ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
Toward a Definition of
Science Fiction
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
Works Cited
Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. NY: Schocken,
1973.
Allen, Dick, ed. Science Fiction: The Future. 2nd Edition. NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1983.
Ash, Brian, ed. The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. NY: Harmony Books, 1977.
Ateberry, Brian. Teacher's Guide to Accompany The Norton Book of Science Fiction.
NY: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Ballard, J. G. A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews. New York:
Picador, 1996.
Card, Orson Scott. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Cincinnati: Writers
Digest Books, 1990.
Clareson, Thomas. "The Other Side of Realism."
''', ed. SF: The Other Side of Realism: Essays on Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971.
Conklin, Groff. "What is Good Science Fiction?" Junior Libraries 15 April 1958.
Fiedler, Leslie A. "Introduction." In Dreams Awake: A Historical-Critical Anthology of
Science Fiction. New York: Dell, 1975.
Franklin, H. Bruce. Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth
Century. New York: Oxford U P, 1978.
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
Works Cited (cont.)
Frye, Northrup. The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P,
1971.
___, Sheridan Baker, and George Perkins. The Harper Handbook to Literature. NY:
Harper and Row, 1985.
Gunn, James. "The Readers of Hard Science Fiction." Slusser and Rabkin. 70-81
___, ed. The Road to Science Fiction: From Here to Forever. Vol. 4. Clarkston, GA:
White Wolf Publishing, 1982.
Heard, Gerald. Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future. New York:
Coward-McCann, 1953.
Hillegas, Mark R., ed. Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R.
Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961.
Knight, Damon.In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction. Chicago:
Advent, 1967.
Le Guin, Ursula K. "Íntroduction to The Left Hand of Darkness." The Language of the
Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood. NY: Berkley Medallion,
1979: 145-49.
___. "Introduction." LeGuin and Ateberry. 15-42.
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
Works Cited (cont.)
___. "Introduction." LeGuin and Ateberry. 15-42.
___. "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown." The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy
and Science Fiction Ed. Susan Wood. NY: Berkley Medallion, 1979: 91-110.
___ and Brian Ateberry, eds. The Norton Book of Science Fiction. NY: W. W. Norton,
1993.
Lem, Stanislaw. Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Franz
Rottensteiner. NY: HBJ, 1984.
Lewis, C. S. "On Science Fiction." Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. Ed. Walter
Hooper. NY: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1966.
Lundwall, Sam J. Science Fiction: What It_s All About. NY: Ace Books, 1971.
Malzberg, Barry. The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties. Garden
City: Doubleday, 1982.
McCaffery, Larry, ed. Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary
American Science Fiction Writers. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1990.
McConnell, Frank. "Sturgeon_s Law: First Corollary." Slusser and Rabkin. 14-23.
Minyard, Applewhite, ed. Decades of Science Fiction. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Publishing, 1998.
Parrinder, Patrick. Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching. New Accents.
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
Works Cited
Pringle, David. Science Fiction, The 100 Best Novels: An English Language Selection,
1949-1984. NY: Carroll and Graf, 1984.
Slusser, George E., "The Ideal Worlds of Science Fiction." Slusser and Rabkin. 214-44.
___. and Eric S. Rabkin, ed. Hard Science Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P,
1986.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a
Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale U P, 1979.
Wilson, William, A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject (1851).
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"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."
Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree (8)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"[Science fiction] is fiction
about the future of science and
scientists."
Isaac Asimov (paraphrased in
The Visual Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction) (257)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"[W]hat distinguishes science fiction from other kinds of fiction is
a peculiar compromise between scientific truth and untruth.
Samuel Delany has analyzed this compromise in terms of the SF
text's subjunctivity ("About 5,750 Words"). What he means by this
term is the degree to which every statement in the fiction
describes a hypothetical condition: something that is not
happening, has not happened, could not have happened in the
past (unlike realistic fiction), but might happen, given the proper
changes in society and scientific knowledge. Another word for
subjunctivity might be 'ifness,' the condition of being contingent.
"What SF is contingent upon is change that does not violate the
reader’s understanding of scientifically defined reality, which is
not to say that we necessarily accept any statement in the text as
scientifically valid. Rather, we accept reference within SF as
allusions to science, broadly conceived of as a field of endeavor, a
way of mapping the universe, and a way of speaking about the
universe and the attempt to comprehend it.”
Brian Ateberry, in Teacher’s Guide to Accompany The Norton Book
of Science Fiction (29-30)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"One can almost make the case that science fiction,
far from being a disreputable minor genre, in fact
constitutes the strongest literary tradition of the
twentieth century, and may well be its authentic
literature. Within its pages, as in our lives, archaic
myth and scientific apocalypse collide and fuse.
However naively, it had tried to respond to the
most significant events of our time--the threat of
nuclear war, over-population, the computer
revolution, the possibilities and abuses of physical
science, the ecological dangers to our planet, the
consumer society as benign tyranny--topics that
haunt our minds but are scarcely considered by the
mainstream novel. If few great names stand out in
science fiction, this reflects its collaborative nature,
just as no great names stand out in the design of
the Boeing 747 or, for that matter, Chartres
Cathedral."
j. G. Ballard, in A User’s Guide to the Millennium
(193-94)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"To be science fiction, not fantasy, an honest effort at
prophetic extrapolation of the known must be made.
Ghosts can enter science fiction, if they’re logically
explained, but not if they are simply the ghosts of fantasy.
Prophetic extrapolation can derive from a number of
different sources, and apply in a number of fields.
Sociology, psychology, and para-psychology are, today, not
true sciences; therefore, instead of forecasting future
results of application of sociological science of today, we
must forecast the development of a science of sociology.
From there the story can take off."
John W. Campbell. Jr. in Of Worlds Beyond (1947) (quoted
in James Gunn, "The Readers of Hard Science Fiction" 74)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"What SF writers write is SF.”
--Orson Scott Card in How to Write Science
Fiction and Fantasy (11)”
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"The best definition of science fiction is that it
consists of stories in which one or more definitely
scientific notion or theory or actual discovery is
extrapolated, played with, embroidered on, in a
non-logical, or fictional sense, and thus carried
beyond the realm of the immediately possible in an
effort to see how much fun the author and reader
can have exploring the imaginary outer reaches of
a given idea’s potentialities."
Groff Conklin, "What is Good Science Fiction" (16)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"[Science fiction is] a new way of reading, a
new way of making texts make sense-collectively producing a new set of codes. [SF
writers invented the genre] by writing new
kinds of sentences and embedding them in
contexts in which those sentences were
readable."
Samuel R. Delany, in an interview with Larry
McCaffery in Across the Wounded Galaxies
(79)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"In fact, one good working definition of science fiction may be the literature which,
growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the
rest of human existence.”
H. Bruce Franklin, Future Perfect (vii)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"Science fiction frequently tries to imagine
what life would be like on a plane as far
above us as we are above savagery; its
setting is often of a kind that appears to us
technologically miraculous. It is thus a mode
of romance with a strong tendency to myth."
Northrup Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (49)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"By ‘scientifction’ . . . I mean the Jules Verne,
H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story-a charming romance intermingled with
scientific fact and prophetic vision."
Hugo Gernsback (quoted in Fiedler 11)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"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 the civilization or the
race itself is in danger."
James Gunn, The Road to Science Fiction, Vol.
4 (16)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"Science fiction is the prophetic . . . the apocalyptic literature of our particular and
culminating epoch of crisis."
Gerald Heard, Modern Science Fiction (255)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"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."
Robert Heinlein (quoted in Parrinder 16)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"Science fiction is the myth of machine civilization, which, in its utopian
extrapolation, it tends to glorify."
Mark R. Hillegas, Shadows of Imagination (xvii)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"Science Fiction is what I mean when I point to it."
Damon Knight (quoted in James Gunn, "The Readers of Hard
Science Fiction" 71)
"What we get from science fiction--what keeps us reading it, in
spite of our doubts and occasional disgust--is not different
from the thing that makes mainstream stories rewarding, but
only expressed differently. We live on a minute island of known
things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which
surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we
can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but
in big ones of space and time."
DamonKnight, In Search of Wonder (4)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"And what is science fiction at its best but just a ‘new tool’ as Mrs.
Woolf avowedly sought 50 years ago, a crazy, protean, left-handed
monkey-wrench, which can be put to any use the craftsman has in
mind--satire, extrapolation, prediction, absurdity, exactitude,
exaggeration, warning, message-carrying, tale-telling, whatever
you like--an infinitely expanding metaphor exactly suited to an
expanding universe, a broken mirror, broken into numberless
fragments, any one of which is capable of reflecting, for a
moment, the left eye and nose of the reader, and also the farthest
stars shining in the depths of the remotest galaxy?
Ursula K. LeGuin, "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown" (106)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"Science fiction, then, commonly uses techniques both from the
realistic and the fantastic traditions of narrative to tell a story of
which a referent, implicit or explicit, is the mind-set, the content,
or the mythos of science and technology.
"In his Strategies of Fantasy, Brian Attebery shows how science
fiction uses science as its ‘megatext.’ The nourishing medium, the
origin of the imagery, the motive of the narrative, is to be found in
the contents, assumptions, and world view of modern science and
technology. ‘Science [writes Attebery] surrounds, supports, and
judges SF in much the same way the Bible grounds Christian
devotional poetry.’"
Ursula K. LeGuin, from the introduction to The Norton Book of
Science Fiction (23-24)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. All fiction is
metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. "All fiction is metaphor.
Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of
fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain
great dominants of our contemporary life--science, all the sciences
and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook,
among them. Space travel is one of those metaphors, so is an
alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another.
The future, in fiction, is a metaphor."
Ursula K. LeGuin, in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness
(149
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"It is the premise of science fiction that
anything shown shall in principle be
interpretable empirically and rationally.
In science fiction there can be no
inexplicable marvels, no transcendence,
no devils or demons--and the patterns
of occurrence must be verisimilar.”
Stanislaw Lem in Microworlds (35)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"In this kind of story the pseudo-scientific
apparatus is to be taken simply as a 'machine' in
the sense which that word bore for the NeoClassical critics. The most superficial appearance
of plausibility--the merest sop to our critical
intellect--will do. I am inclined to think that
frankly supernatural methods are best. I took a
hero once to Mars in a space-ship, but when I
knew better I had angels convey him to Venus.
Nor need the strange worlds, when we get there,
be at all strictly tied to scientific probabilities. It is
their wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that
matter."
C. S. Lewis, "On Science Fiction" (68-69)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
“A simplified definition would be that the author of a 'straight' science fiction
story proceeds from (or alleges to proceed from) known facts, developed in a
credible way, whereas the author of a fantasy story starts with an idea and
builds a world around it. The question of whether a certain story of imagination
is a fantasy or a science fiction work would depend upon the device the author
uses to explain his projected or unreal world. If he uses the gimmick or device
of saying: 'This is a logical or probable assumption based upon known science,
which is going to develop from known science or from investigations of areas
not yet quite explored but suspected,' then one could call it science fiction. But
if he asks the reader to suspend his disbelief simply because of the fun of it, in
other words, just to say: 'Here is a fairy tale I'm going to tell you,' then it is
fantasy. It could actually be the same story.”
Sam J. Lundwall, from Science Fiction: What It’s All About (22)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"Science fiction will always offer easier alternatives.
Science fiction will always be slanted, by definition, to
taking its readers out of the world. Only weak people,
however--pat Freudianism and the great cult psychology
movements of the seventies have taught us--want out
of the world. Strong people want in. Strong people want
to, must deal with life as it is presented. Science fiction
if a literature for the weak, the defenseless, the
handicapped and the scorned. Panacea and pap."
Barry Malzberg, in Engines of the Night (83-84)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"If this appears that I am arguing for a deconstruction of our ideas of generic norms,
returning us to a primal chaos of fictive forms in which all fictive forms are equally
privileged; if this appears that I am arguing for the dismantling of the concept itself,
‘science fiction,’ as more a barrier than an aid to reading; if this seems as if I am
saying that all fiction worth examining is, one way or another, science fiction; it is
because that is what I am doing."
Frank McConnell, in "Sturgeon’s Law: First Corollary" (15)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"Science fiction is not fiction about science, but fiction
which endeavors to find the meaning in science and in the
scientific technology we are constructing."
Judith Merrill (quoted in Science Fiction: The Future (2)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"Science fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that
it eases the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ on the part of its
readers by utilizing an atmosphere of science credibility for its
imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social
science and philosophy."
Sam Moskowitz,, quoted in Science Fiction: The Future (1)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"Science fiction is a form of fantastic fiction which exploits the
imaginative perspectives of modern science."
David Pringle,, in Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"If poetry can be said to aspire to the condition of music, then science fiction tends
toward that of pure idea. That idea is, we are told, Science. But science fiction is two
words, and it is strange if not paradoxical that, in this fiction, science, as idea almost
synonymous with the original sense of that word, disembodied vision, should so
strongly claim a precise locus, a literary form that is "ideal" in a very particular way.
For the sense of this term, denoting as it does the absolute, unique, and singular, is
qualified in science fiction, the literature that, constantly reembodying the
disembodied, claims as its ideal a condition of materiality equal to that of the
material universe its science encounters."
George E. Slusser,, "The Ideal Worlds of Science Fiction" (214)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"The term can be applied only to a story in which
wherein removal of its scientific content would
invalidate the narrative."
Theodore Sturgeon, (paraphrased in The Visual
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) (257)
Nine tenths of science fiction is crap. Of course, nine
tenths of everything is crap. (rough paraphrase)
Theodore Sturgeon (source unknown)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
Science fiction is "the literature of cognitive
estrangement."
Darko Suvin,, in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
(4)
SF Defined
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
SF Defined
"[Thomas] Campbell says that 'Fiction in poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her
soft and enchanting resemblance.' Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in
which the revealed truths of Science may be given interwoven with a pleasing story
which may itself be poetical and true--thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of
science clothed in a garb of the Poetry of Life.”
William Wilson, from A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject (1851); quoted
in Parrinder (2)
ENGL 3840 Science Fiction
"If the labours of men of Science should ever create any material
revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the
impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then
no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps
of the man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects,
but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the
objects of the Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the
Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects
of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the
time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us,
and the relations under which they are contemplated by the
followers of these respective Sciences shall be manifestly and
palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the
time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus
familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of
flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the
transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a
dear and genuine inmate of the household of man."
William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads”
SF Defined