SCIENCE FICTION

form of fiction that developed in the 20th century and deals principally with the impact of actual or imagined science upon society or individuals. The term is more generally used to refer to any literary fantasy that includes a scientific factor as an essential orienting component. Such literature may consist of a careful and informed extrapolation of scientific facts and principles, or it may range into far-fetched areas flatly contradictory of such facts and principles. In either case, plausibility based on science is a requisite, so that such precursors of the genre as Mary Shelley's Gothic novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) are science fiction, whereas Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), based as it is purely on the supernatural, is not. Science fiction was made possible only by the rise of modern science itself, notably the revolutions in astronomy and physics. Aside from the age-old genre of fantasy literature, which does not qualify, there were notable precursors: imaginary voyages to the moon or to other planets in the 18th century and space travel in Voltaire's Micromgas (1752), alien cultures in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), and science-fiction elements in the 19th-century stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Fitz-James O'Brien. Science fiction proper began, however, toward the end of the 19th century with the scientific romances of Jules Verne, whose science was rather on the level of invention, as well as the science-oriented novels of social criticism by H.G. Wells. The development of science fiction as a self-conscious genre dates from 1926 when Hugo Gernsback (q.v.), who coined the portmanteau word scientifiction, founded Amazing Stories magazine, which was devoted exclusively to science-fiction stories. Published in this and other pulp magazines with great and growing success, such stories were not viewed as serious literature but as sensationalism. With the advent in 1937 of a demanding editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., of Astounding Science Fiction (founded in 1930) and with the publication of stories and novels by such writers as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction emerged as a mode of serious fiction. Ventures into the genre by writers who were not devoted exclusively to science fiction, such as Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, and Kurt Vonnegut, also added respectability. A great boom in the popularity of science fiction followed World War II. The increasing intellectual sophistication of the genre and the emphasis on wider societal and psychological issues significantly broadened the appeal of science fiction to the reading public. Science fiction became international, extending into the Soviet Union and other eastern European nations. Serious criticism of the genre became common, and, in the United States particularly, science fiction was studied as literature in colleges and universities. Magazines arose that were dedicated to informing the science-fiction fan on all aspects of the genre. Some science-fiction works became paperback best-sellers. Besides such acknowledged masters of the genre as Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov, science-fiction writers of notable merit in the postwar period included A.E. Van Vogt, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. LeGuin, Frederik Pohl, Octavia E. Butler, and Brian Aldiss. These writers' approaches included predictions of future societies on Earth, analyses of the consequences of interstellar travel, and imaginative explorations of forms of intelligent life and their societies in other worlds. Radio, television, and motion pictures have reinforced the popularity of the genre. Additional reading John Clute and Peter Nichols (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993), includes numerous topical essays. Histories of science fiction include Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree (1973); James Gunn, Alternate Worlds (1975), with illustrations; and Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (1977). Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977), offers critical approaches to science fiction. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), is a scholarly theoretical work on the implications of the genre. Neil Barron (ed.), Anatomy of Wonder 4 (1995); and Marilyn P. Fletcher (compiler and ed.), Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Science Fiction (1989), are annotated critical bibliographies.