. E. van Vogt. Working outside the Campbell influence were Ray Bradbury and Stanisław Lem. Campbell's tenure at Astounding is considered to be the beginning of the Golden Age of science fiction, characterized by hard SF stories celebrating scientific achievement and progress.[27] This lasted until post-war technological advances, new magazines such as Galaxy, edited by H. L. Gold, and a new generation of writers began writing stories with less emphasis on the hard sciences and more on the social sciences.

In the 1950s, the Beat generation included speculative writers such as William S. Burroughs. In the 1960s and early 1970s, writers like Frank Herbert, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and Harlan Ellison explored new trends, ideas, and writing styles, while a group of writers, mainly in Britain, became known as the New Wave for their embrace of a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, and a highbrow and self-consciously "literary" or artistic sensibility.[21] In the 1970s, writers like Larry Niven brought new life to hard science fiction.[29] Ursula K. Le Guin and others pioneered soft science fiction.[30]

In the 1980s, cyberpunk authors like William Gibson turned away from the optimism and support for progress of traditional science fiction.[31] This dystopian vision of the near future is described in the work of Philip K. Dick, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, which resulted in the films Blade Runner and Total Recall. The Star Wars franchise helped spark a new interest in space opera.[32] C. J. Cherryh's detailed explorations of alien life and complex scientific challenges influenced a generation of writers.[33]

Emerging themes in the 1990s included environmental issues, the implications of the global Internet and the expanding information universe, questions about biotechnology and nanotechnology, as well as a post-Cold War interest in post-scarcity societies; Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age comprehensively explores these themes. Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels brought the character-driven story back into prominence.[34] The television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) began a torrent of new SF shows, including three further Star Trek continuation shows (Deep Space 9, Voyager, and Enterprise) and Babylon 5.[35] Stargate, a movie about an ancient portal to other gates across the galaxy, was released in 1994. Stargate SG-1, a TV series, premiered on July 27, 1997 and lasted 10 seasons with 214 episodes. Spin-offs include the animated television series Stargate Infinity, the TV series Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe, and the direct-to-DVD films Stargate: The Ark of Truth and Stargate: Continuum. Stargate SG-1 surpassed The X-Files as the longest-running North American science fiction television series, a record later broken by Smallville.[36]

Concern about the rapid pace of technological change crystallized around the concept of the technological singularity, popularized by Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime and then taken up by other authors.[37]

The term "sci-fi"

Forrest J Ackerman is credited with first using the term sci-fi (analogous to the then-trendy "hi-fi") in 1954.[38] As science fiction entered popular culture, writers and fans active in the field came to associate the term with low-budget, low-tech "B-movies" and with low-quality pulp science fiction.[39] By the 1970s, critics within the field such as Terry Carr and Damon Knight were using sci-fi to distinguish hack-work from serious science fiction.[40]

Around 1978 critic Susan Wood and others introduced the use of the odd pronunciation "skiffy" which is intended to be self-deprecating humor but is inconsistent with the documented genesis of the term "sci-fi" (i.e., one would not pronounce "hi-fi" as "hiffy") and Ackerman's own words engraved on his crypt plaque which read "Sci-Fi was My High".[41]

Peter Nicholls writes that "SF" (or "sf") is "the preferred abbreviation within the community of sf writers and readers."[42] David Langford's monthly fanzine Ansible includes a regular section "As Others See Us" which offers numerous examples of "sci-fi" being used in a pejorative sense by people outside the genre.[43]


Science fiction has criticized developing and future technologies, but also initiates innovation and new technology. This topic has been more often discussed in literary and sociological than in scientific forums. Cinema and media theorist Vivian Sobchack examines the dialogue between science fiction films and the technological imagination. Technology impacts artists and how they portray their fictionalized subjects, but the fictional world gives back to science by broadening imagination. How William Shatner Changed the World is a documentary that gave a number of real-world examples of actualized technological imaginations. While more prevalent in the early years of science fiction with writers like Arthur C. Clarke, new authors still find ways to make currently impossible technologies seem closer to being realized.[44]


Hard science fiction

Main article: Hard science fiction
'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' by Neuville and Riou 024, one of the earliest examples of hard science fiction.

Hard science fiction, or "hard SF", is characterized by rigorous attention to accurate detail in the natural sciences, especially physics, astrophysics, and chemistry, or on accurately depicting worlds that more advanced technology may make possible. Some accurate predictions of the future come from the hard science fiction subgenre, but numerous inaccurate predictions have emerged as well.[citation needed] Some hard SF authors have distinguished themselves as working scientists, including Gregory Benford, Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey A. Landis, David Brin,[45] and Robert L. Forward, while mathematician authors include Rudy Rucker and Vernor Vinge. Other noteworthy hard SF authors include Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, Greg Bear, Larry Niven, Robert J. Sawyer, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Sheffield, Ben Bova, Kim Stanley Robinson, Anne McCaffrey, Andy Weir and Greg Egan.

Soft science fiction

Main article: Soft science fiction
Mary Shelly's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, one of the earliest examples of soft science fiction

The description "soft" science fiction may describe works based on social sciences such as psychology, economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. The term is sometimes used to describe improbable plots, absurd "science", and cardboard characters. Noteworthy writers in this category include Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick.[27][46] The term can describe stories focused primarily on character and emotion; SFWA Grand Master Ray Bradbury was an acknowledged master of this art.[47] The Eastern Bloc produced a large quantity of social science fiction, including works by Polish authors Stanislaw Lem and Janusz Zajdel, as well as Soviet authors such as the Strugatsky brothers, Kir Bulychov, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Ivan Yefremov.[48] Some writers blur the boundary between hard and soft science fiction.

Related to social SF and soft SF are utopian and dystopian stories; George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake are examples.



Main article: Cyberpunk

The cyberpunk genre emerged in the early 1980s; combining cybernetics and punk,[49] the term was coined by author Bruce Bethke for his 1980 short story Cyberpunk.[50] The time frame is usually near-future and the settings are often dystopian in nature and characterized by misery. Common themes in cyberpunk include advances in information technology and especially the Internet, visually abstracted as cyberspace, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics and post-democratic societal control where corporations have more influence than governments. Nihilism, post-modernism, and film noir techniques are common elements, and the protagonists may be disaffected or reluctant anti-heroes. Noteworthy authors in this genre are William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and Pat Cadigan. James O'Ehley has called the 1982 film Blade Runner a definitive example of the cyberpunk visual style.[51]

Time travel

Main article: Time travel in fiction

Time-travel stories have antecedents in the 18th and 19th centuries. The first major time-travel novel was Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The most famous is H. G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine, which uses a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively, while Twain's time traveler is struck in the head. The term time machine, coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle. Back to the Future is one of the most popular movie franchises in this category; Doctor Who is a similarly popular long-running television franchise. Stories of this type are complicated by logical problems such as the grandfather paradox,[52] as exemplified in the classic Robert Heinlein story "—All You Zombies—" and the Futurama episode "Roswell That Ends Well." Time travel continues to be a popular subject in modern science fiction, in print, movies, and television.

Alternate history

Main article: Alternate history

Alternative history stories are based on the premise that historical events might have turned out differently. These stories may use time travel to change the past, or may simply set a story in a universe with a different history from our own. Classics in the genre include Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore, in which the South wins the American Civil War, and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, in which Germany and Japan win World War II. The Sidewise Award acknowledges the best works in this subgenre; the name is taken from Murray Leinster's 1934 story Sidewise in Time. Harry Turtledove is one of the most prominent authors in the subgenre and is sometimes called the "master of alternate history".[53]

Military science fiction

Military science fiction is set in the context of conflict between national, interplanetary, or interstellar armed forces; the primary viewpoint characters are usually soldiers. Stories include detail about military technology, procedure, ritual, and history; military stories may use parallels with historical conflicts. Heinlein's Starship Troopers is an early example, along with the Dorsai novels of Gordon Dickson. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is a critique of the genre, a Vietnam-era response to the World War II–style stories of earlier authors.[54] Prominent military SF authors include John Scalzi, John Ringo, David Drake, David Weber, Tom Kratman, Michael Z. Williamson, S. M. Stirling, and John Carr. The publishing company Baen Books is known for cultivating several of these military science fiction authors.[55]


Superhuman stories deal with the emergence of humans who have abilities beyond the normal. This can stem either from natural causes such as in Olaf Stapledon's novel Odd John, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, and Philip Wylie's Gladiator, or be the result of scientific advances, such as the intentional augmentation in A. E. van Vogt's novel Slan. These stories usually focus on the alienation that these beings feel as well as society's reaction to them. These stories have played a role in the real life discussion of human enhancement. Frederik Pohl's Man Plus also belongs to this category.

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic

Apocalyptic fiction is concerned with the end of civilization through war (On the Beach), pandemic (The Last Man), astronomic impact (When Worlds Collide), ecological disaster (The Wind from Nowhere), or some other general disaster or with a world or civilization after such a disaster. Typical of the genre are George R. Stewart's novel Earth Abides and Pat Frank's novel Alas, Babylon. Apocalyptic fiction generally concerns the disaster itself and the direct aftermath, while post-apocalyptic fiction can deal with anything from the near aftermath (as in Cormac McCarthy's The Road) and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake to centuries in the future (as in Stephen Vincent Benét's By The Waters of Babylon and Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood) to hundreds or thousands of years in the future, as in Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker and Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz. Apocalyptic science-fiction is a popular genre in video games. The critically acclaimed role-playing action adventure video game series Fallout is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where civilization is recovering from a nuclear war as survivors struggle to survive and seek to rebuild society.

Space opera

Main article: Space opera

Space opera is adventure science fiction set mainly or entirely in outer space or on sometimes distant planets. The conflict is heroic, and typically on a large scale. It is also used nostalgically, and modern space opera may be an attempt to recapture the sense of wonder of the golden age of science fiction. The pioneer of this subgenre is generally recognized[by whom?] to be Edward E. (Doc) Smith, with his Skylark and Lensman series. George Lucas's Star Wars series is among the most popular and famous franchises in cinematic space opera. It covers epic battles between good and evil throughout an entire galaxy. Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series, Peter F. Hamilton's Void, Night's Dawn, Pandora's Star series, Stephen Hunt's Sliding Void series, Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky are newer examples of this genre.

Space Western

Main article: Space Western

The space Western transposes themes of American Western books and films to a backdrop of futuristic space frontiers. These stories typically involve colony worlds that have only recently been terraformed and/or settled serving as stand-ins for the backdrop of lawlessness and economic expansion that were predominant in the American west. Examples include the Sean Connery film Outland, Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky, Sparks Nevada: Marshall on Mars from the Thrilling Adventure Hour, the Firefly television series, and the film sequel Serenity by Joss Whedon, the videogame series Borderlands as well as the manga and anime series Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, and Trigun.

Social science fiction

Main article: Social science fiction

Social science fiction focuses on themes of society and human nature in a science fiction setting. Since it usually focuses more on speculation about humanity and less on scientific accuracy, it's usually placed within soft science fiction.

Climate fiction

Main article: Climate fiction

Climate fiction is a genre based around themes of reaction to major climate change. It is sometimes called "cli-fi", much as "science fiction" is often shortened to "sci-fi". Cli-fi novels and films are often set in either the present or the near or distant future, but they can also be set in the past. Many cli-fi works raise awareness about the major threats that global warming and climate change present to life on Earth.

Mundane science fiction

Mundane science fiction is a subgenre that is set on Earth and does not include outer space adventures or alien life. Because it focuses on modern day aspects, it is typically associated with hard science fiction.


Main article: Biopunk

Biopunk focuses on biotechnology and subversives. The main underlying theme within these stories is the attempt to change the human body and engineer humans for specific purposes through enhancements in genetic and molecular makeups. Many examples of this subgenre include subjects such as human experimentation, the misuse of biotechnology and synthetic biotechnology. This subgenre also includes works involving human cloning and how clones might exist within human society in the future.

Other subgenres

  • Anthropological science fiction is a subgenre that absorbs and discusses anthropology and the study of human kind. Examples include Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer, and Neanderthal by John Darnton.
  • Kaiju is a Japanese word that literally translates to "strange beast." The word has been translated and defined in English as "monster" and is used to refer to a genre of tokusatsu entertainment. Kaiju films feature large creatures of any form, usually attacking a major city or engaging another (or multiple) monster(s) in battle. The subgenre began in 1954 with Godzilla.
  • Libertarian science fiction is a subgenre focuses on the politics and social order implied by libertarian philosophies with an emphasis on individualism.
  • Comic science fiction is a subgenre that exploits the genre's conventions for comic effect.
  • Feminist science fiction poses questions about social issues such as how society constructs gender roles, the role reproduction plays in defining gender and the unequal political and personal power of men over women. Some of the most notable feminist science fiction works have illustrated these themes using utopias to explore a society in which gender differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, or dystopias to explore worlds in which gender inequalities are intensified, thus asserting a need for feminist work to continue.[56] Joanna Russ's work, and some of Ursula K. Le Guin's work can be thus categorized. Magical feminism is a subgenre of feminist science fiction.
  • Steampunk is based on the idea of futuristic technology existing in the past, usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Popular examples include The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld, Bas-Lag series by China Miéville, as well as Girl Genius web comic by Phil and Kaja Foglio, although seeds of the subgenre may be seen in certain works of Michael Moorcock, Philip José Farmer and Steve Stiles, and in such games as Space: 1889 and Marcus Rowland's Forgotten Futures. Machines are most often powered by steam in this genre (hence the name). Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil is seen as inspiration for writers and artists of the steampunk sub-culture.[57]
  • Science fiction opera is an opera in a science fiction setting without an outer space or multi-planetary setting, thereby distinguishing it from Space opera.
  • Sci-fi action - Sharing many of the conventions of a science fiction film, sci-fi action films emphasizes gun-play, space battles, invented weaponry, and other sci-fi elements weaved into action film premises. Examples include G.I. Samurai, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Matrix, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Island, Star Wars, Aliens, I Robot, Transformers, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Equilibrium, District 9, Serenity, Akira, Paycheck, Predator, Robocop, Avatar, Mad Max 2, Divergent, They Live, Escape From New York,The Fifth Element and Super 8.[58]
  • Science fiction horror – Often revolves around subjects that include but are not limited to killer aliens, mad scientists, and/or experiments gone wrong.
  • Dieselpunk takes over where Steampunk leaves off. These are stories that take over as we usher in the machine-heavy eras of WWI and WWII. The use of diesel-powered machines plays heavily. In this (like its steam counterpart), the focus is on the technology.
  • Science-fiction poetry is poetry that has the characteristics or subject matter of science fiction. Science fiction poetry's main sources are the sciences and the literary movement of science fiction prose. An extended discussion of the field is given in Suzette Haden Elgin's The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook, where she compares and contrasts it to both mainstream poetry and to prose science fiction. The former, she maintains, uses figures of speech unencumbered by noncompliant details, whereas these details can be key elements in science-fiction poetry. Prose in science fiction has the time to develop a setting and a story, whereas a poem in the field is normally constrained by its short length to rely on some device to get a point across quickly. Elgin says that the effectiveness of this kind of poetry pivots around the correct use of presupposition.[59] The Science Fiction Association is an international organization of speculative poets,[60] which gives the annual Rhysling Awards for speculative poetry. An early example of science fiction in poetry is in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Locksley Hall, where he introduces a picture of the future with "When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see...." This poem was written in 1835, near the end of the first Industrial Revolution. Poetry was only sparingly published in traditional science-fiction outlets such as pulp magazines until the New Wave.[61] By the 1980s there were magazines specifically devoted to science-fiction poetry.[61]

Related genres

Other speculative fiction, fantasy, and horror

For more details on this topic, see Speculative fiction.

The broader category of speculative fiction[62] includes science fiction, fantasy, alternate histories (which may have no particular scientific or futuristic component), and even literary stories that contain fantastic elements, such as the work of Jorge Luis Borges or John Barth. For some editors, magic realism is considered to be within the broad definition of speculative fiction.[63]

Afrofuturism and Black Science Fiction

Afrofuturism is a genre of science fiction and speculative fiction which consists largely of the work produced by members of the African diaspora in the Americas. The term "afrofuturism" was coined in 1993 by Mark Dery in his essay "Black to the Future."[64] Afrofuturism largely concerns itself with the social positioning of African Americans in the United States, in the shadow of the legacy left by Slavery in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, and forms of institutionalized racism which extend into the twenty-first century. Afrofuturism's critiques of European colonization and the epistemological frameworks to have come therefrom link it to other pieces of literature to have emerged from the thoughts of Postcolonialism.

The topics which Afrofuturistic works concern themselves include, but are not limited to: the understanding of and resistance to political systems; the importance of scientific and technological advancement to a civilization; and the redefinition of African and African-American histories (especially African-American claims of historical racial ties to the civilization developed in Ancient Egypt). The alienation of individuals (such as women) and non-humans (such as cyborgs) are also of particular interest.

Afrofuturistic works encompass a variety of media and a timespan longer than the coining of the term in 1993. "For better or worse, I am often spoken of as the first African-American science fiction writer," Samuel R. Delany said in an interview with Dark Matter (prose anthologies),[65] recognizing, too, writers of "proto-science fiction" such as black nationalist Martin Delany and M. P. Shiel, a British writer of Creole descent. The musical albums of Sun Ra display a particularly afrofuturist bend, as does his 1972 science fiction film Space Is the Place, an 85-minute chronicle of his attempts to settle the world's black population on his planet. The music of Janelle Monáe has been compared to Sun Ra's and that of George Clinton (musician).


Main article: Fantasy

Fantasy is commonly associated with science fiction, and a number of writers have worked in both genres, while writers such as Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marion Zimmer Bradley have written works that appear to blur the boundary between the two related genres.[66] The authors' professional organization is called the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).[67] SF conventions routinely have programming on fantasy topics,[68] and fantasy authors such as J. K. Rowling have won the highest honor within the science fiction field, the Hugo Award.[69]

In general, science fiction differs from fantasy in that the former concerns things that might someday be possible or that at least embody the pretense of realism. Supernaturalism, usually absent in science fiction, is the distinctive characteristic of fantasy literature. A dictionary definition referring to fantasy literature is "fiction characterized by highly fanciful or supernatural elements." [70] Examples of fantasy supernaturalism include magic (spells, harm to opponents), magical places (Narnia, Oz, Middle Earth, Hogwarts), supernatural creatures (witches, vampires, orcs, trolls), supernatural transportation (flying broomsticks, ruby slippers, windows between worlds), and shapeshifting (beast into man, man into wolf or bear, lion into sheep). Such things are basic themes in fantasy.[71]

Literary critic Fredric Jameson has characterized the difference between the two genres by describing science fiction as turning "on a formal framework determined by concepts of the mode of production rather than those of religion" – that is, science fiction texts are bound by an inner logic based more on historical materialism than on magic or the forces of good and evil.[72] Some narratives are described as being essentially science fiction but "with fantasy elements." The term "science fantasy" is sometimes used to describe such material.[73]

Science fantasy

Main article: Science fantasy

Science fantasy is a genre where elements of science fiction and fantasy co-exist or combine. Stories and franchises that display fictional science as well as supernatural elements, sorcery or/and "magical technology" are considered science fantasy.

Horror fiction

Main article: Horror fiction

Horror fiction is the literature of the unnatural and supernatural, with the aim of unsettling or frightening the reader, sometimes with graphic violence. Historically it has also been known as weird fiction. Although horror is not per se a branch of science fiction, some works of horror literature incorporates science fictional elements. One of the defining classical works of horror, Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, is the first fully realized work of science fiction, where the manufacture of the monster is given a rigorous science-fictional grounding. The works of Edgar Allan Poe also helped define both the science fiction and the horror genres.[74] Today horror is one of the most popular categories of films.[75] Horror is often mistakenly categorized as science fiction at the point of distribution by libraries, video rental outlets, etc.

Supernatural fiction

Main article: Supernatural fiction

Supernatural fiction is a genre that features supernatural and other paranormal phenomenon in stories and settings.


Main article: Spy-Fi (subgenre)

A subgenre of spy fiction that includes significant elements of science fiction.

Mystery fiction

Main article: Mystery fiction

Works in which science and technology are a dominant theme, but based on current reality, may be considered mainstream fiction. Much of the thriller genre would be included, such as the novels of Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton, or the James Bond films.[76] Modernist works from writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, and Stanisław Lem have focused on speculative or existential perspectives on contemporary reality and are on the borderline between SF and the mainstream.[77] According to Robert J. Sawyer, "Science fiction and mystery have a great deal in common. Both prize the intellectual process of puzzle solving, and both require stories to be plausible and hinge on the way things really do work."[78] Isaac Asimov, Walter Mosley, and other writers incorporate mystery elements in their science fiction, and vice versa.

Distinct from the above, a full-fledged Science Fiction Mystery is one which is set in a completely different world from ours, in which the circumstances and motives of the crime committed and the identity of the detective(s) seeking to solve it are of an essentially science fictional character. A prime example is Isaac Asimov's "The Caves of Steel" and its sequels, set in a world thousands of years in the future and presenting the Robot detective R. Daneel Olivaw. An allied genre is the Fantasy Mystery, a detective mystery set in a world of fantasy - such as the Lord Darcy mysteries taking place in a world where magic works, or "The Idylls of the Queen" set in the mythical King Arthur's court.

Superhero fiction

Main article: Superhero fiction

Superhero fiction is a genre characterized by beings with much higher than usual capability and prowess, generally with a desire or need to help the citizens of their chosen country or world by using their powers to defeat natural or superpowered threats. A number of superhero fiction characters involve themselves (either intentionally or accidentally) with science fiction and fact, including advanced technologies, alien worlds, time travel, and interdimensional travel; but the standards of scientific plausibility are lower than with actual science fiction. Authors of this genre include Stan Lee (co-creator of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Iron Man, the X-Men, and the Hulk); Marv Wolfman, the creator of Blade for Marvel Comics, and The New Teen Titans for DC Comics; Dean Wesley Smith (Smallville, Spider-Man, and X-Men novels) and Superman writers Roger Stern and Elliot S! Maggin.

Fandom and community

For more details on this topic, see Science fiction fandom.

Science fiction fandom is the "community of the literature of ideas... the culture in which new ideas emerge and grow before being released into society at large."[79] Members of this community, "fans", are in contact with each other at conventions or clubs, through print or online fanzines, or on the Internet using web sites, mailing lists, and other resources.

SF fandom emerged from the letters column in Amazing Stories magazine. Soon fans began writing letters to each other, and then grouping their comments together in informal publications that became known as fanzines.[80] Once they were in regular contact, fans wanted to meet each other, and they organized local clubs. In the 1930s, the first science fiction conventions gathered fans from a wider area.[81] Conventions, clubs, and fanzines were the dominant form of fan activity, or "fanac", for decades, until the Internet facilitated communication among a much larger population of interested people.


Science fiction is being written worldwide by a diverse population of authors. According to 2013 statistics by the science fiction publisher Tor Books, men outnumber women by 78% to 22% among submissions to the publisher.[82] A controversy about voting slates in the 2015 Hugo Awards highlighted tensions in the science fiction community between a trend of increasingly diverse works and authors being honored by awards, and a backlash by groups of authors and fans who preferred what they considered more traditional science fiction.[83]


For more details on this topic, see List of science fiction awards.

Among the most respected awards for science fiction are the Hugo Award, presented by the World Science Fiction Society at Worldcon; the Nebula Award, presented by SFWA and voted on by the community of authors; and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for short fiction. One notable award for science fiction films is the Saturn Award. It is presented annually by The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films.

There are national awards, like Canada's Prix Aurora Awards, regional awards, like the Endeavour Award presented at Orycon for works from the Pacific Northwest, special interest or subgenre awards like the Chesley Award for art or the World Fantasy Award for fantasy. Magazines may organize reader polls, notably the Locus Award.

Conventions, clubs, and organizations

For more details on this topic, see Science fiction convention.
Pamela Dean reading at Minicon

Conventions (in fandom, shortened as "cons"), are held in cities around the world, catering to a local, regional, national, or international membership. General-interest conventions cover all aspects of science fiction, while others focus on a particular interest like media fandom, filking, etc. Most are organized by volunteers in non-profit groups, though most media-oriented events are organized by commercial promoters. The convention's activities are called the "program", which may include panel discussions, readings, autograph sessions, costume masquerades, and other events. Activities that occur throughout the convention are not part of the program; these commonly include a dealer's room, art show, and hospitality lounge (or "con suites").[84]

Conventions may host award ceremonies; Worldcons present the Hugo Awards each year. SF societies, referred to as "clubs" except in formal contexts, form a year-round base of activities for science fiction fans. They may be associated with an ongoing science fiction convention, or have regular club meetings, or both. Most groups meet in libraries, schools and universities, community centers, pubs or restaurants, or the homes of individual members. Long-established groups like the New England Science Fiction Association and the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society have clubhouses for meetings and storage of convention supplies and research materials.[85] The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) was founded by Damon Knight in 1965 as a non-profit organization to serve the community of professional science fiction authors,[67] 24 years after his essay "Unite or Fie!" had led to the organization of the National Fantasy Fan Federation. Fandom has helped incubate related groups, including media fandom,[86] the Society for Creative Anachronism,[87] gaming,[88] filking, and furry fandom.[89]

Fanzines and online fandom

For more details on this topic, see Science fiction fanzine.

The first science fiction fanzine, The Comet, was published in 1930.[90] Fanzine printing methods have changed over the decades, from the hectograph, the mimeograph, and the ditto machine, to modern photocopying. Distribution volumes rarely justify the cost of commercial printing. Modern fanzines are printed on computer printers or at local copy shops, or they may only be sent as email. The best known fanzine (or "'zine") today is Ansible, edited by David Langford, winner of numerous Hugo awards. Other fanzines to win awards in recent years include File 770, Mimosa, and Plokta.[91] Artists working for fanzines have risen to prominence in the field, including Brad W. Foster, Teddy Harvia, and Joe Mayhew; the Hugos include a category for Best Fan Artists.[91] The earliest organized fandom online was the SF Lovers community, originally a mailing list in the late 1970s with a text archive file that was updated regularly.[92] In the 1980s, Usenet groups greatly expanded the circle of fans online. In the 1990s, the development of the World-Wide Web exploded the community of online fandom by orders of magnitude, with thousands and then literally millions of web sites devoted to science fiction and related genres for all media.[85] Most such sites are small, ephemeral, and/or very narrowly focused, though sites like SF Site and SFcrowsnest offer a broad range of references and reviews about science fiction.

Fan fiction

For more details on this topic, see Fan fiction.

Fan fiction, known to aficionados as "fanfic", is non-commercial fiction created by fans in the setting of an established book, film, video game, or television series.[93] This modern meaning of the term should not be confused with the traditional (pre-1970s) meaning of "fan fiction" within the community of fandom, where the term meant original or parody fiction written by fans and published in fanzines, often with members of fandom as characters therein. Examples of this would include the Goon Defective Agency stories, written starting in 1956 by Irish fan John Berry and published in his and Arthur Thomson's fanzine Retribution. In the last few years, sites have appeared such as Orion's Arm and Galaxiki, which encourage collaborative development of science fiction universes. In some cases, the copyright owners of the books, films, or television series have instructed their lawyers to issue "cease and desist" letters to fans.

Science fiction studies

For more details on this topic, see Science fiction studies.

[Science fiction] is the one real international literary form we have today, and as such has branched out to visual media, interactive media and on to whatever new media the world will invent in the 21st century... crossover issues between the sciences and the humanities are crucial for the century to come.

George Edgar Slusser[94]

The study of science fiction, or science fiction studies, is the critical assessment, interpretation, and discussion of science fiction literature, film, new media, fandom, and fan fiction. Science fiction scholars take science fiction as an object of study in order to better understand it and its relationship to science, technology, politics, and culture-at-large. Science fiction studies has a long history dating back to the turn of the 20th century, but it was not until later that science fiction studies solidified as a discipline with the publication of the academic journals Extrapolation (1959), Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (1972), and Science Fiction Studies (1973), and the establishment of the oldest organizations devoted to the study of science fiction, the Science Fiction Research Association and the Science Fiction Foundation, in 1970. The field has grown considerably since the 1970s with the establishment of more journals, organizations, and conferences with ties to the science fiction scholarship community, and science fiction degree-granting programs such as those offered by the University of Liverpool and Kansas University.

The National Science Foundation has conducted surveys of "Public Attitudes and Public Understanding" of "Science Fiction and Pseudoscience."[95] They write that "Interest in science fiction may affect the way people think about or relate to study found a strong relationship between preference for science fiction novels and support for the space program...The same study also found that students who read science fiction are much more likely than other students to believe that contacting extraterrestrial civilizations is both possible and desirable (Bainbridge 1982).[96]

As serious literature

Mary Shelley wrote a number of science fiction novels including Frankenstein, and is treated as a major Romantic writer.[97] A number of science fiction works have received critical acclaim including Childhood's End and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner). A number of respected writers of mainstream literature have written science fiction, including Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing wrote a series of SF novels, Canopus in Argos, and nearly all of Kurt Vonnegut's works contain science fiction premises or themes.

The scholar Tom Shippey asks a perennial question of science fiction: "What is its relationship to fantasy fiction, is its readership still dominated by male adolescents, is it a taste which will appeal to the mature but non-eccentric literary mind?"[98] In her much reprinted essay "Science Fiction and Mrs Brown,"[99] the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin has approached an answer by first citing the essay written by the English author Virginia Woolf entitled Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown in which she states:

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poets, historians, or pamphleteers.

Le Guin argues that these criteria may be successfully applied to works of science fiction and so answers in the affirmative her rhetorical question posed at the beginning of her essay: "Can a science fiction writer write a novel?"

Tom Shippey[98] in his essay does not dispute this answer but identifies and discusses the essential differences that exists between a science fiction novel and one written outside the field. To this end, he compares George Orwell's Coming Up for Air with Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and concludes that the basic building block and distinguishing feature of a science fiction novel is the presence of the novum, a term Darko Suvin adapts from Ernst Bloch and defines as "a discrete piece of information recognizable as not-true, but also as not-unlike-true, not-flatly- (and in the current state of knowledge) impossible."[100]

In science fiction the style of writing is often relatively clear and straightforward compared to classical literature. Orson Scott Card, an author of both science fiction and non-SF fiction, has postulated that in science fiction the message and intellectual significance of the work is contained within the story itself and, therefore, there need not be stylistic gimmicks or literary games; but that some writers and critics confuse clarity of language with lack of artistic merit. In Card's words:

...a great many writers and critics have based their entire careers on the premise that anything that the general public can understand without mediation is worthless drivel. [...] If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of a job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability.[101]

Science fiction author and physicist Gregory Benford has declared that: "SF is perhaps the defining genre of the twentieth century, although its conquering armies are still camped outside the Rome of the literary citadels."[102] This sense of exclusion was articulated by Jonathan Lethem in an essay published in the Village Voice entitled "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction."[103] Lethem suggests that the point in 1973 when Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula Award, and was passed over in favor of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, stands as "a hidden tombstone marking the death of the hope that SF was about to merge with the mainstream." Among the responses to Lethem was one from the editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction who asked: "When is it [the SF genre] ever going to realize it can't win the game of trying to impress the mainstream?"[104] On this point the journalist and author David Barnett has remarked:[105]

The ongoing, endless war between "literary" fiction and "genre" fiction has well-defined lines in the sand. Genre's foot soldiers think that literary fiction is a collection of meaningless but prettily drawn pictures of the human condition. The literary guard consider genre fiction to be crass, commercial, whizz-bang potboilers. Or so it goes.

Barnett, in an earlier essay had pointed to a new development in this "endless war":[106]

What do novels about a journey across post-apocalyptic America, a clone waitress rebelling against a future society, a world-girdling pipe of special gas keeping mutant creatures at bay, a plan to rid a colonizable new world of dinosaurs, and genetic engineering in a collapsed civilization have in common?

They are all most definitely not science fiction.
Literary readers will probably recognize The Road by Cormac McCarthy, one of the sections of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood from their descriptions above. All of these novels use the tropes of what most people recognize as science fiction, but their authors or publishers have taken great pains to ensure that they are not categorized as such.

World-wide examples

Although perhaps most developed as a genre and community in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, science fiction is a worldwide phenomenon. Organisations devoted to promotion and even translation in particular countries are commonplace, as are country- or language-specific genre awards.


Mohammed Dib, an Algerian writer, wrote a science fiction allegory about his nation's politics, Qui se souvient de la mer (Who Remembers the Sea?) in 1962.[107] Masimba Musodza, a Zimbabwean author, published MunaHacha Maive Nei? the first science-fiction novel in the Shona language,[108] which also holds the distinction of being the first novel in the Shona language to appear as an ebook first before it came out in print. In South Africa, a movie titled District 9 came out in 2009, an apartheid allegory featuring extraterrestrial life forms, produced by Peter Jackson.

Science fiction examines society through shifting power structures (such as the shift of power from humanity to alien overlords). African science fiction often uses this genre norm to situate slavery and the slave trade as an alien abduction. Commonalities in experiences with unknown languages, customs, and culture lend themselves well to this comparison. The subgenre also commonly employs the mechanism of time travel to examine the effects of slavery and forced emigration on the individual and the family.[citation needed]



Indian science fiction, defined loosely as science fiction by writers of Indian descent, began with the English-language publication of Kylas Chundar Dutt's A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 in the Calcutta Literary Gazette (June 6, 1835). Since this story was intended as a political polemic, credit for the first science fiction story is often given to later Bengali authors such as Jagadananda Roy, Hemlal Dutta and the polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose. Eminent film maker and writer Satyajit Ray also enriched Bengali science fiction by writing many short stories as well as science fiction series, Professor Shonku (see Bengali science fiction). Similar traditions exist in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and English.[109] In English, the modern era of Indian speculative fiction began with the works of authors such as Samit Basu, Payal Dhar, Vandana Singh and Anil Menon. Works such as Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome, Salman Rushdie's Grimus, and Boman Desai's The Memory of Elephants are generally classified as magic realist works but make essential use of SF tropes and techniques. In recent years authors in some other Indian languages have begun telling stories in this genre; for example in Punjabi IP Singh and Roop Dhillon have written stories that can clearly be defined as Punjabi science fiction. The latter has coined the term Vachitarvaad to describe such literature.[citation needed]


Muhammed Zafar Iqbal at Ekushey Book Fair, Dhaka in February 2015

Bangladesh has a strong Science fiction literature in South Asia. After Qazi Abdul Halim's Mohasunner Kanna (Tears of the Cosmos) (1970), Humayun Ahmed wrote the first modern Bengali SF novel, Tomader Jonno Valobasa (Love For You All).[citation needed] It was published in 1973. This book is treated as the first full-fledged Bangladeshi science fiction novel.[citation needed] Then he wrote Tara Tinjon (They were Three), Irina, Anonto Nakshatra Bithi (Endless Galaxy), Fiha Somikoron (Fiha Equation) etc.[citation needed]

But Bengali science fiction leaves its cocoon phase holding the hands of Muhammed Zafar Iqbal.[citation needed] Mr. Iqbal wrote a story named Copotronic Sukh Dukho (Copotronic Emotions) when he was a student of Dhaka University.[citation needed] This story was later included in a compilation of Iqbal's work in a book by the same name. Muktodhara, a famous publishing house of Dhaka was the publisher of this book. This collection of science fiction stories gained huge popularity and the new trend of science fiction emerged among Bengali writers and readers. After his first collection, Mr. Iqbal transformed his own science fiction cartoon strip Mohakashe Mohatrash (Terror in the Cosmos) into a novel. All told, Muhammed Zafar Iqbal has written the greatest number of science fiction works in Bengali science fiction.[citation needed]

Following the footsteps of the ancestors, more and more writers, especially young writers started writing science fiction and a new era started in Bengali literature.


Modern science fiction in China mainly depends on the magazine Science Fiction World. A number of works were originally published in it in installments, including the highly successful novel The Three-Body Problem, written by Liu Cixin.


Until recently, there has been little domestic science fiction literature in Korea.[110] Within the small field, the author and critic writing under the nom de plume Djuna has been credited with being the major force.[111] Kim Boyoung, Bae Myunghoon and Kwak Jaesik are also often mentioned as the new generation of Korean science fiction writers of 2010s.[112] The upswing that began in 2009 has been attributed by Shin Junebong to a combination of factors.[113] Shin quotes Djuna as saying, "'It looks like the various literary awards established by one newspaper after another, with hefty sums of prize money, had a big impact.'" [113] Another factor cited was the active use of Web bulletin boards among the then-young writers brought up on translations of Western SF.[114] In spite of the increase, there were still no more than sixty or so authors writing in the field at that time.[113]

Middle East

Chalomot Be'aspamia is an Israeli magazine of short science fiction and fantasy stories. The Prophecies Of Karma, published in 2011, is advertised as the first work of science fiction by an Arabic author, the Lebanese writer Nael Gharzeddine.


France and Belgium

Moonshot from Le Voyage dans la lune (1902), a silent film by George Méliès

Jules Verne, a 19th-century French novelist known for his pioneering science fiction works (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon) is the prime representative of the French legacy of science fiction. French science fiction of the 19th century was also represented with such artists as Albert Robida and Isidore Grandville. In the 20th century, traditions of French science fiction were carried on by writers like Pierre Boulle (best known for his Planet of the Apes), Serge Brussolo, Bernard Werber, René Barjavel and Robert Merle, among others.

In Franco-Belgian comics, bande dessinée ("BD") science-fiction is a well established genre.[citation needed] Notable French science fiction comics include Valerian et Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, a space opera franchise that has lasted since 1967. Metal Hurlant magazine (known in US as Heavy Metal) was one of the largest contributors to francophone science-fiction comics. Its major authors include Jean "Moebius" Giraud, creator of Arzach; Chilean Alejandro Jodorowsky, who created a series of comics, including L'Incal and Les Metabarons, set in Jodoverse; and Enki Bilal with The Nikopol Trilogy. Giraud also contributed to French SF animation, collaborating with René Laloux on several animated features. A number of artists from neighboring countries, such as Spain and Italy, create science fiction and fantasy comics in French aimed at a Franco-Belgian market.[citation needed]

In French cinema, science fiction began with silent film director and visual effects pioneer George Méliès, whose most famous film was Voyage to the Moon, loosely based on books by Verne and Wells. In the 20th and 21st centuries, French science fiction films were represented by René Laloux's animated features, as well as Enki Bilal's adaptation of the Nikopol Trilogy, Immortal. Luc Besson filmed The Fifth Element as a joint Franco-American production.

In the French-speaking world, the colloquial use of the term sci-fi is an accepted Anglicism for the term science fiction.[115] This probably stems from the fact that science fiction writing never expanded there to the extent it did in the English-speaking world, particularly with the dominance of the United States. Nevertheless, France has made a tremendous contribution to science fiction in its seminal stages of development. Although the term "science fiction" is understood in France, their penchant for the "weird and wacky" has a long tradition and is sometimes called "le culte du merveilleux." This uniquely French tradition certainly encompasses what the anglophone world would call French science fiction but also ranges across fairies, Dadaism, and surrealism.[citation needed]


Italy has a vivid history in science fiction, though almost unknown outside its borders. The history of Italian science fiction recognizes a varied roadmap of this genre which spread to a popular level after World War Two, and in particular in the second half of the 1950s, on the wave of American and British literature.[116]

The earliest pioneers may be found in the literature of the fantastic voyage and of the Renaissance Utopia, even in previous masterpieces such as "The Million" of Marco Polo. In the second half of the 19th century stories and short novels of "scientific fantasies" (also known as "incredible stories" or "fantastic" or "adventuristic", "novels of the future times" or "utopic", "of the tomorrow") appeared in Sunday newspaper supplements, in literary magazines, and as booklets published in installments. Added to these, at the beginning of the 20th century, were the most futuristic masterpieces of the great Emilio Salgari, considered by most the father of Italian science fiction, and Yambo and Luigi Motta, well known authors of popular novels of the time, with extraordinary adventures in remote and exotic places, and even works of authors representing known figures of the "top" literature, among them Massimo Bontempelli, Luigi Capuana, Guido Gozzano, Ercole Luigi Morselli.[117]

The true birth of Italian science fiction is placed in 1952, with the publishing of the first specialized magazines, Scienza Fantastica (Fantastic Science) and Urania, and with the appearance of the term "fantascienza" which has become the usual translation of the English term "science fiction." The "Golden Years" span the period 1957-1960.

From the end of the 1950s science fiction became in Italy one of the most popular genres, although its popular success was not followed by critical success. In spite of an active and organized fandom there hasn't been an authentic sustained interest on the part of the Italian cultural élite towards science fiction.[118]

Popular Italian science fiction writers include Gianluigi Zuddas, Giampietro Stocco, Lino Aldani,[119] as well as comic artists, such as Milo Manara. Valerio Evangelisti is the best known modern author of Italian science fiction and fantasy.[120] Also, popular Italian children's writer Gianni Rodari often turned to science fiction aimed at children, most notably, in Gip in the Television.


Director Fritz Lang and cameraman Curt Courant, creators of Metropolis

The main German science fiction writer in the 19th century was Kurd Laßwitz.[121] According to Austrian SF critic Franz Rottensteiner, though significant German novels of a science-fiction nature were published in the first half of the 20th century, SF did not exist as a genre in the country until after World War II and the heavy importing and translation of American works. In the 20th century, during the years of divided Germany, both East and West spawned a number of successful writers. Top East German writers included Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller, as well as Günther Krupkat. West German authors included Carl Amery, Gudrun Pausewang, Wolfgang Jeschke and Frank Schätzing, among others. A well known science fiction book series in the German language is Perry Rhodan, which started in 1961. Having sold over two billion copies (in pulp, paperback and hardcover formats), it is the most successful science fiction book series ever written, worldwide.[122] Current well-known SF authors from Germany are five-time Kurd-Laßwitz-Award winner Andreas Eschbach, whose books The Carpet Makers and Eine Billion Dollar are big successes, and Frank Schätzing, who in his book The Swarm mixes elements of the science thriller with SF elements to an apocalyptic scenario. The most prominent German-speaking author, according to Die Zeit, is[when?] Austrian Herbert W. Franke.[citation needed]

In the 1920s Germany produced a number of critically acclaimed high-budget science fiction and horror films. Metropolis by director Fritz Lang is credited as one of the most influential science fiction films ever made.[123] Other films of the era included Woman in the Moon, Alraune, Algol, Gold, Master of the World, among others. In the second half of the 20th century, East Germany also became a major science fiction film producer, often in a collaboration with fellow Eastern Bloc countries. Films of this era include Eolomea, First Spaceship on Venus and Hard to Be a God.

Russia and ex-Soviet countries

Russians made their first steps to science fiction in the mid-19th century, with utopias by Faddei Bulgarin and Vladimir Odoevsky.[124] However, it was the Soviet era that became the genre's golden age. Soviet writers were prolific,[125] despite limitations set up by state censorship. Early Soviet writers, such as Alexander Belayev, Alexey N. Tolstoy and Vladimir Obruchev, employed Vernian/Wellsian hard science fiction based on scientific predictions.[126] The most notable books of the era include Belayev's Amphibian Man, The Air Seller and Professor Dowell's Head; Tolstoy's Aelita and Engineer Garin's Death Ray. Early Soviet science fiction was influenced by communist ideology and often featured a leftist agenda or anti-capitalist satire. [127] Those few early Soviet books that challenged the communist worldview and satirized the Soviets, such as Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopia We or Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog and Fatal Eggs, were banned from publishing until the 1980s, although they still circulated in fan-made copies.

In the second half of the 20th century, a new generation of writers developed a more complex approach. Social science fiction, concerned with philosophy, ethics, utopian and dystopian ideas, became the prevalent subgenre.[128] The breakthrough was started by Ivan Yefremov's utopian novel Andromeda Nebula (1957). He was soon followed by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who explored darker themes and social satire in their Noon Universe novels, such as Hard to be a God (1964) and Prisoners of Power (1969), as well as in their science fantasy trilogy Monday Begins on Saturday (1964). A good share of Soviet science fiction was aimed at children. Probably the best known[126][129] was Kir Bulychov, who created Alisa Selezneva (1965-2003), a children's space adventure series about a teenage girl from the future.

The Soviet film industry also contributed to the genre, starting from the 1924 film Aelita. Some of early Soviet films, namely Planet of the Storms (1962) and Battle Beyond the Sun (1959), were pirated, re-edited and released in the West under new titles.[130] Late Soviet science fiction films include Mystery of the Third Planet (1981), Ivan Vasilyevich (1973) and Kin-dza-dza! (1986), as well as Andrey Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker, among others.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, science fiction in the former Soviet republics is still written mostly in Russian, which allows an appeal to a broader audience. Aside from Russians themselves, especially notable are Ukrainian writers, who have greatly contributed to science fiction and fantasy in Russian language.[131] Among the most notable post-Soviet authors are H. L. Oldie, Sergey Lukyanenko, Alexander Zorich and Vadim Panov. Russia's film industry, however, has been less successful recently, producing only a few science fiction films, most of them are adaptations of books by the Strugatskys (The Inhabited Island, The Ugly Swans) or Bulychov (Alice's Birthday). Science fiction media in Russia is represented with such magazines as Mir Fantastiki and Esli.


El hotel eléctrico (1905), directed, written and special effects by Segundo de Chomón, can be considered the first Spanish science fiction film, even though the film was made for Pathé.

Spanish science fiction starts mid 19th century; depending on how it is defined, Lunigrafía (1855) from M. Krotse or Una temporada en el más bello de los planetas from Tirso Aguimana de Veca — a trip to Saturn published in 1870-1871, but written in the 1840s — is the first science fiction novel.[132][133][134] As such, science fiction was very popular in the second half of the 19th century, but mainly produced alternate history and post-apocalyptic futures, written by some of the most important authors of the generations of '98 and '14.[135] The influence of Verne also produced some singular works, like Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau's El anacronópete (1887), a story about time travel that predates the publication of The Chronic Argonauts by H. G. Wells; Rafael Zamora y Pérez de Urría's Crímenes literarios (1906), that describes robots and a "brain machine" very similar to our modern laptops; or Frederich Pujulà i Vallès' Homes artificials (1912), the first in Spain about "artificial people".[135][136] But the most prolific were Coronel Ignotus, and Coronel Sirius, who published their adventures in the magazine Biblioteca Novelesco-Científica. The 19th century up to the Spanish Civil War saw no less than four fictional trips to the Moon, one to Venus, five to Mars, one to Jupiter, and one to Saturn.[135][137]

The Spanish Civil War devastated this rich literary landscape. With few exceptions, only the arrival of pulp science fiction in the 1950s would reintroduce the genre in Spanish literature.[138][135] The space opera series La Saga de los Aznar (1953-1958 and 1973-1978) by Pascual Enguídanos won the Hugo Award in 1978.[139] Also in the 1950s started the radio serial for children Diego Valor; inspired by Dan Dare, the serial produced 1200 episodes of 15 min., and spinned a comic (1954-1964), three theater plays (1956-1959) and the first Spanish sf TV series (1958), that has been lost.[140]

Modern, prospective, self-aware science fiction crystallized in the 1970s around the magazine Nueva Dimensión (1968-1983), and its editor Domingo Santos, one of the most important Spanish sf authors of the time.[137][135] Other important authors of the 70s and 80s are Manuel de Pedrolo (Mecanoscrit del segon origen, 1974), Carlos Saiz Cidoncha (La caída del Imperio galáctico, 1978), Rafael Marín (Lágrimas de luz, 1984), and Juan Miguel Aguilera (the Akasa-Puspa saga, 1988-2005).[135] In the 1990s the genre exploded with the creation many small dedicated fanzines, important SF prizes, and the convention HispaCon; Elia Barceló (El mundo de Yarek, 1992), became the most prolific.[135] Other recent authors are Eduardo Vaquerizo (Danza de tinieblas, 2005), Félix J. Palma (The Victorian trilogy, 2008-2014), and Carlos Sisí (Panteón, 2013).[141]

Spain has been continuously producing sf films since the 1960s, at a rate of 5 to 10 per decade. The 1970s was specially prolific; the director, and sreenwriter Juan Piquer Simón is the most important figure of fantaterror, producing some low budget sf films. La cabina (1972) is the most awarded Spanish TV production in history. In the 90s Acción mutante (1992), by Álex de la Iglesia, and Abre los ojos (1997), by Alejandro Amenábar, represent a watershed in Spanish sf filming, with a quality that would only be reached again by Los cronocrímenes (2007), by Nacho Vigalondo.[142][143] The most important sf TV series produced in Spain is El ministerio del tiempo (2015-), even though Mañana puede ser verdad (1964-1964) by Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, and Plutón BRB Nero (2008-2009), should also be mentioned.

Other European countries

Poland is a traditional producer of science fiction and fantasy. The country's most influential science fiction writer of all time is Stanisław Lem, who is probably best known for his science fiction books, such as Solaris and the stories involving Ijon Tichy, but who also wrote very successful hard sci-fi such as The Invincible and the stories involving Pilot Pirx. A number of Lem's books were adapted for screen, both in Poland and abroad. Other notable Polish writers of the genre include Jerzy Żuławski, Janusz A. Zajdel, Konrad Fiałkowski, Jacek Dukaj and Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz.

Czech writer and playwright Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (1920) introduced the word robot into science fiction. Čapek is also known for his satirical science fiction novels and plays, such as War with the Newts and The Absolute at Large. Traditions of Czech science fiction were carried on despite the general political climate by writers like Ludvík Souček, Josef Nesvadba, Ondřej Neff and Jaroslav Velinský. In the years 1980 - 2000 a new vawe of young writers appeared (J. W. Procházka, F. Novotný, E. Hauserová, V. Kadlečková, J. Rečková, E. Dufková).

Early writers of Yugoslav science fiction were mid-19th century Slovene writer Simon Jenko, late 19th century Slovene writers Josip Stritar, Janez Trdina and Janez Mencinger (who, in 1893, published a notable dystopian novel Abadon) and late 19th century Serbian writers Dragutin Ilić and Lazar Komarčić. Since the beginning of the 20th century, a large number of authors incorporated science fiction elements into their work. Scientist Milutin Milanković wrote the book Through Distant Worlds and Times (1928), which mixes elements of autobiography, scientific discussion and science fiction. In the 1930s, Vladimir Bartol wrote a series of science fiction novels. The period after World War II brought the appearance of a large number of writers, most notably the duo Zvonimir Furtinger and Mladen Bjažić, Vid Pečjak and Miha Remec, with some academically acclaimed writers, like Dobrica Ćosić, Erih Koš and Ivan Ivanji, occasionally turning towards science fiction.[144] Serbian writer Borislav Pekić published several science fiction works: Rabies (1983), 1999 (1984), The New Jerusalem (1988) and Atlantis (1988). Zoran Živković wrote a large number of essays on science fiction and one of the first encyclopedias of science fiction in the world. His early novels and stories featured elements of the genre. The films The Rat Savior (1977) by Krsto Papić and Visitors from the Galaxy (1981) by Dušan Vukotić won awards at international festivals. In the first half of the 20th century comic book authors such as Andrija Maurović and Đorđe Lobačev published a number of science fiction works, and since the 1980s comic book artists like Željko Pahek, Igor Kordej and Zoran Janjetov became internationally well-known.[145]


Australia: American David G. Hartwell noted there is "nothing essentially Australian about Australian science-fiction." A number of Australian science-fiction (and fantasy and horror) writers are in fact international English language writers, and their work is published worldwide. This is further explainable by the fact that the Australian inner market is small (with Australian population being around 24 million), and sales abroad are crucial to most Australian writers.[146]

North America

In Canadian Francophone province Québec, Élisabeth Vonarburg and other authors developed a tradition of French-Canadian SF, related to the European French literature. The Prix Boreal was established in 1979 to honor Canadian science fiction works in French. The Prix Aurora Awards (briefly preceded by the Casper Award) were founded in 1980 to recognize and promote the best works of Canadian science fiction in both French and English. Also, due to Canada's bilingualism and the US publishing almost exclusively in English, translation of science fiction prose into French thrives and runs nearly parallel upon a book's publishing in the original English. A sizeable market also exists within Québec for European-written Francophone science fiction literature.

Latin America

Although there is still some controversy as to when science fiction began in Latin America, the earliest works date from the late 19th century. All published in 1875, O Doutor Benignus by the Portuguese Brazilian Augusto Emílio Zaluar, El Maravilloso Viaje del Sr. Nic-Nac by the Argentinian Eduardo Holmberg, and Historia de un Muerto by the Cuban Francisco Calcagno are three of the earliest novels which appeared in the region.[147]

Up to the 1960s, science fiction was the work of isolated writers who did not identify themselves with the genre, but rather used its elements to criticize society, promote their own agendas or tap into the public's interest in pseudo-sciences. It received a boost of respectability after authors such as Horacio Quiroga and Jorge Luis Borges used its elements in their writings. This, in turn, led to the permanent emergence of science fiction in the 1960s and mid-1970s, notably in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Cuba. Magic realism enjoyed parallel growth in Latin America, with a strong regional emphasis on using the form to comment on social issues, similar to social science fiction and speculative fiction in the English world.

Economic turmoil and the suspicious eye of the dictatorial regimes in place reduced the genre's dynamism for the following decade. In the mid-1980s, it became increasingly popular once more. Although led by Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, Latin America now hosts dedicated communities and writers with an increasing use of regional elements to set them apart from English-language science-fiction.[148]

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    Speculative fiction in Ukrainian is living through a hard time today... Speaking of fiction written by Ukrainian citizens, regardless of language (primarily Russian, of course), there's a brighter picture. More than 30 fantasy and science fiction writers are active here, their books are regularly published (in Russia, mostly), they enjoy the readers' love they deserve; many are recipients of prestigious literary awards, including international.
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External links

  • Science Fiction (Bookshelf) at Project Gutenberg
  • SF Hub—resources for science-fiction research, created by the University of Liverpool Library
  • Science fiction fanzines (current and historical) online
  • SFWA "Suggested Reading" list
  • Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame
  • Science Fiction Research Association
  • A selection of articles written by Mike Ashley, Iain Sinclair and others, exploring 19th-century visions of the future. From the British Library’s Discovering Literature website.
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