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In The Road to Science Fiction: From Gilgamesh to Wells, James Gunn put forth the idea that the Industrial Revolution sparked the change that needed to happen before science fiction could become a true genre. He wrote that people

“had to adopt an open mind about the nature of the universe — its beginning and its end — and the fate of man …. People also had to discover the future. As long as the future was merely the place where today’s activities went on in some eternal cycle, perhaps even spiraling downward from some earlier golden age, a fiction about the future was meaningless.” (pg. 3)

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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.” Read more »