Science Fiction

“A piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences… It must be a scientific discovery – something that the author at least rationalizes as possible to science.”

“Trying to get two enthusiasts to agree on a definition of [science fiction] leads only to bloody knuckles.”

“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”

“Science fiction is fiction based upon some imagined development of science, or upon the extrapolation of a tendency in society.”

A science fiction story “is one that presupposes a technology, or an effect of technology, or a disturbance in the natural order, such as humanity, up to the time of writing, has not in actual fact experienced.”

“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. To make this definition cover all science fiction (instead of ‘almost all’) it is necessary only to strike out the word ‘future’.”

“Science fiction is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin.”

Science fantasy is “a kind of hybrid in which plausibility is specifically invoked for most of the story, but may be cast aside in patches at the author’s whim and according to no visible system or principle.”

“Speculative fiction: stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature of the universe, of man, or ‘reality’… I use the term ‘speculative fiction’ here specifically to describe the mode which makes use of the traditional ‘scientific method’ (observation, hypothesis, experiment) to examine some postulated approximation of reality, by introducing a given set of changes—imaginary or inventive—into the common background of ‘known facts’, creating an environment in which the responses and perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the inventions, the characters, or both.”

“Someone once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. We agree.”

Science fiction is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”

“Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.”

“For, above all, science fiction, as far back as Plato trying to figure out a proper society, has always been a fable teacher of morality…There is no large problem in the world this afternoon that is not a science-fictional problem.”

“Science fiction guesses at sciences before they are sprung out of the brows of thinking men. More, the authors in the field try to guess at machines which are the fruit of these sciences. Then we try to guess at how mankind will react to these machines, how use them, how grow with them, how be destroyed by them. All, all of it fantastic.”

“Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.”

Fabulation is “fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way.”

In structural fabulation, “the tradition of speculative fiction is modified by an awareness of the universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures, and the insights of the past century of science are accepted as fictional points of departure. Yet structural fabulation is neither scientific in its methods nor a substitute for actual science. It is a fictional exploration of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent science. Its favourite themes involve the impact of developments or revelations derived from the human or physical sciences upon the people who must live with those revelations or developments.”

“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. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger.”

 “SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional “novum” (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic.”

“‘Hard’ SF is related to ‘hard facts’ and also to the ‘hard’ or engineering sciences. It does not necessarily entail realistic speculation about a future world, though its bias is undoubtedly realistic. Rather, this is the sort of SF that most appeals to scientists themselves—and is often written by them. The typical ‘hard’ SF writer looks for new and unfamiliar scientific theories and discoveries which could provide the occasion for a story, and, at its more didactic extreme, the story is only a framework for introducing the scientific concept to the reader.”

“In ‘space opera’ (the analogy is with the Western ‘horse opera’ rather than the ‘soap opera’) the reverse [Parrinder is referring to his definition of “hard sf”] is true; a melodramatic adventure-fantasy involving stock themes and settings is evolved on the flimsiest scientific basis.”

“Science fiction is that form of literature which deals with the effects of technological change in an imagined future, an alternative present or a reconceived history.”

Sf is “an historical literature… In every sf narrative, there is an explicit or implicit fictional history that connects the period depicted to our present moment, or to some moment in our past.”

“Perhaps the crispest definition is that science fiction is a literature of ‘what if?’ What if we could travel in time? What if we were living on other planets? What if we made contact with alien races? And so on. The starting point is that the writer supposes things are different from how we know them to be.”

“‘Hard science fiction’ [is] stories that feature authentic scientific knowledge and depend upon it for plot development and plot resolution.”

“Science fiction is something that could happen—but you usually wouldn’t want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen—though you often only wish that it could.”

Science fiction “is a selective tradition, continuously reinvented in the present, through which the boundaries of the genre are continuously policed, challenged and disrupted, and the cultural identity of the SF community continuously established, preserved and transformed. It is thus essentially and necessarily a site of contestation.”