The core of this section is to focus on understanding S-F and how it operates as a genre and story-typing paradigm.
The genre then is often the domain of a number of S-F tropes; such as, ray guns, spaceships, robots and androids, faster-the-light travel, aliens, holograms, transhumans, superhumans, artificial humans, clones, utopia or dystopia, evil empires and/or rebel causes, uprisings, collapses and superintelligences. These are some of, but not limited to, the wide range of things that make up the trope domain of the genre.
What then is science fiction? The term Science Fiction – which will be abbreviated throughout this work as S-F – has been used to define a particular type of storytelling genre. This is the genre where story, narrative or plot (for now, let’s use these interchangeably) are generally defined to include some or all of the following traits:
Herein lies the challenge of the term. ****S-F is both broad in its generosity of inclusion and yet rich in dissent on its exclusions. Commonly, repeatedly and at times with much controversy, the term has been utilised in different ways to describe all sorts of material as being S-F. Why?
The answer may lie in how S-F has evolved as a genre since its inception. ****The term science fiction has been attributed to Amazing Stories magazine creator Hugo Gernsback (of Hugo Award fame) when he created the term for the stories appearing in his magazine as being that of ’scientifiction’ because of how the stories treated “the speculative and the otherworldly through the lens of systematic realism” (Gernsback & Wythoff, 2016; Vint, 2014). Although this term originates after what is often considered the first science fiction novel – Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Shelly is often attributed to being the inventor or at least progenitor of the genre. As Scholes & Rabkin (1977) argues Shelly demonstrated that taking a scientific possibility and projecting its possible advancement in her own timeline showed how to produce a fictional science future; “\[s]he introduced a piece of a possible future into her own world and altered forever the possibilities of literature” (p. 7). Until this point, other authors in contention for inventing science fiction only offered projections of fantasies, utopias or supernatural capacities with the likes of Vernes’ story adventures; Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) or Jonathan Swifts’ Gulliver’s Travels (1726) or //X Author// on supernatural explorations with //X book// and utopias buy **//X Author// **. These authors’ works did not demonstrate as Shelly’s did the capability of taking a known science concept and projecting its advancement into a future state of their existing world and its time.
Scholars who have investigated, researched and examined S-F over its many years of production have defined their learned description of what S-F represents. In nearly every published text on the exploration of S-F, there is the opening section where the author draws down their own lines of what they think S-F actually is and how it works as a form of genre writing. While the definition of S-F is still a contested space, it is useful to examine how others have delineated how and what S-F is.
Everett F. Bleiler (1990), in their book “Science-fiction, the early years“ provides a utilitarian justification for how to define S-F when he refers to it as merely a commercial construct because it is an “assemblage of genres and subgenres that are not intrinsically closely related, but are generally accepted as an area of publication by a market-place” (p. xi). Dieter and Cassidy (1989) in their work The illustrated history of science fiction position S-F as an embryonic genre trying to move beyond what they consider its fantasy roots during the period when humanity began to blossom into its scientific confidence and harnessed the natural world (p. 5-6).
[POINTS ABOUT S-F changing from Fantasy, Utopian to Science]
Aldiss supports Bleiler’s position when in Tree Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction he points out that in any argument on defining S-F there will be scholarly dissent but it must pay attention to the reader who can find just as interesting (and rewarding) Thomas More's Utopia, Burroughs's Barsoom, or 1984 as 2010 – as he puts it “C. S. Lewis is as rewarding as Robert Heinlein” (Aldiss, 1989, p. 15). ****The reader then is uncaring of the battle lines for what constitutes S-F only in what presents an interesting speculative story. The space is enmeshed in a range of generic interplays that overlap with peaks and troughs, all battling to define what is the domain of the science fiction story. Aldiss (1989), however, unlike others, is prepared to put forth a categorical definition of S-F that he states as follows:
”Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind 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 mode. (p. 25)”
The definition is robust in covering the key aspects of how S-F explores humanity’s position in the universe and the futurity of scientific development coloured by our anxieties about the unknown.
The origins of S-F in gothic are another aspect of the S-F zone [MORE HERE ON THIS]
Another facet to unpick is the assumed corollary that S-F is but a form of fantasy, the former operating as a subset of the latter. Aldiss (1989) positions this sentiment by pointing out that separating science fiction from science fantasy is impossible as they both inhabit the larger fantasy area. Counter to this is Miriam Allen deFord’s (1971) assertion in the foreword to Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow that “science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities" giving a semblance of contrastive space to the interplay of S-F and Fantasy.
From this territory, S-F has shifted and evolved as the ‘what’ of its makeup has changed. The fantastical stories of Mary Shelly and Jules Verne evolved into stories of defined futuristic science by Issac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. However, regardless of the delineating frame of reference, it can be argued that all these stories are still about ‘future alternative potential’. This sense of future alternative potential can be understood if we adopt the concept of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that science fiction scholar Darko Survin (1979) has used to umbrella the range of S-F storytelling. Suvin's (1979) term ‘cognitive estrangement’ is valuable in how it captures S-F’s need to produce a difference for how an ‘imagined something’ is contrasted with the ‘current now'. This term offers freedom by embracing all the historical shifts of S-F from ancient literary tales to modern movie blockbusters. Embracing Survin’s commentary further, we can say it embodies everything from “the Islands of the Blessed, utopias, fabulous voyages, planetary novels, Staatsromane, anticipations, and dystopias—as well as the Verne-type Romans Scientifiques, the Wellsian scientific romance variant, and the twentieth-century magazine and anthology-based SF sensu stricto” (Survin, 1979, p. 12) extending into and also capturing the twenty-first-century moving image VFX extravaganzas of animes, movie blockbusters and streaming serials.
However, before we can understand how Survin’s ‘cognitive estrangement’ can work to offer a type of sovereignty for defining S-F, we need to examine how S-F has historically and contemporarily been understood.
Landon (2002) rejects S-F as a useful category claiming it lacks an understanding of what is actually occurring as a method of constructed meaning and embraces instead the term ‘science fiction thinking’ – a deliberately fuzzy term he acknowledges – because it allows a wider field of vision for the ‘culture’ of S-F across three aspects instead. These three are 1. A shift from literary category to that of a “set of attitudes and expectations about the future”. 2. S-F operates in a dual mode of assumptions that guide both its writing-of and consumption-of and, 3. The terminology of modern analysis for S-F generates its own expectation of how to critique and understand the field (Landon, 2002, p. 4). Each of these effectively builds a board consideration of S-F as being that of a set of “common enterprises” underlying any discussion of S-F, which for Landon is the “belief that better thinking is a desirable goal for humanity and that science fiction can somehow promote that improvement” (Landon, 2002, p. 7). That science fiction has, from its original inception, moved from the fringes to the centre of cultural consciousness and, in doing so, influences the modern zeitgeist (Landon, 2002, p. 4-5).
Figure X.X
It is useful at this juncture to consider how varied the definitions of S-F are and the range of ways that science fiction has been categorised, boxed, and all-around classified by those who both write S-F works and those scholars that study them. Both S-F writers and scholars have attempted for decades to give Science Fiction as a genre and literary space a form of clear mandate in what it represents. These definitions of what science fiction is have instead fuel further debate, disagreement and rebukes.
Meta-Analysis of Definitions for Science Fiction To aid in understanding the complexity of delineating what is considered science fiction and how science fiction has been defined, a meta-analysis of definitions for S-F was conducted. The meta-analysis method involved a review of definitions provided by Science Fiction writers, scholars and researchers across a range of published works. Each time one of these parties defined science fiction – either their definition or that of another party – it was collected and counted. To help provide a meaningful structure to the collected definitions, a sort and tag approach was utilised to bucket the definitions into meaningful themes as per methods used in thematic analysis. The thematic themes associated with the S-F definition meta-analysis can be reviewed in Table X.X - S-F Definitions Themes.
This meta-analysis is useful in revealing how despite the range of scholarship and works around understanding S-F it is clear that there is no single consensus. Figure X.X: Frequency Count of S-F Definitions provides a visual overview of the meta-analysis showing the range of definitions and the breadth of opinion regarding how science fiction is categorised. In the provided figure, a frequency count of the definition themes is presented, along with snippets of the quotes connected to the scholar or author’s account of how they have aimed to define science fiction. An inspection of Figure X.X quickly reveals the breadth of opinion and divergence of agreement on what science fiction is. However, despite this contested range for the genre, several ways to understand science fiction arise and appear to dominate. Figure X.X: Frequency Size of S-F Definitions.