What Is Science Fiction?
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In my research for this project, I’ve found a lot of different — even conflicting — definitions of science fiction. In fact, one author wrote, “A definition of science fiction can be attempted in twenty words and remain unachieved in two thousand.”
Frederick Pohl claimed that, “Science fiction is the a way of thinking about things.”
In The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction, Paul Allen Carter wrote that, “Science fiction is an imaginative extrapolation from the known into the unknown.” (pg. 4)
John W. Campbell once said that, “Science fiction consists of the hopes and dreams and fears (for some dreams can be nightmares) of a technically based society.”
Sam Merwin, an editor in the late 1930s and early 1940s, said that science fiction was “fantasy wearing a tight girdle.”
In the 1950s, Damon Knight threw up his hands and defined science fiction this way: “Science fiction is whatever we point to when we say ‘this is science fiction’.”
Here are some more thoughts on the definition of science fiction:
“It is sometimes seen as literature which has come inevitably into being as the fate of the world is seen to hang on the interaction of man and science. It is said to differ from fantasy because its scientific extrapolations make it seem plausible. Or it differs from straight fiction because it presupposes something — operative space travel, advanced cybernetics, a galactic political situation, or an environment not drawn from anyone’s life experience — that is not yet, or may never be, visibly operative in our everyday life.”
– The Shattered Ring, pg. 19
“Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places.”
– James Gunn, The Road to Science Fiction: From Gilgamesh to Wells, pg. 1
“The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge, some knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need as it exists today there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man.”
– William Tenn, in the introduction to Of All Possible Worlds, pg. 1
“It isn’t really science fiction’s business to describe what science is going to find. It is much more science fiction’s business to say what the human race will make of it all. … It gives us a look at the consequences.”
– Frederick Pohl, in the introduction to Ninth Galaxy Reader (1965), pg. 8
“The literature which, growing with science, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of existence.”
– H. Bruce Franklin, 1966, Future Perfect, pg. 8
“Science fiction and fantasy … deal … with events played against social backgrounds that do not exist today and have not existed in the past. … [The] background of the story in science fiction could, conceivably, be derived from our own by appropriate changes in the level of science and technology.”
– Isaac Asimov (1981), Asimov on Science Fiction, pgs. 17-18
“… science fiction is not just a form of literature to be discussed as literature should be discussed — the lives of authors, the lists of their works, the evaluation of their styles. Science fiction is above all a system of ideas. It deals with ideas more than it deals with literary styles. It speculates in futurities and improbabilities.”
– Donald A. Wollheim, The Universe Makers, pg. 6
“Science fiction is that branch of fantasy, which, while not true of present-day knowledge, is rendered plausible by the reader’s recognition of the scientific possibilities of it being possible at some future date or at some uncertain period in the past.”
– Donald A. Wollheim, The Universe Makers, pg. 10
“Science fiction is that form of literature which deals with the effects of technological change in an imagined future, an alternative present or a re-conceived history.”
– Barry Malzberg, Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties, pg. 1
“Science fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ on the part of the readers by utilizing an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy.”
– Sam Moskowitz, Alternate Worlds, pg. 31
I must say that this particular branch of story telling is very hard to define. For example, if we take Wolheim’s definition then what is science fiction today very probably will become mere fantasy tomorrow. And having such a slippery, changeable definition just won’t do.I believe that the one that is closest to being on the mark is that of Moskowitz. What do you think?
I just saw this definition of “Sci Fi” on the OCSF Yahoo! Group:
“I think we’ll classify it as Sci-Fi, which is Science Fiction without the science in it.”
The quote was in reference to the movie Sunshine.