science fictionabbreviation SF or sci-fia form of fiction that deals principally with the impact of actual or imagined science upon society or individuals. The term science fiction was popularized, if not invented, in the 1920s by one of the genre’s principal advocates, the American publisher Hugo Gernsback. The Hugo Awards, given annually since 1953 by the World Science Fiction Society, are named after him. These achievement awards are given to the top SF writers, editors, illustrators, films, and “fanzines.”
The world of science fiction

Science fiction is a modern genre. Though writers in antiquity sometimes dealt with themes common to modern science fiction, their stories made no attempt at scientific and technological plausibility, the feature that distinguishes science fiction from earlier speculative writings and other contemporary speculative genres such as fantasy and horror. The genre formally emerged in the West, where the social transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution first led writers and intellectuals to extrapolate the future impact of technology. By the beginning of the 20th century, an array of standard science fiction “sets” had developed around certain themes, among them space travel, robots, alien beings, and time travel (see below Major science fiction themes). The customary “theatrics” of science fiction include prophetic warnings, utopian aspirations, elaborate scenarios for entirely imaginary worlds, titanic disasters, strange voyages, and political agitation of many extremist flavours, presented in the form of sermons, meditations, satires, allegories, and parodies—exhibiting every conceivable attitude toward the process of techno-social change, from cynical despair to cosmic bliss.

Science fiction writers often seek out new scientific and technical developments in order to prognosticate freely the techno-social changes that will shock the readers’ sense of cultural propriety and expand their consciousness. This approach was central to the work of H.G. Wells, a founder of the genre and likely its greatest writer. Wells was an ardent student of the 19th-century British scientist T.H. Huxley, whose vociferous championing of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution earned him the epithet “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Wells’s literary career gives ample evidence of science fiction’s latent radicalism, its affinity for aggressive satire and utopian political agendas, as well as its dire predictions of technological destruction.

This dark dystopian side can be seen especially in the work of T.H. Huxley’s grandson, Aldous Huxley, who was a social satirist, an advocate of psychedelic drugs, and the author of a dystopian classic, Brave New World (1932). The sense of dread was also cultivated by H.P. Lovecraft, who invented the famous Necronomicon, an imaginary book of knowledge so ferocious that any scientist who dares to read it succumbs to madness. On a more personal level, the works of Philip K. Dick (often adapted for film) present metaphysical conundrums about identity, humanity, and the nature of reality. Perhaps bleakest of all, the English philosopher Olaf Stapledon’s mind-stretching novels picture all of human history as a frail, passing bubble in the cold galactic stream of space and time.

Stapledon’s views were rather specialized for the typical science fiction reader. When the genre began to gel in the early 20th century, it was generally disreputable, particularly in the United States, where it first catered to a juvenile audience. Following World War II, science fiction spread throughout the world from its epicentre in the United States, spurred on by ever more staggering scientific feats, from the development of nuclear energy and atomic bombs to the advent of space travel, human visits to the Moon, and the real possibility of cloning human life.

By the 21st century, science fiction had become much more than a literary genre. Its avid followers and practitioners constituted a thriving worldwide subculture. Fans relished the seemingly endless variety of SF-related products and pastimes, including books, movies, television shows, computer games, magazines, paintings, comics, and, increasingly, collectible figurines, Web sites, DVDs, and toy weaponry. They frequently held well-attended, well-organized conventions, at which costumes were worn, handicrafts sold, and folk songs sung.

The evolution of science fiction

Antecedents of science fiction can be found in the remote past. Among the earliest examples is the 2nd-century AD Syrian-born Greek satirist Lucian, who in Trips to the Moon describes sailing to the Moon. Such flights of fancy, or fantastic tales, provided a popular format in which to satirize government, society, and religion while evading libel suits, censorship, and persecution. The clearest forerunner of the genre, however, was the 17th-century swashbuckler Cyrano de Bergerac, who wrote of a voyager to the Moon finding a utopian society of men free from war, disease, and hunger. (See below Utopias and dystopias.) The voyager eats fruit from the biblical tree of knowledge and joins lunar society as a philosopher—that is, until he is expelled from the Moon for blasphemy. Following a short return to Earth, he travels to the Sun, where a society of birds puts him on trial for humanity’s crimes. In creating his diversion, Cyrano took it as his mission to make impossible things seem plausible. Although this and his other SF-like writings were published only posthumously and in various censored versions, Cyrano had a great influence on later satirists and social critics. Two works in particular—Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752)—show Cyrano’s mark with their weird monsters, gross inversions of normalcy, and similar harsh satire.

Another precursor was Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (c. 1771; “The Year 2440”; Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred), a work of French political speculation set in a 25th-century utopian society that worships science. While many writers had depicted some future utopian “Kingdom of God” or a utopian society in some mythical land, this was the first work to postulate a utopian society on Earth in the realizable future. The book was swiftly banned by the French ancien régime, which recognized that Mercier’s fantasy about “the future” was a thin disguise for his subversive revolutionary sentiments. Despite this official sanction—or perhaps because of it—Mercier’s book became an international best seller. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned copies.

The 19th and early 20th centuries
Proto-science fiction

In 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley took the next major step in the evolution of science fiction when she published Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Champions of Shelley as the “mother of science fiction” emphasize her innovative fictional scheme. Abandoning the occult folderol of the conventional Gothic novel, she made her protagonist a practicing “scientist”—though the term scientist was not actually coined until 1834—and gave him an interest in galvanic electricity and vivisection, two of the advanced technologies of the early 1800s. Even though reanimated corpses remain fantastic today, Shelley gave her story an air of scientific plausibility. This masterly manipulation of her readers established a powerful new approach to creating thrilling sensations of wonder and fear. Frankenstein has remained in print since its first publication, and it has been adapted for film repeatedly since the first silent version in 1910. Frankenstein’s monster likewise remained a potent metaphor at the turn of the 21st century, when opponents of genetically engineered food coined the term Frankenfood to express their concern over the unknown effects of the human manipulation of foodstuffs.

Another significant 19th-century forerunner was Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote many works loosely classifiable as science fiction. The Balloon Hoax of 1844, originally published in the New York Sun, is but one example of Poe’s ability to provide meticulous technical descriptions intended to mislead and impress the gullible.

Jules Verne

More significant to the genre’s formation than Poe was Jules Verne, who counted Poe among his influences and was arguably the inventor of science fiction. Verne’s first novel, Paris au XXième siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century)—written in 1863 but not published until 1994—is set in the distant 1960s and contains some of his most accurate prognostications: elevated trains, automobiles, facsimile machines, and computer-like banking machines. Nevertheless, the book’s depiction of a dark and bitter dystopian world without art was too radical for Jules Hetzel, Verne’s publisher.

Hetzel, who published a popular-science magazine for young people, the Magasin illustré d’éducation et de récréation, was a shrewder judge of public taste than Verne. With Hetzel’s editorial guidance, Verne abandoned his far-fetched futurism and set to work on the first of his Voyages extraordinairesCinq semaines en ballon (1863; Five Weeks in a Balloon). In this series of contemporary techno-thrillers, the reader learns of balloons, submarines, trains, mechanical elephants, and many other engineering marvels, all described with unmatchable technical accuracy and droll humour.

Verne’s novels achieved remarkable international success, and he became a legend in his own time. His major works, which were adapted for film many times, remained popular into the 21st century, and the “scientific romance” became a permanent fixture of Western popular entertainment.

Another uncannily prescient figure was the French illustrator Albert Robida. His graphic cartoons (see the figure) and essays appeared in Le Vingtième Siècle (1882; The 20th Century), La Vie électrique (1883; “The Electric Life”), and the particularly ominous and impressive La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887; “War in the 20th Century”). Although Robida’s shrewd extrapolations were created for comic effect, they proved remarkably akin to the 20th century’s reality. In fact, since Robida’s time, science fiction has often proved most prophetic not at its magisterial heights of moral sobriety but at its most louche and peculiar.

Classic British science fiction

Great Britain as well as France experienced a flowering of creative imagination in the 1880s and ’90s. Literary landmarks of the period included such innovative works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and H.G. Wells’s phenomenal trio of The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). Never before had fantastic events of seeming scientific plausibility erupted right in the midst of humdrum daily life. These works used the worldview presented by science to rip aggressively at the fabric of Victorian reality. As the 20th century dawned, many of science fiction’s most common themes—space travel, time travel, utopias and dystopias, and encounters with alien beings—bore British postmarks.

The technophilic tenor of the times, as well as 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism, also inspired a reaction from those who longed for a return to a preindustrial life. William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) envisioned a 21st-century pastoral utopia that combined the author’s socialist theories with the lucid and placid values of the 14th century. While some critics dismissed Morris’s work as a communist tract, C.S. Lewis praised its style and language. Indeed, Lewis, Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, J.R.R. Tolkien, and a growing host of imitators imbued pastoral settings with heroic and mythic elements, often borrowing from Christian ethos. Examples of this type of work existed even across the Atlantic, notably in two novels by William Dean Howells, the dean of late 19th-century American letters. In Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), he described Altruria, a utopian world that combined the foundations of Christianity and the U.S. Constitution to produce an “ethical socialism” by which society was guided. Though heroic fantasy remained a minority taste in Britain and elsewhere for many decades, during the second half of the 20th century, it began to dominate bookstore shelves and book clubs (see Science fiction after World War II).

Mass markets and juvenile science fiction

Publishing trends brought about an important shift in the development of the genre. The most crucial change in Britain was a decline in the publication of “three-decker” Victorian novels and an accompanying expansion of magazine publication. This adjustment proved highly advantageous to shorter works of science fiction. It brought about a new subgenre, as seen, for example, in George Chesney’s short story The Battle of Dorking (1871). First published in Blackwood’s Magazine, The Battle of Dorking darkly postulated a Prussian defeat of a poorly armed, weak, and unwary Britain and established the military techno-thriller. Chesney used his urgent narrative of the near future to warn against what he perceived as symptoms of Britain’s decline.

Magazine publication was encouraged by an even more pronounced publishing trend that began in the early 1880s. With the development of a cheap process for converting wood pulp into paper and the increasing mechanization of the printing process, inexpensive “pulp” magazines began to deliver stories to a mass audience. During this period in the United States, “dime novels” (shoddily produced pamphlets that usually sold for a nickel) and boys’ adventure magazines proliferated. The stories distributed in these books and magazines, such as Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder (1884), often boasted SF elements that appealed to the young reader’s sense of wonder and adventure. While Verne’s influence is evident in them, dime novels lacked both Verne’s knowledge of technology and his literary skill. Senarens’s work, for example, epitomizes the worst aspects of the type: they are poorly written and filled with sadistic racism directed toward Native Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, Mexicans, and Jews.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his serialized story Under the Moons of Mars (1912; novelized as A Princess of Mars and Under the Moons of Mars), transformed European-style “literary” science fiction into a distinctly American genre directed at a juvenile audience. Combining European elements of fantasy and horror with the naive expansionist style of early American westerns, Burroughs had his hero John Carter outwit various inferior green, yellow, and black Martians. He also marries a red Martian and has a child by her, despite the fact that shereproduces she reproduces by laying eggs. Burroughs’s hero remained an SF archetype, especially for “space operas,” through the 1950s.

The success of juvenile SF stories inculcated a love of science fiction that culminated in the founding of adult-oriented SF pulp magazines in the 1920s, a circumstance that moved the centre of the genre decisively into American hands.

The “golden age” of science fiction

The previously mentioned Hugo Gernsback, an emigrant from Luxembourg based in New York City, made a living publishing technical magazines for radio and electrical enthusiasts. Noting the growing fondness of his youthful audience for fictional accounts of thrilling technical wonders, Gernsback began to republish the works of Verne and Poe and the early writings of H.G. Wells in great profusion.

Gernsback’s magazine Amazing Stories (founded 1926) broke ground for many imitators and successors, including his own later periodicals Science Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories, and Scientific Detective Monthly (later known as Amazing Detective Tales), and a torrent of other pulp publications. This practice soon yielded so much fruit that many people, especially Americans, falsely assumed that Americans had created science fiction.

By 1934 SF readership in the United States was large enough to support the establishment of the Science Fiction League, Gernsback’s professionally sponsored fan organization (with local chapters in the United Kingdom and Australia). Like a kind of freemasonry, SF fandom spread across the United States. Eager young devotees soon had their own stories published, and, as time passed, they became the hardened, canny professionals of the SF pulp world. Literary groups such as New York’s Futurians, Milwaukee’s Fictioneers, and the Los Angeles Science Fiction League argued ideology in amateur presses. Conventions were held, feuds and friendships flourished, and science fiction began its long climb, never to respectability but rather toward mass acceptance.

Another influential figure was John W. Campbell, Jr., who from 1937 to 1971 edited Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell’s insistence on accurate scientific research (he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his B.S. in physics from Duke University) and some sense of literary style shaped the career of almost every major American science fiction writer from the period. As a writer, Campbell is noteworthy for his story Who Goes There? (1938) and its two film versions, The Thing (1951 and 1982), but he is best remembered as an editor. Many fans refer to Campbell’s early years at Astounding, roughly 1938–46, with its frequent publication of stories by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. Van Vogt, and Theodore Sturgeon, as SF’s golden age.

Certain literary critics countered wittily that the “golden age” of science fiction is the chronological age of 14—the reputed age at which many fans become hooked on science fiction and the all-too-typical literary level of a genre relished far more for its new scientific “ideas” than its literary merits. Nevertheless, even the sharpest critic would have to admit that for all its often juvenile nature—particularly as conceived in the United States—science fiction was a singular source of scientific wonder and discovery that inspired generations of scientists and engineers to pursue in reality what they had dreamed about in their youth.

Soviet science fiction

Only the gargantuan world of Soviet state publishing could match the production of U.S. science fiction. The Soviet promotion of “scientific socialism” created a vital breathing space for science fiction within Soviet society. The genre’s often allegorical nature gave Soviet writers of science fiction many creative opportunities for relatively free expression.

Soviet science fiction was broad and deep enough to spawn several subgenres, such as the techno-thriller Red Detective stories of Marxist world revolution and many Cosmonaut space operas. Among its masterpieces were the Constructivist silent film Aelita (1924), based on the 1923 novel of the same title by Aleksey Tolstoy. The film’s imaginative set and costume designs had a strong artistic influence on Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927). Both Aelita’s design and its scenes of an Earthman leading a Martian proletarian revolt against an oppressive regime were echoed in the 1930s American film serial Flash Gordon. Another notable work of this period was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s My (written in 1920, circulated in manuscript and not published in Russian until 1952; translated into English as We in 1924), which won a wide readership overseas, though the author’s satiric daring led to his banishment under Joseph Stalin. The book’s depiction of life under a totalitarian state influenced the other two great dystopian novels of the 20th century, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).

Science fiction after World War II
New directions in fiction

After World War II, publishers largely abandoned the pulps in favour of paperback books and paperback-like “digests.” By that time, however, science fiction had inspired such passionate devotion that it moved with ease into small specialty presses. Two new digest magazines in particular—The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949– ) and Galaxy Science Fiction (1950–80)—prospered. Science fiction also grew in popular esteem after the advent of the atomic bomb (1945) and the launch of Sputnik (1957).

Under the editorial guidance of the new SF digests, American science fiction of the 1950s became more sophisticated, urbane, and satiric, with raw technophilia waning in favour of more anthropologically based speculation about societies and cultures. Many books (and film adaptations) from the decade were rife with Cold War-induced fear and paranoia. Perhaps the most representative novel is Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960; first serialized, 1955–57), which describes the postnuclear holocaust efforts of a Catholic religious order to preserve knowledge. Another work, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955; made into a film classic in 1956), in a clear case of communist paranoia, relates the story of ordinary people being replaced by look-alikes who operate as part of a collective body.

Science fiction films of the period, with a few notable exceptions—such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Forbidden Planet (1956)—tended to be cheaply produced, juvenile, formulaic films about alien invasions and monstrous mutants. (It was during this era that the Japanese produced numerous Godzilla movies.) In the genre’s fiction, however, the American trio of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury—later joined by Briton Arthur C. Clarke—enjoyed worldwide fame and unmatched popularity during the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s. In fact, Anglophone science fiction was dominant during the 1950s and ’60s, though authors from other countries—such as the Polish fantastyka writer Stanisław Lem and the literary Italian Italo Calvino, with his fantascienza—also advanced the genre.

Change was also in the air in Soviet Russia. The political and cultural thaw that occurred during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, when restrictions on Russian artists were relaxed, and the Russian-led dawn of the space age caused a dramatic upsurge in Soviet science fiction, including works by Ivan Yefremov, Kir Bulychev, and the renowned doyens of Russian-language science fiction, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A similar surge in Chinese science fiction accompanied the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In fact, at the start of the 21st century, China’s main science fiction magazine claimed a readership of 500,000, dwarfing the circulation of any science fiction publication in the West.

In Britain and the United States, the editorial polemics of Michael Moorcock (associated for many years with New Worlds and its anthologies) and Harlan Ellison (Dangerous Visions [1967] and Again, Dangerous Visions [1972]) led a rebellious New Wave movement that facilitated the genre’s move in fresh directions. Sporting a countercultural disregard of taboos (particularly with regard to morals and sexuality), a fascination with mind-altering drugs and Eastern religions, and an interest in experimental literary styles, the movement pushed the boundaries of traditional science fiction until the genre was almost unrecognizable. Most avant-garde experimentalism had vanished by the late 1970s, but by then the New Wave had vastly expanded the subgenre of “soft” science fiction. (“Soft” SF is typically more concerned with exploring social aspects of the near future and of “inner space,” while “hard” science fiction features technology-for-technology’s-sake.)

SF cinema and TV

In contrast to earlier decades, traditional science fiction of the late 1960s and early ’70s reached unprecedented popularity on television and in film. American SF television series, such as Star Trek (1966–69; founded by Gene Roddenberry), may have primed film producers and audiences alike for cinema adaptations of “serious” science fiction. Fahrenheit 451 (1966), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Charly (1968)—based on works by Bradbury, Clarke, and Daniel Keyes, respectively—earned critical praise and attracted a growing number of directors and actors to the genre. If any doubt remained about the commercial viability of SF cinema, the blockbuster movies Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) proved that science fiction had finally moved beyond its drive-in B-film status. In fact, U.S. box-office receipts for science fiction, fantasy, and horror films jumped from 5 percent in 1971 to nearly 50 percent by 1982; although the share fell somewhat in subsequent years, science fiction continued to be one of the most important Hollywood movie formats.

Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), prefigured the 1980s phenomenon known as cyberpunk. It combined a fascination for cybernetics (the science of communication and control theory, especially with regard to the human nervous system and brain) with a “punk,” or alienated, social consciousness, thus melding elements of soft and hard science fiction. William Gibson in Neuromancer (1984) coined the word cyberspace to describe a computer-mediated virtual world into which humans plugged their brains. Other works of this subgenre include John Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin’ (1980), Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985), and Lewis Shiner’s Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988). The explosive growth of the computer industry in the 1990s and the new forums for expressing alienation presented by the Internet gave cyberpunk writing a bracing sense of immediate relevancy.

The spectacular nature of science fiction’s thematics played very strongly to Hollywood’s technical advantages over rival cinemas in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, and Mumbai (then Bombay). After the 1970s, the American SF film with its state-of-the-art special effects became science fiction’s public face. Science fiction films such as the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003), the Alien series (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997), and the Jurassic Park series (1993, 1997, 2001) became major money earners worldwide.

Heroic fantasy, which had remained a minority taste in Britain and elsewhere for many decades, captivated a new generation and emerged in the 1990s as a dominant subgenre known to devotees as “sword and sorcery.” One indication of the changing commercial reality was the 1992 reorganization of SF’s largest professional association, the Science Fiction Writers of America, into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. Undreamed-of book sales of such fantasy works as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997; U.S. title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) and succeeding volumes brought wildly successful film adaptations of the Harry Potter books (2001, 2002, 2004, and on) as well as of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, and 2003).

Major science fiction themes
Utopias and dystopias

Sir Thomas More’s learned satire Utopia (1516)—the title is based on a pun of the Greek words eutopia (“good place”) and outopia (“no place”)—shed an analytic light on 16th-century England along rational, humanistic lines. Utopia portrayed an ideal society in a hypothetical “no-place” so that More would be perceived as undertaking a thought experiment, giving no direct offense to established interests.

Since More’s time, utopias have been attractive primarily to fringe political thinkers who have little practical redress within the power structures of the day. Under these conditions, a published thought experiment that airs hidden discontents can strike with revelatory force and find a broad popular response.

Utopias can be extravagant castles-in-the-air, nostalgic Shangri-Las, provocative satires, and rank political tracks thinly disguised as novels. Society’s esteem for utopian thinking has fluctuated with the times. The failure of Soviet communism caused an immense archive of utopian work to shift catastrophically in value from sober social engineering to dusty irrelevancy. The line between reforming insight and political crankdom is often thin.

Utopias thrived amid the 19th century’s infatuation with scientific progress. Many philosophers—Karl Marx included—thought that historical forces and the steady accumulation of rational knowledge would someday yield an “end state” for history. According to this way of thinking, the thoughtful futurist needed only to spot and nurture tomorrow’s dominant progressive trends and kill off the feudal superstitions of false consciousness; then social perfection would arrive as surely as the ticking of a clock.

Fictional successes along this line included Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), in which a Bostonian awakes from a mystical sleep in the year 2000 to find industry nationalized, equal distribution of wealth to all citizens, and class divisions eradicated—a process that Bellamy called Nationalism. Bellamy Nationalist clubs sprang up nationwide to discuss his ideals, and the Nationalists were represented at the 1891 Populist Party convention; socialist leader Eugene V. Debs adopted many of the tenets of the Nationalist program. William Morris, who was appalled by Bellamy’s depiction of a rational, bureaucratized industrial state, countered with News from Nowhere, a British vision of a pastoral utopia.

German politician Walther Rathenau wrote technological utopias, Von Kommenden Dingen (1917; In Days to Come) and Der neue Staat (1919; The New Society), in which he rejected nationalized industries in favour of greater worker participation in management; in the turbulence of Weimar society, he was assassinated by anti-Semitic nationalists.

H.G. Wells became a particularly ardent and tireless socialist campaigner. In works such as A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928), and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), he foresaw a rationalized, technocratic society. Yet Wells lived long enough to see the atomic bomb, and his last essay, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), darkly prophesied extinction for the human race, which, in his later opinion, lacked the creative flexibility to control its own affairs.

In B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), rewards and punishments are employed to condition the members of a small communal society. In Walden Two Revisited (1976), Skinner was more explicit: “Russia after fifty years is not a model we wish to emulate. China may be closer to the solutions I have been talking about, but a communist revolution in America is hard to imagine.”

Technocratic utopias like those envisioned by Wells and Skinner have a serious conceptual difficulty: where, how, and why is the process of “improvement” to stop? It is hard to champion “progress” by depicting a world in which further progress is impossible. This paradox does not apply to the pastoral utopia, which turns its back on technology to seek a timeless world of stability and peace. The pastoral utopia generally functions as an imaginary refuge from the technological forces that are so visibly warping the author’s real-world landscape. Pastorals tend to be quiet, thoughtful village retreats devoid of smokestacks, newspapers, bank loans, and annoying traffic jams. Major works in this vein include Morris’s News from Nowhere, Samuel Butler’s satiric Erewhon (1872), James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic Island (1962), and Ernest Callenbach’s green postindustrial Ecotopia (1975).

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) depicts an anarchist state striving to fulfill its own ideals, but like most modern SF utopias, it emphasizes ambiguity rather than claiming that history is on the author’s side. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian Trilogy—Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996)—describes planetary settlers creating an idealist pioneer society under Martian physical conditions.


Utopias commonly featured “moderns” undergoing a conversion experience to the utopian mind-set—after which, all action stopped. In dystopias, a character representing moderns is excitingly chased down, persecuted, degraded, and commonly killed. In Huxley’s Brave New World, an intellectual dissident is singled out and exiled by fatuous world rulers anxious to preserve their numbing status quo. George Orwell’s hellish Nineteen Eighty-four stopped the march of history in its tracks with its famous image of the future as “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Terry Gilliam’s satiric film Brazil (1985) veers between pathos and absurdity with its bizarre blend of Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future and Kafkaesque elements.

E.M. Forster’s much-anthologized story The Machine Stops (1909) was written as a counterblast to Wellsian technical optimism. The story depicts a soulless push-button, heavily networked world. The sudden collapse of Forster’s dystopia supplies motive force to the plot—a scheme so common in science fiction that it is known as the “house-of-cards” plot.

In Norman Spinrad’s black comedy The Iron Dream (1972), a frustrated Adolf Hitler immigrates and becomes an American pulp SF novelist, to weirdly convincing effect. Whether pleasant or sinister, heavenly or apocalyptic, utopias and dystopias shared a sublime sense of ahistoricality. All solutions were necessarily final solutions, and the triumph, or calamity, would surely last at least a thousand years.

Alternative societies

If one abandons the odd notion that the passage of time must make things worse or better, the spectrum of possibility expands dramatically. Science fiction writers have spent much effort conceiving societies that are neither perfect nor horrific but excitingly different, alien to human experience. Robert Heinlein’s greatest popular success, the novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), paints the fate of a prophet and social reformer who was raised by Martians. A Martian human has no earthly shibboleths, so the story’s weird hero cuts briskly through almost every pious human custom relating to sex, death, religion, and money. For obvious reasons, Heinlein’s work was a countercultural icon in the 1960s.

Many SF writers, like Heinlein, took particular pleasure in upsetting the most basic tenets of the human condition. John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977) is an archive of methods to shatter old human verities: characters die and are reborn as clones, change sex with ease and alacrity, make backup tapes of their personalities, and undergo drastic acts of surgery—all in a space-dwelling society that accepts such things as normal.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer, mentioned above, was widely noted for its intense depiction of a postnational world order ruled by feudal global corporations. Artificial intelligences, owned by the wealthy few, are hugely powerful entities, yet they pass almost unheeded over a seething, fractured society of outlaw geneticists, information criminals, colourful street gangs, and orbiting Rastafarians.

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), a future globalized society has abandoned conventional land-based government and reformed itself along the lines of electronic cults and mobile interest groups. The Mafia delivers pizza, the CIA is a for-profit organization, Hong Kong is a global franchise of capitalist Chinatowns, and life online is often of more consequence than real life.

Sex and gender

Because it is difficult to legislate relations between the sexes by conventional political reform, and because works of fiction can present a multiplicity of new arrangements, science fiction has had a particular affinity for feminism, and the attraction was mutual. In Mizora (1890), Mary Bradley Lane presented an early feminist utopia, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Herland (1915) imagined a society of women who reproduce by parthenogenesis.

The subject also interested some male authors. Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X (1960) examined the limits of gender in a world where sexuality and reproduction are surgical add-ons. One of the more thoughtful explorations of the theme was Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which posited a human society on a distant planet where humans have no sexual identity but become sexual beings for a brief period once a month; each can become either male or female during this time. Le Guin works out the consequences of this sort of arrangement in meticulous anthropological detail and creates a revelatory tour de force.

Because science fiction was by nature receptive to technical solutions to all sorts of issues, including gender, readers embraced Shulamith Firestone’s feminist tract The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution (1970); though the book was not written with a science fiction audience in mind, it nevertheless declared that women could never be free of oppression until the physical acts of childbearing and child rearing were industrialized. The influence of Firestone’s book could be seen in works such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines (1978).

Although feminist SF tended to hope for gender justice and to declare “if only” rather than to ask “what if,” a powerful dystopian school of feminist science fiction suggested that relationships between men and women might slide from poor to downright catastrophic. Nazi cults of crazed masculinity haunt Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937). Joanna Russ’s much-praised The Female Man (1975) suggests through its title that “femininity” is a weird condition forced on one by oppressors. Even Russ’s feminist classic paled by comparison to Margaret Atwood’s evocative dystopian misogyny in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Drawn from dark contemporary trends, the bitter world of The Handmaid’s Tale is ruled by a repressive American religious regime. This dystopia finally collapses from its own hostility to women—to be succeeded by yet another historical epoch. In this sense, The Handmaid’s Tale makes an intellectual peace with historical process and transcends the customary limits of utopias and dystopias.

Alien encounters

Since human beings are the only known form of fully sentient life, any encounter with nonhuman intelligence is necessarily speculative. Writers in the 17th and 18th centuries produced many tales of travel to and from other inhabited worlds, but works such as Voltaire’s Micromégas did not depict Saturnians as alien beings; they were men, though of Saturn-sized proportions.

A fuller knowledge of natural history enabled writers to imagine that life on other worlds might develop differently from life on Earth. In 1864 the astronomer and science popularizer Camille Flammarion published Les Mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (“Imaginary Worlds and Real Worlds”), depicting otherworldly forms of life that could evolve within alien biological environments. This Gallic conceptual breakthrough was first exploited in fiction by J.H. Rosny Aîné, whose short story Les Xipéhuz (1887) describes an evolutionary war of extermination between prehistoric humans and a menacing crystal-based life-form.

Aliens were thus first conceived as Darwinian competitors with mankind, a scheme worked out in spooky Huxleyan detail by H.G. Wells, whose slimy, bloodsucking Martians possessed intellects “vast, and cool, and unsympathetic.” Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) was all the more successful for its implication that the highly advanced British Empire was finally experiencing from the other side the gunboat diplomacy that it had meted out to others. In 1938 Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds was mistaken by the gullible for actual news reportage of marauding Martians sacking and looting New Jersey. The episode provoked a famous attack of mass panic, making it perhaps the most famous radio drama of all time.

Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901) boosted antlike aliens into a sinister lunar analog for human society. The spate of alien invasion stories that followed were often strident in tone and genocidal in their predictions of coming doom. The “bug-eyed monster” became a staple of science fiction. Stanley G. Weinbaum won immediate and lasting acclaim with his more sophisticated approach in A Martian Odyssey (1934), which presented aliens whose behaviour, though whimsical, harmless, and colourful, was profoundly inexplicable to human mentality. In Raymond Z. Gallun’s Old Faithful (1934), the Martians tended to be quite decent sorts.

Authors of “serious” literature, such as Olaf Stapledon, also dealt with alien life forms. His Star Maker (1937) follows an Englishman whose disembodied mind travels across space and time, observing aliens as metaphysical actors in a fiery cosmic drama remote from all human concern, and encounters the creator of the universe (Star Maker). This critically acclaimed book is more a philosophical treatise on science, human nature, and God than a traditional novel. Stapledon’s descriptions and social-philosophical discourses on galactic empires, symbiotic alien life-forms, genetic engineering, ecology, and overpopulation inspired a number of SF writers, including Arthur C. Clarke, during the 1940s and ’50s.

As dramatic actors within a narrative, aliens pose unique difficulties. If too humanlike, they are of little use; if genuinely alien, they defy the fictional conventionalities of motive, conflict, and plot. In Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1961; filmed 1972, 2002), the sentience on an alien planet is so metaphysically distant from humanity that it causes its cosmonaut investigators to hallucinate and collapse. The Solaris alien is a permanent enigma, completely unframable by any human thought process. Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1954) was a tour de force in that its hero is a tiny, intelligent centipede-like creature who breathes poison gas in the crushing gravity of an alien world. This description alone makes it clear just how difficult imagining the alien can be. As a result, science fiction writers often centred their energies on a first contact with aliens, such as those found in Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). In the “first contact” narrative, one can enjoy the novel thrill of alienness without having to confront the implications of everyday interactions with aliens.

Alien-invasion motifs persist in science fiction, as in the film Alien (1979) with its ruthless, parasitic monsters. Yet a distinct and growing trend within science fiction depicted aliens as coworkers, science officers, technical specialists, sidekicks, and even love interests. Two of the most prominent examples of this come from the various television shows, films, and novels based on the worlds of Star Trek and Alien Nation. It is also increasingly common for human characters to have undergone such extensive warping and mutation—as in Paul Di Fillipo’s Ribofunk (1996)—that they themselves are as exotic as aliens.

Aliens are supposed evolutionary products of life on different worlds, while intelligent robots are supposed mechanical, industrial creations. Robots and aliens therefore serve similar thematic purposes for science fiction. The first robots were introduced by Czech dramatist Karel Čapek as characters in his play R.U.R. (1921). In a rather standard alien-menace maneuver, Čapek’s robots outcompete humanity within the new milieu of industrial mass production and attempt to exterminate the human race.

Robots remain primarily theatrical inventions, but they are central figures in science fiction thought experiments intended to provoke debate about humanity’s place within a technological environment. Isaac Asimov, for example, devoted much effort to creating an ethical system for humans and robots. Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics are as follows: “(1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; (3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”

Asimov was able to derive an entertaining set of novels and stories from these three premises—even though his imaginary laws have never been used for the control of any real-world robot. Quite to the contrary, 21st-century robotics are probably best represented by semiautonomous military devices such as the cruise missile, specifically designed to blow itself up as it reaches its target and to do considerable damage.

The robot as a reflection of humanity received a classic outing in Lester del Rey’s short story Helen O’Loy (1938). Helen was not the first female robot—her famous predecessor is the sinister celluloid robot Maria from the aforementioned film Metropolis (1927). Helen, by contrast, somehow establishes her womanhood by marrying her inventor and then sacrificing her own mechanical life upon her husband’s death. Male robots, in the hands of authors such as Tanith Lee (The Silver Metal Lover, 1981) and Marge Piercy (He, She, and It, 1991), became distorted images of human men.

Humanoid robots, or androids, remain the photogenic darlings of SF cinema, appearing in a host of productions, including Westworld (1973), The Stepford Wives (1975, 2004), Star Wars (1977), Bicentennial Man (1999), Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001), and I, Robot (2004).

Space travel

Flight into outer space is the classic SF theme. Verne’s pioneering De la terre à la lune (1865; From the Earth to the Moon) was the first fiction to treat space travel as a coherent engineering problem—to recognize explicitly that gravity would cease, that there could be no air, and so forth. Because Verne found no plausible way to land his cannon-fired passengers on the lunar surface, they merely whiz by the Moon at close range, cataloging craters in a geographic ecstasy. At the conceptual dawn of space travel, it was enough just to be up there, escaping earthly bonds to revel in sheer extraterrestrial possibility. Given that Georges Méliès filmed a fictional trip to the Moon with his pioneering camera in 1902, science fiction cinema is as old as cinema itself.

A certain disenchantment with this theme necessarily set in after the actual Moon landing in 1969, for human life in outer space proved less than heavenly. Far from swashbucklers, astronauts and cosmonauts were highly trained technicians whose primary motive was to preserve their hardware. They grappled with strict limits in fuel, power, water, oxygen, and privacy, along with cramped personal quarters—a life more akin to submarine service than to a romantic flight aboard a luxury starship.

The SF works that treat space travel with nuts-and-bolts realism are a minority taste. Science fiction far more commonly omits the unromantic aspects of space travel, especially through one of the genre’s commonest stage devices, the “faster-than-light drive,” or “warp drive.” Although this imaginary technology is no more technically plausible than lifelike androids, it is a necessity for the alien-planet adventure story. Science fiction writers cheerfully sacrifice the realities of astrophysics in the service of imaginary worlds.

Much creative energy has been invested in “space opera,” science fiction at its most romantic. The space opera is an action-adventure, commonly of galactic scale, of which the film cycle Star Wars (1977, 1980, 1983, 1999, 2002) is the best-known exemplar. It presents a unique type of “widescreen baroque,” with all the riches of pulp fiction in a single package. Star Wars, for example, offered not only advanced scientific technology—presumably necessary to build the starships and orbiting battle stations—but also princesses, smugglers, robots, sword fights, mystical doctrines, levitating gurus, monsters, barroom brawls, heroes of dubious birth, elaborate chase scenes, and gothic death traps.

Like the black-clad figures who move the props in Japanese Noh theatre, the fantastic aspects of space opera are simply and gratefully accepted by its devotees. Writers of 20th-century space opera are among the most respected figures in science fiction. Their ranks include E.E. (“Doc”) Smith, Edmond Hamilton, John W. Campbell, Jack Williamson, A.E. Van Vogt, Jack Vance, Anne McCaffrey, Lois McMaster Bujold, and C.J. Cherryh. Nor is space opera by any means moribund, for a particularly extravagant form of space opera is the signature of the New British Science Fiction, the first SF literary movement of the 21st century. Introverted postimperial insularity had long characterized British science fiction, but in the 21st century a cluster of writers—including Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Justina Robson, Peter F. Hamilton, Charles Stross, and Ken MacLeod—reengineered the universe in gaudy bursts of star-smashing neo-cosmology.

Time travel

A complement to travel through space is travel through time. A prototype of the time travel story is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). The story features the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who is magically able to immerse the hapless Scrooge in the dire consequences of his own ungenerous actions. But for all their familiarity, Scrooge’s time travels were mere ghostly dreammongering. The SF version of time travel arrived when H.G. Wells suggested in The Time Machine (1895) that the process might be done mechanically.

For a genre whose central issues involve processes of historical change, time travel is irresistibly attractive. For instance, time travel offers the edifying spectacle of “moderns” traveling into the past to remake the world closer to the heart’s desire. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) contrasts industrial ingenuity with feudal romance, to darkly hilarious effect. L. Sprague de Camp’s novel Lest Darkness Fall (1941) has an American archaeologist rescuing Imperial Rome in its decline, an act the hero carries out with such luminous attention to techno-historical detail that it resembles a World Bank bailout of an underdeveloped country.

Time tourism, a distinct subgenre, is a perennial SF theme. It is exemplified in Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder (1952), in which a tiny misstep by dinosaur hunters grimly affects the consequent course of history. In Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line (1969), voyeuristic thrill seekers from the future infest the past.

Another variant on the time travel theme involves physical objects that become displaced in time. C.M. Kornbluth’s The Little Black Bag (1950) concerns a doctor’s bag from the future. Warring groups of time travelers battle one another up and down the time streams in Poul Anderson’s Guardians of Time (1960) and Fritz Leiber’s The Change War (1978). Barrington J. Bayley’s Fall of Chronopolis (1974) achieves the technicolour proportions of “time opera.” In John Kessel’s Corrupting Dr. Nice (1997), cynical exploiters from the future invade the past wholesale, kidnapping major historical figures and crassly employing them as underlings and talk-show hosts.

A one-way trip into the future is the staple of the suspended-animation story, the device behind the Buck Rogers stories and a host of consequent tales in which a hero of the present-day escapes the customary time-bound limits of human mortality. In Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), the flow of time is entirely reversed, but life seems just as precarious as people solemnly march to a final end in their mother’s wombs.

The long-lived British television series Dr. Who (1963–89, 2005– ) involved an eccentric time traveler whose exotic mode of transport was disguised as a common telephone booth. Periodically portrayed by different actors, Dr. Who exhibited a popularity so perennial that he indeed seemed timeless. The popularity of the notion can be seen in any number of time-travel films, including The Time Machine (1960 and 2002), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), Time Bandits (1981), Back to the Future (1985), Terminator (1984), and Twelve Monkeys (1995).

Alternate histories and parallel universes

Stories centred on time-travel paradoxes developed as a separate school of science fiction. If a human being broke free from the conventional chains of causality, intriguing metaphysical puzzles ensued. The classic SF version of these puzzles is the challenge posed by a man who travels back in time and kills his own grandfather, thus ensuring that he, the time traveler, can never be born in the first place. Time-travel paradoxes were usually resolved as ingeniously as locked-room murder mysteries.

Murray Leinster’s Sidewise in Time (1934) expanded the possibilities by suggesting a vast multiplicity of “histories,” all occurring at the same “time.” Under the scheme Leister proposed, one need not limit oneself to one past or one future but might travel between many alternate worlds existing in parallel. This new SF convention of a “multiverse” opened a vast potential canvas for fictional exploitation, with humanity’s universe just one undistinguished universe among many.

Narratives set in the future offered at least some potential connection to the real world. By contrast, the “parallel universe” was entirely conjectural and hypothetical. Initially, readers found parallel worlds an amusing but inconsequential conceit, just as they had once found works set within the future academic or absurd. They soon realized, however, that the notion of uchronia (or “no-times”) offered certain pleasures all its own, such as the ability to deploy actual historical figures as fictional characters. Well-known settings and events could be mutated and distorted at will.

The passage of time had a complex, uchronic effect on science fiction itself. Despite the passing of the year 1984 itself, a number of concepts presented in Nineteen Eighty-four—such as omnipresent video surveillance—were not so far-fetched at the turn of the 21st century, and Orwell’s political concerns remain painfully relevant. In addition to representing the uchronic effect of some works of science fiction, Nineteen Eighty-four is an excellent example of a uchronic novel; it is neither futuristic nor historical, existing in a peculiar uchronic netherworld. As time passes, growing numbers of SF classics fall into this conceptual category. It is a small step from this category to parallel worlds and alternate histories. Those concepts no longer seem abstract and improbable, but they have become part of the heritage of science fiction.

Even historical fiction has dealt with the “what if” posed by uchronias. In 1907 G.M. Trevelyan wrote an essay speculating on the consequences of a Napoleonic victory at Waterloo. Trevelyan’s work inspired J.C. Squires’s anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931), in which such period worthies as Winston Churchill, André Maurois, and G.K. Chesterton speculated on counterfactual historical turning points. This was an intellectual parlour game of the type that science fiction liked to play.

Alternate histories existed well outside the customary bounds of science fiction, such as Len Deighton’s thriller SS-GB (1978), about the grim role of Nazi occupiers in Britain, and Vladimir Nabokov’s involved and elegant Ada (1969). Alternate histories tend to cluster around particularly dramatic and colourful junctures of history, with World War II and the American Civil War as particular favourites. Some ventured farther out, postulating a global Roman Empire or a world in which dinosaurs avoided extinction.

The film It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)—based on the story The Greatest Gift (1943) by Philip Van Doren Stern—is a perennial sentimental favourite. In the film, a man in despair learns that his life does matter when he sees that, without his presence, his hometown becomes an evil dystopia. It is an ultimate compliment to the individual when the universe rewrites itself around a fantasy of self-worth.

In some deep sense, all works of fiction must be alternate histories and parallel worlds, for their protagonists and described events do not in fact exist. As the tradition of fiction grew longer and deeper, presenting works ever more distant from the reader’s cultural framework, readers seemed more willing to accept work that was radically detached from local truisms of time and space.

High technologies

Leo Marx, author of the techno-social study The Machine in the Garden (1964), coined the useful term technological sublime to indicate a quasi-spiritual haze given off by any particularly visible and impressive technological advance. Science fiction dotes on the sublime, which ruptures the everyday and lifts the human spirit to the plateaus of high imagination. Common models of the technological sublime include railroads, photography, aviation, giant dams, rural electrification (a particular Soviet favourite), atomic power and atomic weapons, space flight, television, computers, virtual reality, and the “information superhighway.” The most sublime of all technologies are, in reality, not technologies at all but rather technological concepts—time machines, interplanetary starships, and androids.

Humans quickly lose a sense of awe over the technological advancements that have been fully integrated into the fabric of everyday life. Technologies such as immunization, plumbing, recycling, and the birth control pill have had a profound cultural impact, but they are not considered sublime nor are they generally subjects for science fiction. The reason for this is not directly related to the scientific principles involved or any inherent difficulties of the engineering. It is entirely a social judgment, with distinctly metaphysical overtones. Science fiction is one of the arenas in which these judgments are cast.

Space flight is one high technology to which science fiction has shown a passionate allegiance. For the most part, the space shuttle remains sublime, even though it is three decades old and in its final years of operation. Were space shuttles as common as 747s, they would quickly lose their sublime affect.

Outer space and cyberspace—a science fiction term applied to computer networks and simulated spaces—are conceptual cousins, offering the same high-tech thrill through different instruments in different historical periods. Yet with cybertechnology rapidly achieving mass acceptance and becoming commonplace in many parts of the world, its SF allure is fading fast. Science fiction therefore has been once again making tentative overtures to biotechnology, although a relationship has existed at least since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published. Unlike computers, biotechnology is deeply rooted in ancient and highly conservative pursuits such as medicine and agriculture. Social resistance to gene-altered crops, animals, and especially human children is widespread.

The sheer novelty of computers masked their particular affinity for pornography, swindling, organized crime, and terrorist conspiracy until they were widely present in the home. By contrast, the potential social impact of cloning was easy to recognize and led to a spate of SF works, including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), with its tank-born castes of workers. Czech “biopunk” stories of the 1980s used genetic parables to indict the moral warping of Czech society under Warsaw Pact oppression. Biologically altered “posthumans” are becoming an SF staple. First visualized as menacing monsters or Nietzschean supermen, the genetically altered were increasingly seen as people with unconventional personal problems.

Although many of the technologies that were first envisioned by science fiction have become reality—and become mundane aspects of mainstream fictional works—scientific knowledge is growing exponentially, leaving plenty of room for further speculation about its future impact on society and individuals. It is hard to imagine any contemporary society’s being fully immune to the prognosticating lure of science fiction.