Defenitions of Science Fiction

                

                       Definitions of Science Fiction

Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Don D’Ammassa)

Science fiction is one of the three subdivisions of fantastic literature, the other two being fantasy fiction and supernatural horror. Science fiction is the youngest of the three, but since the late 1940s it has been by far the most popular, and the total number of science fiction titles published in book form presently exceeds that of fantasy and supernatural fiction combined.                                                                  

Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms 

Science fiction is a type of narrative fiction that is grounded in scientific or pseudo scientific concepts and that, whether set on Earth or in an alternate or parallel world, employs both realistic and fantastic elements in exploring the question “What if?”

Isaac Asimov

Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.

Christopher Evans

Perhaps the crispest definition is that science fiction is a literature of 'what if?' What if we could travel in time? What if we were living on other planets? What if we made contact with alien races? And so on. The starting point is that the writer supposes things are different from how we know them to be.

Arthur C. Clarke

Science fiction is something that  could  happen - but you usually wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that  couldn't  happen - though you often only wish that it could.

Jeff Prucher

Science fiction is "a genre (of literature, film, etc.) in which the setting differs from our own world (e.g. by the invention of new technology, through contact with aliens, by having a different history, etc.), and in which the difference is based on extrapolations made from one or more changes or suppositions; hence, such a genre in which the difference is explained (explicitly or implicitly) in scientific or rational, as opposed to supernatural, terms."

Merriam Webster Dictionary

Science Fiction is a fiction dealing principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals or having a scientific factor as an essential orienting component

Brian W. Aldiss

Science fiction is the search for 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.

Dick Allen

Is it any wonder that a new generation has rediscovered science fiction, rediscovered a form of literature that argues through its intuitive force that the individual can shape and change and influence and triumph; that man can eliminate both war and poverty; that miracles are possible; that love, if given a chance, can become the main driving force of human relationships?

Kingsley Amis

Science Fiction is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin.

John Boyd

Science fiction is story-telling, usually imaginative as distinct from realistic fiction, which poses the effects of current or extrapolated scientific discoveries, or a single discovery, on the behavior of individuals of society.

J. O. Bailey

A piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences ... It must be a scientific discovery -- something that the author at least rationalizes as possible to science.

Theodore Sturgeon

A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.