General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20268 min read

Science fiction

Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi) is a genre of narrative fiction that depicts imagined scientific or technological developments, such as time travel or artificial intelligence, and explores their impact on society¹. It exists as a body of literature tracing its written origins to the Romantic era, as a category of twentieth-century commercial fiction that emerged from the American pulp magazines, and as a dominant form of global screen entertainment²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Working definition	Fiction depicting imagined scientific or technological advances (e.g., time travel, artificial intelligence) and their impact on society¹
Coined term	"Scientifiction", defined by Hugo Gernsback in the editorial to Amazing Stories #1 (April 1926) as "the Jules Verne, H G Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision"⁴
Scholarly definition	Darko Suvin's "literature of cognitive estrangement", organized around a novum, a principle of possible difference from reality³
First true work	Most critics cite Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)⁵
Commercial scale	By the 1970s SF constituted around 10 percent of all English-language fiction published⁶
Screen dominance	SF action spectacles dominated the global box office of the first two decades of the 21st century³
Catalogued subgenres	Afrofuturist, apocalyptic, cyberpunk, dystopian, LitRPG, space opera, steampunk, superhero, and time-travel fiction, among others¹

Definition and scope

No single definition of science fiction holds across critics, and the competing definitions differ in what they treat as the genre's core. The Library of Congress genre record defines it functionally, as fiction depicting imagined scientific or technological advances and their impact on society¹. The Cambridge Dictionary offers a reader-facing version: books, movies, or cartoons about an imagined future, especially about space travel or other planets, or writing about imagined developments in science and their effect on life, especially in the future⁷.

Suvin's novum. The most influential academic definition comes from Darko Suvin, a scholar of comparative literature whose 1970s work is regarded by most 21st-century scholars as the primary origin point of academic SF studies. Suvin defined the genre as "the literature of cognitive estrangement": SF posits some principle of possible difference from reality as we know it, which he calls a novum³. Carl Freedman later proposed replacing Suvin's "cognition" with "the cognition effect", arguing that the dividing line between SF and fantasy depends on a text's rhetorical attitude rather than an external epistemological judgment³.

Institutional delineation. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction deliberately avoids a sharp boundary, delineating SF as "an interwoven array of texts set in worlds which do not exist but arguably could"; it notes that widespread agreement on a definition emerged only after the founding of the specialist SF pulp magazines⁴. A 2020 peer-reviewed article in SAGE Open proposed an empirical revision centered on techne, arguing that the content diversity of the genre means works cannot be dismissed from the SF canon on stylistic or literary grounds⁸.

Boundaries with fantasy and speculative fiction

In practice the SF/fantasy boundary often reduces to a labeling test: if teleportation is attributed to magical powers, the story is fantasy, whereas if the same effect is attributed to technological innovation, it is SF³. Suvin's novum makes the same distinction systematic: a fantasy story's principle of difference is not possible from a scientific, materialist perspective, while SF's must be materially plausible³. A definition cited by the Library of Congress states the criterion directly: the attempt at scientific and technological plausibility is the feature that distinguishes science fiction from earlier speculative writings and from contemporary speculative genres such as fantasy and horror¹.

The term speculative fiction itself carries three historically located meanings: a human-centered subgenre of SF, a genre distinct from SF focused exclusively on possible futures, and a supercategory embracing fantasy, SF, horror, and their derivatives such as dystopia, alternate history, steampunk, and magic realism⁹. Which sense applies depends on who is using the term and when.

History: origins and proto-SF

Scholarship traces written SF's origins to the Romantic era while also recognizing it as a category of twentieth-century commercial fiction that emerged out of the American pulp magazines². Scholars variously connect Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to the genre's origins, but most agree that SF's development is primarily a phenomenon of the twentieth century, acknowledging Jules Verne in France and H. G. Wells in England as proto-science-fiction writers¹⁰.

Frankenstein's contested status. Most critics cite Mary Shelley's 1818 novel as the first true work of science fiction⁵, yet other scholarship treats the genre as primarily twentieth-century and describes Frankenstein only as variously connected to its development¹⁰. The disagreement is unresolved.

Wells's synthesis. The figure whose work had a truly transformative impact on early SF was H. G. Wells (1866–1946), in many of whose stories, published from the 1890s onward, the Gothic, the Utopia, and the Anticipation traditions are closely bound together and reworked into a form all readers today recognize as inarguably SF; most later SF has adhered to his balance between scientific and sociological speculation⁶. One later survey frames the tradition as running from Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) through Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek (1966– ) to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008– ), marked by a dialectic between utopian optimism and apocalyptic pessimism³.

The term itself has a layered history. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an isolated 1851 reference to "Science-Fiction"; accounts differ on the phrase's early attestations, though Hugo Gernsback is generally credited with coining it for the genre¹⁰^•¹¹.

Pulps, Golden Age, New Wave, and cyberpunk

The pulp foundation. Science fiction became a commercial publishing category in the United States with the founding of the first SF magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926⁵. In the editorial to its first issue, Gernsback coined "Scientifiction" for the Verne, Wells, and Poe type of story, "a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision"⁴. The term "science fiction" came into general use in the 1930s, with an early appearance in Gernsback's editorial to #1 of Wonder Stories (June 1929); its first use on a standalone book cover may have been The Girl from Mars (1929) by Miles J. Breuer and Jack Williamson⁴.

The book boom. The 1950s saw an SF book-publishing boom, first through specialist small presses and then mass-market publishers, largely reprinting material from the pulp magazines⁶. By the 1970s SF constituted around 10 percent of all English-language fiction published, and with the growing readership came greater public acceptance of SF as "respectable"⁶. Among magazines, Asimov's Science Fiction, founded in 1977 as Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, was the only new US SF magazine of its era to approach the quality of the "big three": Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy⁶.

Film and the 1980s. Film successes including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and E.T. (1982) catalyzed SF's commercial success and its 1980s media packaging⁶. The most significant SF development of the 1980s was the advent of cyberpunk, with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling cast as its prophets; despite media hyperbole, cyberpunk represented a real invigoration of the genre and came close to revitalizing hard SF⁶. Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer was published in 1984⁵. The New Wave of the 1960s–70s and cyberpunk are treated as distinct movements in standard genre histories, which typically cover nineteenth-century, pulp, Golden Age, New Wave, feminist, and cyberpunk SF in sequence¹².

Subgenres and forms

The Library of Congress genre vocabulary subdivides science fiction into named forms including Afrofuturist fiction, apocalyptic fiction, cyberpunk fiction, dystopian fiction, LitRPG, space operas, steampunk fiction, subterranean fiction, superhero fiction, and time-travel fiction¹. The SFE's own delineation, "an interwoven array of texts set in worlds which do not exist but arguably could", accommodates all of them⁴.

Awards, fandom, and institutions

The Hugo Awards are presented by the World Science Fiction Society, which for over four decades has chosen its winners by votes from members of the World Science Fiction Convention⁹^•¹⁴. In 2001 the Society opened what one scholar calls a new chapter by selecting J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) and Ang Lee's film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) as Hugo Award winners, works outside science fiction proper, marking a rapprochement between fantasy and SF within the broader speculative-fiction field⁹.

National awards sit alongside the Hugos. In Canada, since 1980 the principal literary award for SF has been the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, the Aurora, voted on by readers, with six professional awards given each year in English and French⁵. Canadian winners of the Hugo include Spider Robinson's "By Any Other Name" (1977), "Stardance" (1978), and "Melancholy Elephants" (1983), and William Gibson's Neuromancer (novel, 1985); Canadian Nebula-winning novels include Neuromancer and Robert J. Sawyer's The Terminal Experiment⁵.

By the numbers

Two quantified measures anchor the genre's scale. In publishing, SF constituted around 10 percent of all English-language fiction published by the 1970s⁶. On screen, SF action spectacles dominated the global box office of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, making SF arguably the most popular narrative genre in existence³.

Naming across languages

The genre's name travels with local inflections. French usage retains the hybrid form science-fiction, and the Encyclopédie Universalis characterizes the SF effect as situated near the marvelous, in which the universal acceptance of the plausible is replaced by surprise and revelation¹³.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Literature and written works › Science fiction (literature)

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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