Sci-Fi Subgenres
NOTE: Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more highly imaginative fiction genres, specifically
including science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction,
apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history.
Science Fiction Subgenres:
 Hard SF
 Soft and Social SF
 Punk:
o Cyberpunk:
 Dieselpunk
 Atompunk
 Nanopunk
 Postcyberpunk
o Steampunk:
 Clockpunk
o Biopunk
 Time Travel
 Alternative History
 Military SF
 Superhuman
 Apocalyptic SF
 Space Opera
 Space Western
 Feminist SF
 New Wave SF
 Comic SF
 Anthropological SF
Hard SF:
The heart of the "hard SF" designation is the relationship of the science content and attitude to the rest of the narrative,
and (for some readers, at least) the "hardness" or rigor of the science itself. One requirement for hard SF is procedural or
intentional: a story should be trying to be accurate, logical, credible and rigorous in its use of current scientific and
technical knowledge about which technology, phenomena, scenarios and situations that are practically and/or theoretically
possible, and later discoveries do not necessarily invalidate the label.
Hard science fiction, or "hard SF", is characterized by rigorous attention to accurate detail in quantitative sciences,
especially physics, astrophysics, and chemistry, or on accurately depicting worlds that more advanced technology may
make possible. Many accurate predictions of the future come from the hard science fiction subgenre, but numerous
inaccurate predictions have emerged as well. Some hard SF authors have distinguished themselves as working scientists,
including Gregory Benford, Geoffrey A. Landis and David Brin, while mathematician authors include Rudy Rucker and
Vernor Vinge. Other noteworthy hard SF authors include Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, Isaac Asimov, Greg Bear, Larry
Niven, Robert J. Sawyer, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Sheffield, Ben Bova, and Greg Egan.
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Soft and Social SF:
The description "soft" science fiction may describe works based on social sciences such as psychology, economics,
political science, sociology, and anthropology. Noteworthy writers in this category include Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip
K. Dick. The term can describe stories focused primarily on character and emotion; SFWA Grand Master Ray Bradbury is
an acknowledged master of this art. The Soviet Union produced a quantity of social science fiction, including works by
the Strugatsky brothers, Kir Bulychov and Ivan Yefremov. Some writers blur the boundary between hard and soft science
fiction.
Exploration of fictional societies is one of the most interesting aspects of science fiction, allowing it to perform predictive
(H.G. Wells, The Final Circle of Paradise) and precautionary (Fahrenheit 451) functions, to criticize the contemporary
world (Antarctica-online) and to present solutions (Walden Two), to portray alternative societies (World of the Noon) and
to examine the implications of ethical principles (the works of Sergey Lukyanenko).
Related to Social SF and Soft SF are the speculative fiction branches of utopian or dystopian stories; George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, are examples.
Satirical novels with fantastic settings such as Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift may be considered speculative fiction.
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Cyberpunk:
The Cyberpunk genre emerged in the early 1980s; combining "cybernetics" and "punk", the term was coined by author
Bruce Bethke for his 1980 short story "Cyberpunk". The time frame is usually near-future and the settings are often
dystopian (characterized by misery). Common themes in cyberpunk include advances in information technology and
especially the Internet (visually abstracted as cyberspace), artificial intelligence and prosthetics and post-democratic
societal control where corporations have more influence than governments. Nihilism, post-modernism, and film noir
techniques are common elements and the protagonists may be disaffected or reluctant anti-heroes. Noteworthy authors in
this genre are William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and Pat Cadigan. James O'Ehley has called the 1982 film
Blade Runner a definitive example of the cyberpunk visual style.
Cyberpunk plots often center on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and megacorporations, and tend to be
set in a near-future Earth, rather than the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels such as Isaac Asimov's
Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to be marked by
extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators. Much of the genre's
atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction.
Variations include:
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Dieselpunk:
Is based on the aesthetics of the interbellum period through World War II (c. 1920-1945). The genre combines pop
surrealist art with postmodern technology and sensibilities. First coined in 2001 as a marketing term by game designer
Lewis Pollak to describe his role-playing game Children of the Sun, dieselpunk has grown to describe a distinct style of
visual art, music, motion pictures, fiction, and engineering.
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Atompunk:
Relates to the pre-digital period of 1945-1965, including mid-century Modernism, the Atomic Age and Space Age,
Communism and concern about it exaggerated as paranoia in the USA along with Neo-Soviet styling, underground
cinema, Googie architecture (also known as populuxe or Doo-Wop is a form of modern architecture and a subdivision of
futurist architecture, influenced by car culture and the Space and Atomic Ages.), the Sputnik program, superhero fiction,
the rise of the US military/industrial powers and the fall-out of Chernobyl.
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Nanopunk:
Refers to an emerging genre of speculative science fiction (sci-fi) still very much in its infancy in comparison to other
genres like that of Cyberpunk. The genre is similar bio-punk, but describes the world where the use of biotechnologies are
limited or prohibited, so only nanotechnologies in wide use (while in biopunk bio- and nanotechnologies often coexist).
Linda Nagata's Tech Heaven is a futuristic thriller about Katie, a woman whose husband is about to die of injuries
sustained in a helicopter crash. Instead of dying, he gets his body cryogenically preserved so that he can be reawakened
when med-tech is advanced enough to heal him. The problem is that it winds up taking far more than the estimated few
years for this to happen. Another famous example of this genre is Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". Some novels of
Stanislaw Lem, including Weapon System of the Twenty First Century or The Upside-down Evolution, The Invincible and
Peace on Earth could also be considered precursors of nanopunk.
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Postcyberpunk:
As new writers and artists began to experiment with cyberpunk ideas, new varieties of fiction emerged, sometimes
addressing the criticisms leveled at the original cyberpunk stories. Typical postcyberpunk stories continue the focus on a
ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information and cybernetic augmentation of the human body, but without the
assumption of dystopia (see Technological utopianism). Good examples are Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age and
Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire. In television, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has been called "the most interesting,
sustained postcyberpunk media work in existence." In 2007, SF writers James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel published
Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. Like all categories discerned within science fiction, the boundaries of
postcyberpunk are likely to be fluid or ill defined.
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Steampunk:
Steampunk is based on the idea of futuristic technology existing in the past, usually the 19th century, and often set in
Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological
inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the
computer occurring at an earlier date. Popular examples include The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce
Sterling, as well as the Girl Genius series by Phil and Kaja Foglio, although seeds of the genre may be seen in certain
works of Michael Moorcock, Philip Jose Farmer and Steve Stiles and in such games as Space 1889 and Marcus Rowland's
Forgotten Futures. Machines are most often powered by steam in this genre (hence the name).
Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of "the path not taken" for such technology as
dirigibles, analog computers, or such digital mechanical computers as Charles Babbage's Analytical engine.
Steampunk was influenced by, and often adopts the style of, the 19th century scientific romances of Jules Verne, H.G.
Wells, Mark Twain, and Mary Shelley.
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Several works of fiction significant to the development of the genre were produced before the genre had a name. Titus
Alone (1959), by Mervyn Peake, anticipated many of the tropes of steampunk. One of the earliest mainstream
manifestations of the steampunk ethos was the original CBS television series The Wild Wild West (1965-69), while the
film Wild Wild West (1999) was one of the first contemporary steampunk motion pictures.
Because he coined the term, K.W. Jeter's novel Morlock Night (1979) is typically considered to have established the
genre. Keith Laumer made an early contribution with Worlds of the Imperium (1962). Ronald W. Clark's Queen Victoria's
Bomb (1967) and Michael Moorcock's Warlord of the Air (1971) have been cited as early influences. Harry Harrison's
novel A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (1973) portrays a British Empire of an alternate 1973, full of atomic locomotives,
coal-powered flying boats, ornate submarines, and Victorian dialogue. In February 1980 Richard A. Lupoff and Steve
Stiles published the first "chapter" of their 10-part comic strip The Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle and His
Incredible Aether Flyer.
1988 saw the publication of the first version of the science fiction roleplaying game Space 1889, set in an alternate history
in which certain discredited Victorian scientific theories were instead provable and have led to the existence of new
technologies. Contributing authors included Frank Chadwick, Loren Wiseman, and Marcus Rowland.
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990 novel The Difference Engine is often credited with bringing widespread
awareness of steampunk to a wider readership. This novel applies the principles of Gibson and Sterling's cyberpunk
writings to an alternate Victorian era where Charles Babbage's proposed steam-powered mechanical computer, which he
called a difference engine (a later, more general-purpose version was known as an analytical engine), was actually built,
and led to the dawn of the information age more than a century "ahead of schedule".
The first use of the word in a title was in Paul Di Filippo's 1995 Steampunk Trilogy, consisting of three short novels:
"Victoria", "Hottentots", and "Walt and Emily", which respectively imagine the replacement of Queen Victoria by a
human/newt clone, an invasion of Massachusetts by Lovecraftian monsters, and a love affair between Walt Whitman and
Emily Dickinson.
Alan Moore's and Kevin O'Neill's 1999 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic book series (and the subsequent
2003 film adaption) greatly popularized the steampunk genre and helped propel it into mainstream fiction.
Nick Gevers's 2008 original anthology Extraordinary Engines features new steampunk stories by some of the form's preeminent practitioners, as well as other leading science fiction and fantasy writers experimenting with neo-Victorian
conventions. A major retrospective, reprint anthology of steampunk fiction was released, also in 2008, by Tachyon
Publications; edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and appropriately entitled Steampunk, it collects stories by James
Blaylock, whose "Narbondo" trilogy is typically considered steampunk; Jay Lake, author of the novel Mainspring,
sometimes labeled "clockpunk"; the aforementioned Michael Moorcock; as well as Jess Nevins, famed for his annotations
to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
While most of the original steampunk works had a historical setting, later works would often place steampunk elements in
a fantasy world with little relation to any specific historical era. Historical steampunk tends to be more "science fictional":
presenting an alternate history; real locales and persons from history with different technology. Fantasy-world steampunk,
such as China Miéville's Perdido Street Station and Stephen Hunt's Jackelian novels, on the other hand, presents
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steampunk in a completely imaginary fantasy realm, often populated by legendary creatures coexisting with steam-era or
anachronistic technologies.
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Clockpunk:
Used to refer to a subgenre of speculative fiction which is similar to steampunk, but deviates in its technology. As with
steampunk, it portrays advanced technology based on pre-modern designs, but rather than the steam power of the
Industrial Age, the technology used is based on springs and clockwork, in the vein of Jay Lake's novel, Mainspring, and
Whitechapel Gods by S M Peters.
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Biopunk:
Biopunk focuses on biotechnology and subversives (an attempt to overthrow the established order of a society, its
structures of power, authority, exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy).
Biopunk science fiction is a subgenre of cyberpunk fiction that portrays the underground side of the "biotech revolution"
which, in the 1990s and 2000s, was expected to start having a profound impact on humanity in the first half of the 21st
century. Biopunk stories explore the struggles of individuals or groups, often the product of human experimentation,
against a backdrop of totalitarian governments or megacorporations which misuse biotechnologies as means of social
control or profiteering. Unlike cyberpunk, it builds not on information technology but on synthetic biology. Like in
postcyberpunk fiction, individuals are usually modified and enhanced not with cyberware, but by genetic manipulation. A
common feature of biopunk stories is the “black clinic”, which is a lab, clinic or hospital that performs illegal, unregulated
or ethically-dubious biomod and gengineering procedures. Many features of biopunk fiction have their roots in William
Gibson's Neuromancer, one of the first cyberpunk novels.
One of the prominent writers in this field is Paul Di Filippo, though he called his collection of such stories ribofunk, with
the first element being taken from the term ribosome.
The 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain shares many elements with later biopunk fiction, though lacking the dystopian
view of society underpinning most books representative of the cyberpunk genre.
Examples include:
 Ribofunk by Paul Di Filippo
 The Movement of Mountains and The Brains of Rats by Michael Blumlein
 Clade and Crache by Mark Budz
 White Devils by Paul J. McAuley
 The Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia E. Butler
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Time Travel:
Time travel stories have antecedents in the 18th and 19th centuries. The first major time travel novel was Mark Twain's A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The most famous is H. G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine, which uses a
vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively, while Twain's time traveler is struck in the head. The
term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle. Stories of this type are
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complicated by logical problems such as the grandfather paradox. Time travel is a popular subject in modern science
fiction, in print, movies, and television.
Early stories featuring time travel.
Although The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was instrumental in causing the idea of time travel to enter the public
imagination, non-technological forms of time travel had appeared in a number of earlier stories, and some even earlier
stories featured elements suggestive of time travel, but remain somewhat ambiguous.
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In ancient Hindu mythology, the Mahabharatha mentions the story of the King Revaita, who travels to a different
world to meet the creator Brahma and is shocked to learn that many ages have passed when he returns to Earth.
"Urashima Tarō", an early Japanese tale, involves traveling forwards in time to a distant future, and was first
described in the Nihongi (720). It was about a young fisherman named Urashima Taro who visits an undersea
palace and stays there for three days. After returning home to his village, he finds himself three hundred years in
the future, where he is long forgotten, his house in ruins, and his family long dead.
Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) by Samuel Madden is mainly a series of letters from English
ambassadors in various countries to the British "Lord High Treasurer", along with a few replies from the British
foreign office, all purportedly written in 1997 and 1998 and describing the conditions of that era. However, the
framing story is that these letters were actual documents given to the narrator by his guardian angel one night in
1728; for this reason, Paul Alkon suggests in his book Origins of Futuristic Fiction that "the first time-traveler in
English literature is a guardian angel who returns with state documents from 1998 to the year 1728", although the
book does not explicitly show how the angel obtained these documents. Alkon later qualifies this by writing "It
would be stretching our generosity to praise Madden for being the first to show a traveler arriving from the
future", but also says that Madden "deserves recognition as the first to toy with the rich idea of time-travel in the
form of an artifact sent backwards from the future to be discovered in the present."
in Walter Map's 12th century De nugis curialium (Courtiers' Trifles), Map tells of the Briton King Herla, who is
transported with his hunting party over two centuries into the future by the enchantment of a mysterious
harlequin.
In the play Anno 7603, written by the Dano-Norwegian poet Johan Herman Wessel in 1781, the two main
characters are moved to the future (AD 7603) by a good fairy.
"Rip Van Winkle", Washington Irving's 1819 story, is about a man named Rip Van Winkle who takes a nap at a
mountain and wakes up twenty years in the future, where he has been forgotten, his wife deceased, and his
daughter grown up.
In the science fiction anthology Far Boundaries (1951), the editor August Derleth identifies the short story
"Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism", written for the Dublin Literary Magazine by an anonymous author in
1838, as a very early time travel story. In this story, the narrator is waiting under a tree to be picked up by a coach
which will take him out of Newcastle, when he suddenly finds himself transported back over a thousand years,
where he encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery, and gives him somewhat ironic explanations of the
developments of the coming centuries. It is never entirely clear whether these events actually occurred or were
merely a dream.
The book Paris avant les hommes (Paris before Men) by the French botanist and geologist Pierre Boiterd,
published posthumously in 1861, in which the main character is transported to various prehistoric settings by the
magic of a "lame demon", and is able to actively interact with prehistoric life.
The short story "The Clock That Went Backward", written by editor Edward Page Mitchell appeared in the New
York Sun in 1881, another early example of time travel in fiction.
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain.
Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy and News from Nowhere (1890) by William Morris, which feature
a protagonist who wake up in a socialist utopian future.
Tourmalin's Time Cheques (1891) by Thomas Anstey Guthrie (written under the pseudonym F. Anstey) was the
first story to play with the paradoxes that time travel could cause.
Golf in the Year 2000 (1892) by J. McCullough tells the story of an Englishman who fell asleep in 1892 and
awakens in the year 2000. The focus of the book is how the game of golf would have changed by then, but many
social and technological themes are also discussed along the way, including a device similar to television and
women's equality.
Time traveling themes and ideological function
A number of themes tend to recur in science fiction time-travel stories, often with enough variation to make them
interesting.
 Taking technology to the past. In these stories a visitor to the past changes history using knowledge from their
own time, either for evil or good, or sometimes accidentally. Examples of this genre include the classic Lest
Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp.
 The Guardians of Time. In this genre a group of people are charged with ensuring that time turns out 'properly'
(or protecting it from changes by other travellers). This includes Hugo winner The Big Time and the other Change
War stories by Fritz Leiber, Terry Pratchett's humorous Thief of Time, Simon Hawke's TimeWars series and The
End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov. Another good example of this concept is the popular sci-fi series Doctor Who,
whose main character is a "Time Lord" and whose people are essentially scholars and historians who usually only
observe histories; "the Doctor," as he calls himself, intervenes to fight the evil he encounters if he is called on to
do so.
 Unintentional change or fulfillment. In these stories a time traveller intends to observe past events, or is taken to
the past against his will and tries to return to his proper time. However, the time traveler may discover that his
actions had unintentionally altered the future, because of the Butterfly effect. A Sound of Thunder is an example
of this kind.
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Alternate History:
Alternate (or alternative) history stories are based on the premise that historical events might have turned out differently.
These stories may use time travel to change the past, or may simply set a story in a universe with a different history from
our own. Classics in the genre include Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore, in which the South wins the American Civil
War, and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, in which Germany and Japan win World War II. The Sidewise
Award acknowledges the best works in this subgenre; the name is taken from Murray Leinster's 1934 story "Sidewise in
Time." Harry Turtledove is one of the most prominent authors in the subgenre and is often called the "master of alternate
history".
Since the 1950s, this type of fiction has to a large extent merged with science fictional tropes involving cross-time travel
between alternate histories or psychic awareness of the existence of "our" universe by the people in another; or ordinary
voyaging uptime (into the past) or downtime (into the future) that results in history splitting into two or more time-lines.
Cross-time, time-splitting and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss
them fully apart from one another. "Alternate History" looks at "what if" scenarios from some of history's most pivotal
turning points and presents a completely different version, sometimes based on science and fact, but often based on
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conjecture. The exploration of how the world would look today if various changes occurred and what these alternate
worlds would be like forms the basis of this vast subject matter.
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Military SF:
Military science fiction is set in the context of conflict between national, interplanetary, or interstellar armed forces; the
primary viewpoint characters are usually soldiers. Stories include detail about military technology, procedure, ritual, and
history; military stories may use parallels with historical conflicts. Heinlein's Starship Troopers is an early example, along
with the Dorsai novels of Gordon Dickson. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is a critique of the genre, a Vietnam-era
response to the World War II–style stories of earlier authors. Prominent military SF authors include John Ringo, David
Drake, David Weber, and S. M. Stirling. Baen Books is known for cultivating military science fiction authors.
Military science fiction dates back at least as far as George Chesney's story "The Battle of Dorking." Other works of
fiction followed, including H.G. Wells’ "The Land Ironclads." Eventually, as science fiction became an established and
separate genre, military science fiction established itself as a subgenre. One such early work is H. Beam Piper's Uller
Uprising (1952) (based on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny). Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959) is another
pivotal early work of military SF, along with Gordon Dickson's Dorsai (1960), and these are thought to be mostly
responsible for spreading this sub-genre's popularity among young readers of the time.
The Vietnam War resulted in veterans with combat experience turning to write science fiction, including David Drake and
Joe Haldeman. Throughout the 1970s, works such as Haldeman's The Forever War and Drake's Hammer's Slammers
helped expand the popularity of the genre. Short stories also were popular, collected in books like Combat SF, edited by
Gordon R. Dickson. This anthology includes one of the first Hammer's Slammers stories as well as one of the BOLO
stories by Keith Laumer and one of the Berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen. This anthology seems to have been the first
time SF-stories specifically dealing with war as a subject were collected and marketed as such. The series of anthologies
under the group title There Will be War edited by Pournelle and John F. Carr (nine volumes from 1983 through 1990)
helped keep the category active, and encouraged new writers to enter it.
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Superhuman:
Superhuman stories deal with the emergence of humans who have abilities beyond the norm. This can stem either from
natural causes such as in Olaf Stapledon's novel Odd John, and Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, or be the result
of intentional augmentation such as in A.E. van Vogt's novel Slan. These stories usually focus on the alienation that these
beings feel as well as society's reaction to them. These stories have played a role in the real life discussion of human
enhancement. Frederick Pohl's Man Plus also belongs to this category.
Superhuman can mean an improved human, for example, by genetic modification, cybernetic implants, or as what humans
might evolve into, in the distant future. Occasionally, it could mean an otherwise "normal" human with unusual abilities,
such as psychic abilities, flying abilities, unimaginable strength or exceptional proficiency at something, far beyond the
norm.
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Apocalyptic SF:
Apocalyptic fiction is concerned with the end of civilization through war (On The Beach), pandemic (The Last Man),
astronomic impact (When Worlds Collide), ecological disaster (The Wind From Nowhere), or mankind's self-destruction
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(Oryx and Crake), or some other general disaster or with a world or civilization after such a disaster. Typical of the genre
are George R. Stewart's novel Earth Abides and Pat Frank's novel Alas, Babylon. Apocalyptic fiction generally concerns
the disaster itself and the direct aftermath, while post-apocalyptic can deal with anything from the near aftermath (as in
Cormac McCarthy's The Road) to 375 years in the future (as in By The Waters of Babylon) to hundreds or thousands of
years in the future, as in Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker.
Post-apocalyptic stories often take place in an agrarian, non-technological future world, or a world where only scattered
elements of technology remain. There is a considerable degree of blurring between this form of science fiction and that
which deals with false utopias or dystopic societies.
The genres gained in popularity after World War II, when the possibility of global annihilation by nuclear weapons
entered the public consciousness. However, recognizable apocalyptic novels existed at least since the first quarter of the
19th century, when Mary Shelley's The Last Man was published. Additionally, the subgenres draw on a body of
apocalyptic literature, tropes, and interpretations that are millennia old.
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Space Opera:
Space opera is adventure science fiction set in outer space or on distant planets, where the emphasis is on action rather
than either science or characterization. The conflict is heroic, and typically on a large scale. The best-selling science
fiction book of all time (with 12 million copies) is a space opera: Frank Herbert's Dune (1966), which sprawls over
thousands of years, a multitude of planets in and beyond an Imperium, and themes as diverse as environmentalism and
ecology, empires, religion and jihad, gender issues, and heroism.
Space opera is sometimes used pejoratively, to describe improbable plots, absurd science, and cardboard characters. But it
is also used nostalgically, and modern space opera may be an attempt to recapture the sense of wonder of the golden age
of science fiction. The pioneer of this subgenre is generally recognized to be Edward E. (Doc) Smith, with his Skylark and
Lensman series. Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, Peter F. Hamilton The Dreaming Void, The Night's Dawn and
Pandora's Star series, and the immensely popular Star Wars trilogies are newer examples of this genre.
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Space Western:
Space Western could be considered a sub-genre of Space Opera that transposes themes of the American Western books
and film to a backdrop of futuristic space frontiers. These stories typically involve "frontier" colony worlds (colonies that
have only recently been terraformed and/or settled) serving as stand-ins for the backdrop of lawlessness and economic
expansion that were predominant in the American west. Examples include Firefly and the accompanying movie Serenity
by Joss Whedon, as well as the animes Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star. The Star Wars character Han Solo is often
considered elemental to this genre.
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Feminist SF:
Feminist science fiction poses questions about social issues such as how society constructs gender roles, the role
reproduction plays in defining gender and the unequal political and personal power of men and women. Some of the most
notable feminist science fiction works have illustrated these themes using utopias to explore a society in which gender
differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, or dystopias to explore worlds in which gender inequalities are
intensified, thus asserting a need for feminist work to continue.
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Women writers have played key roles in science fiction and fantasy literature, often addressing themes of gender. One of
the first writers of science fiction was Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein (1818) dealt with the asexual creation of
new life, a re-telling of the Adam and Eve story.
Women writers in the utopian literature movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at the time of first wave
feminism, often addressed sexism. The Sultana's Dream (1905) by Bengali Muslim feminist, Roquia Sakhawat Hussain,
points this out through depicting a gender-reversed purdah in an alternate and terminologically futuristic world. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman did so by creating a single-sex world in Herland (1915). During the 1920s writers such as Clare Winger
Harris and Gertrude Barrows Bennett published science fiction stories written from female perspectives and occasionally
dealt with gender and sexuality based topics. Meanwhile, much pulp science fiction published during 1920s and 1930s
carried an exaggerated view of masculinity along with sexist portrayals of women. By the 1960s science fiction was
combining sensationalism with political and technological critiques of society. With the advent of second wave feminism,
women’s roles were questioned in this "subversive, mind expanding genre."
Two notable texts of this period are Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ' The Female
Man (1970). Each highlights the socially constructed aspects of gender roles by creating worlds with genderless societies.
Both authors were pioneers in feminist criticism of science fiction during the 1960s and 70s through essays collected in
The Language of the Night (Le Guin, 1979) and How To Suppress Women's Writing (Russ, 1983).
Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale (1985) tells a dystopic tale of a society in which women have been systematically
stripped of all liberty, and was motivated by fear of potential retrogressive effects on women's rights stemming from the
anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s. Octavia Butler poses complicated questions about the nature of race and gender in
Kindred (1979).
By the 1970s the science fiction community was confronting questions of feminism and sexism within science fiction
culture itself. Multiple Hugo-winning fan writer and professor of literature Susan Wood and others organized the
"feminist panel" at the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention against considerable resistance. Reactions to the
appearance of feminists among fannish ranks led indirectly to the creation of A Women's APA and WisCon.
Feminist science fiction is sometimes taught at the university level to explore the role of social constructs in
understanding gender.
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New Wave SF:
New Wave is a term applied to science fiction writing characterized by a high degree of experimentation, both in form and
in content, and a highbrow and self-consciously "literary" or artistic sensibility.
Among other authors producing work in the 1950s that broke from the Campbellian concept of SF were Ray Bradbury
who achieved a level of general fame that was “unprecedented in the field.” Bradbury was hailed as a visionary by the
likes of Christopher Isherwood and C. S. Lewis; Walter M. Miller Jr.’s novel 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' (1960) … also
received favorable attention from outside the field as well as within it. Theodore Sturgeon (“his story When You’re
Smiling, which appeared in Galaxy in the 1950s, is beautiful and brutal, spiked with psychological understanding.”), Fritz
Leiber (for example his novel 'Gather Darkness!' (1950) which is “an amusing and ingenious story of superscience
disguised as religion and witchcraft), Algis Budrys (especially for his novel 'Rogue Moon' with its use of Freudianism),
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and Alfred Bester (“singlehandedly it sometimes seems, he invented both New Wave and ‘cyberpunk.”) can be considered
as important precursors of the New Wave.
Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) has elements that resemble New Wave, though it's not clear if there
was any direct influence. In his introduction to a reprint of Leigh Brackett's Martian Quest, Michael Moorcock, the editor
of New Worlds (and thus the New Wave's prime instigator), wrote "With Catherine Moore, Judith Merril and Cele
Goldsmith, Leigh Brackett is one of the true godmothers of the New Wave. Anyone who thinks they're pinching one of
my ideas is probably pinching one of hers."
Beat writer William S. Burroughs would prove very inspirational, so much so that Philip José Farmer in "The Jungle Rot
Kid on the Nod" and Barrington J. Bayley's "The Four Colour Problem" (Bayley's most acclaimed work of fiction, which
appeared in New Worlds) wrote pastiches of the elder writer's work and J. G. Ballard published an admiring essay in New
Worlds. (Burroughs had earlier expressed admiration for Bayley's short novel Star Virus.) Burroughs' use of
experimentation such as the cut-up technique (an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to
create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing) and
his appropriation of science fiction tropes in radical ways proved the extent to which prose fiction could prove
revolutionary. In this, the more extreme New Wave writers sought to emulate his example.
Among works frequently cited as particularly important to the New Wave are John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, Philip
Jose Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage, Thomas M. Disch's 334, Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 and Dhalgren, Langdon
Jones's The Great Clock, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", J.G.
Ballard's The Voices of Time, Brian Aldiss' The Dark Light Years and "anti-novel" A Report on Probability, and Fritz
Leiber's One Station of the Way. The Dangerous Visions anthology (and its sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions) remain
especially noteworthy.
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Comic SF:
Comic science fiction is a sub-genre that exploits the genre's conventions for comic effect. Comic science fiction often
mocks or satirizes standard SF conventions like alien invasion of earth, interstellar travel, or futuristic technology.
Early pulp science fiction contained few comic stories. A notable exception was the Pete Manx series by Henry Kuttner
and Arthur K. Barnes (sometimes writing together and sometimes separately, under the house pen-name of Kelvin Kent).
Published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the series featured a time-traveling carnival
barker who uses his con-man abilities to get out of trouble. Two later series cemented Kuttner's reputation as one of the
most popular, early writers of comic science fiction: the Gallegher series (about a drunken inventor and his narcissistic
robot) and the Hogben series (about a family of mutant hillbillies). The former appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in
1943 and 1948 and was collected in hardcover as Robots Have No Tails (Gnome, 1952), and the latter appeared in
Thrilling Wonder Stories in the late 1940s.
Other examples include:
 Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and related novels
 Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.
 Robert Asprin's Phule series
 Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan novels
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 Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers novels
 Eric Idle's The Road to Mars
 Stanislaw Lem's novel Cyberiad and his Ijon Tichy stories.
 Most of Ron Goulart's work
 Kurt Vonnegut's novel The Sirens of Titan, and a lot of his work
 Snoo Wilson's novel Spaceache
 The novels of Rob Grant (Colony, Incompetence and Fat).
 Michael Ruben's The Sheriff of Yrnameer.
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Anthropological SF:
Anthropological science fiction is a sub-genre that absorbs and discusses anthropology and the study of human kind.
Examples include:
 Hominids by Robert Sawyer
 Neanderthal by John Darnton
 A Women of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason
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