What Is Science Fiction? Asking What If and Following It Honestly

The origin is argued about and three candidates recur. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein of 1818 is the most defensible, because the central event is achieved by a named contemporary science rather than by magic, and because the book is about the consequences of the creation rather than the creation itself. Earlier works including Lucian's second-century voyage to the moon and Kepler's Somnium of 1634 contain the furniture and not the method. Jules Verne from the 1860s wrote extrapolative adventure grounded in engineering that was plausible at the time, and H. G. Wells from the 1890s wrote the other half, using a single impossible premise, a time machine, an invisibility process, a Martian invasion, to examine class, evolution and empire, which is the template the genre has used since. The American pulp magazines from 1926 gave it a name, a market and an audience, and also a reputation for juvenile adventure that took decades to shed.

The internal history is usually told as a sequence of shifts, each reacting to the last:

• •The pulp era from the 1920s, with adventure plots, technological optimism and very variable prose
• •The golden age from about 1938, shaped by the editor John W. Campbell, demanding scientific plausibility and competent engineering-minded protagonists, producing Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke
• •The new wave of the 1960s, reacting against all of that in favour of literary experiment, inner space rather than outer, and pessimism, with Ballard, Delany, Le Guin and Dick
• •Cyberpunk from the early 1980s, taking computing, corporations and body modification seriously and setting stories among people at the bottom of those systems rather than in command of them
• •A subsequent widening from the 1990s onward, with the genre's centre of gravity moving away from American and British writers and toward a far broader set of authors, and with the Hugo Awards going to work from China, Nigeria and elsewhere
• •The distinction between hard science fiction, which keeps the physics as accurate as possible, and soft, which treats the sciences of society and mind as the material, which is a difference of subject rather than of rigour

The genre's characteristic move is to change one thing and see what breaks, which makes it a form of argument as much as of storytelling. Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness removes fixed biological sex from a human population and examines what remains of gender. Octavia Butler's Kindred sends a modern Black woman to a nineteenth-century plantation and uses the device to make the reader confront what a survival strategy costs. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World take opposite mechanisms of control, terror and pleasure, and follow each to its conclusion. The Dispossessed builds a functioning anarchist society and refuses to make it comfortable. What unites these is that the speculative element is load-bearing: remove it and the argument cannot be made, which is the test that separates science fiction from a thriller with spaceships in it.

The genre is often judged on whether it predicted things, which practitioners generally regard as a misunderstanding. There are hits: satellites in geostationary orbit were described by Arthur C. Clarke in a 1945 technical article, the waldo remote manipulator took its name from a Heinlein story, the word robotics was coined by Asimov, and the handheld communicator and the tablet appeared decades before the devices. There are also enormous misses, including a nearly universal failure to anticipate that computers would get small and cheap rather than large and centralised, and a persistent assumption of routine interplanetary travel by the end of the twentieth century. Frederik Pohl's often-quoted line is that a good story predicts the traffic jam rather than the automobile, meaning that the interesting work is in second-order social consequence rather than in the device. The genre's actual influence runs the other way as often as not, since engineers and entrepreneurs read it as children and then build what they read.

The genre argues about its own edges more than most. The line with fantasy is usually drawn at whether the impossible element is given a rationalised explanation, which is a distinction about rhetoric rather than about plausibility, since a faster-than-light drive is no more physically possible than a spell. Speculative fiction is the umbrella term preferred by writers who dislike the marketing category. Literary novelists who use the apparatus frequently deny writing science fiction, which reliably irritates the genre and reflects a real history of critical dismissal that has only partly ended, with a few authors crossing the line in the other direction and being claimed by both. The awards have their own politics, including an organised campaign to influence the Hugo ballot in 2013 to 2015 that turned an argument about the genre's changing demographics into a public dispute. What is not disputed is commercial reality: the genre's apparatus now dominates mainstream film and television entirely, whatever the books are called.

The most useful definition is fiction built on one new thing not present in the author's world, whose consequences are then followed with internal consistency, which is what separates it from fantasy and from adventure stories using its furniture. Shelley's Frankenstein is the most defensible starting point, Wells set the template of a single impossible premise used to examine society, and the genre has moved through pulp, a plausibility-focused golden age, a literary new wave, cyberpunk and a considerable widening of who writes it. Prediction is incidental, and second-order social consequence is the actual subject.