"Let's gather up the bits and pieces and define the Simon-pure science fiction story: 1. It must be a scientific discovery-something that the author at least rationalizes as possible to science." "A piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences. Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well." Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written. New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow. Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading-they are always instructive. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story-a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. "By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. Campbell's infamous "Science fiction is what I say it is".ĭefinitions In chronological order According to anthologist, populist and historian of the genre Sam Moskowitz (1920–1997), Gernback's final words on the matter were: "Science fiction is a form of popular entertainment which contains elements of known, extrapolation of known or logical theoretical science". The list below omits Hugo Gernsback's later redefining of the term "science fiction". The order of the quotations is chronological quotations without definite dates are listed last. Tom Shippey compared George Orwell's Coming Up for Air (1939) with Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952), and concluded that the basic building block and distinguishing feature of a science fiction novel is the presence of the novum, a term Darko Suvin adapted from Ernst Bloch and defined as "a discrete piece of information recognizable as not-true, but also as not-unlike-true, not-flatly- (and in the current state of knowledge) impossible." The authors of the Encyclopedia article- Brian Stableford, Clute, and Nicholls-explain that, by "cognition", Suvin refers to the seeking of rational understanding, while his concept of estrangement is similar to the idea of alienation developed by Bertolt Brecht, that is, a means of making the subject matter recognizable while also seeming unfamiliar. Suvin's cited definition, dating from 1972, 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". The authors regard Darko Suvin's definition as having been most useful in catalysing academic debate, though they consider disagreements to be inevitable as science fiction is not homogeneous. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, contains an extensive discussion of the problem of definition, under the heading "Definitions of SF". In addition, some definitions are included that define, for example, a science fiction story, rather than science fiction itself, since these also illuminate an underlying definition of science fiction. Some definitions of sub-types of science fiction are included, too for example see David Ketterer's definition of "philosophically-oriented science fiction". Robert Scholes's definitions of "fabulation" and "structural fabulation" below. Definitions of related terms such as " science fantasy", " speculative fiction", and "fabulation" are included where they are intended as definitions of aspects of science fiction or because they illuminate related definitions-see e.g. This is a list of definitions that have been offered by authors, editors, critics and fans over the years since science fiction became a genre. There have been many attempts at defining science fiction.
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