science fiction n.

Mr. H. G. Wells, the imaginative writer of science-fiction, has recently brought out a thrilling romance whose basis is the intended conquest of the earth by the inhabitants of Mars.

A COLUMBUS OF SPACE (by Garrett P. Serviss. D. Appleton & Co., New York. Illustrated, $1.50) — This is a science-fiction tale for boys, written in Jules Verne’s fashion. He who is the hero of the story, by the power of ‘inter-atomic energy,’ sails into space in a queer airship he’s constructed, and with his companion lands on Venus. Then there is enough of lively action. Fierce giants with white saucer eyes and most beautiful Amazons, and monsters of the prehistoric sort, and dangers of several varieties, provide it. Boys will enjoy the story, which has four full page pictures in colors.

Remember that Jules Verne was a sort of Shakespeare in science fiction.

That the term ‘science fiction’ is a misnomer, that trying to get two enthusiasts to agree on a definition of it leads only to bloody knuckles; that better labels have been devised (Heinlein’s suggestion, ‘speculative fiction’, is the best, I think), but that we're stuck with this one; and that it will do us no particular harm if we remember that, like ‘The Saturday Evening Post’, it means what we point to when we say it.

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-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin.

Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.

Crude, vigorous and imaginative magazine stories from one of the star writers of Thirties pulp science fiction.

Soft science fiction is basically based on sociology, anthropology, political science, theology, or mythology. Example: Brian Aldiss’s Galaxies Like Grains of Sand.

Soft science fiction, probably a back-formation from Hard Science Fiction, and used sometimes to refer to science fiction based in the so-called soft sciences (anthropology, sociology, etc.), and sometimes to refer to science fiction in which there is little science or little awareness of science at all.

By hard science fiction we mean that science fiction in which the story turns around a change in the environment that can be understood only scientifically and generally through what are known as the hard sciences, usually the laboratory sciences such as chemistry, physics, and biology, and the observational sciences such as astronomy, geology, and geography. Mathematics and computers are two of the tools used by all the hard sciences. These sciences are considered hard because they deal with objective data, and predictions can be made from these data that are verifiable.

Science fiction stories are those in which some aspect of future science or high technology is so integral to the story that, if you take away the science or technology, the story collapses.

science fiction…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.