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This article covers the history of the literary genre of science fiction.

The start of the genre of science fiction is a question that is debated among scholars, and each one places it at a different place. This debate is exacerbated by the fact that there is no consistent, consensus definition of science fiction. Inclusionists have offered works like the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh or the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata's A True Story as the ur-text of science fiction. Exclusionists like Brian Aldiss argue that science fiction can be properly said to originate with Gothic novels, particularly Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Still others have argued that science fiction was made possible only by the rise of modern science itself, notably the Galilean and Newtonian revolutions in astronomy and physics.

Science fiction's development took off in the 20th century, as the permeation of new technology into society created an interest in literature that explored technology's influence on society. Today, science fiction is a mode with significant influence on world culture and thought. It is represented in a variety of media, including books, film, television, comic books, and video games.

Early science fiction

Ancient Precursors

There have been attempts by various historians to claim an ancient history for the genre of science fiction. This claim is now a minority opinion, with the majority placing these works at best as examples of proto-science fiction.

Lester del Rey has stated that the first work of science fiction was the first recorded work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Epic of Gilgamesh features a flood scene that in some ways resembles work of apocalyptic science fiction. However, The Epic of Gilgamesh can probably be better categorized as fantastic literature, as there is little of science or technology in it.

Another commonly cited ancient work is Lucian's True History, which tells of an interplanetary trip. Kingsley Amis wrote of True History that, "It is hardly science-fiction, since it deliberately piles extravagance upon extravagance for comic effect." Other Greek works with science fictional elements include Aristophanes' The Clouds and The Birds, and Plato's descriptions of Atlantis.

Works of fantastic literature from Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied to Dante's The Divine Comedy and Shakespeare's The Tempest have also been claimed to contain science fictional elements, with varying degrees of success. The Tempest contains the prototype for the mad scientist story, and it was adapted as the science fiction film Forbidden Planet.

European Proto-Science Fiction

Literature that resembles modern science fiction didn't really begin until the 16th Century. The discoveries in the sciences and the dawning of the Enlightenment inspired literature informed by these advances.

One of the earliest instances is the superior country imagined in Thomas More's 1515 novel Utopia. More's name for a perfect world would be borrowed by many later science fiction writers, and the Utopia motif is a common one in science fiction. It is notable that More and Francis Bacon, leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, wrote works of proto-science fiction.

Imaginary voyages to the moon appear in the 17th century, first in Johannes Kepler's Somnium (The Dream, 1634), and then in Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1656). Space travel also figures prominently in Voltaire's Micromégas (1752).

Other early works of significance include the alternate world found in the Arctic by a young noblewoman in Margaret Cavendish' 1666 novel, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World, the account of life in the future in Louis-Sébastien Mercier's l'An 2440, and the descriptions of alien cultures in in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and in Ludvig Holberg's Niels Klim's Underground Travels.

Most notable of all is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, first published in 1818. In his book Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss claims that Frankenstein represents "the first seminal work to which the label SF can be logically attached". It is also the first of the "mad scientist" subgenre. Although normally associated with the gothic horror genre, the novel introduces science fiction themes such as the use of technology for achievements beyond the scope of science at the time, and the alien as antagonist, furnishing a view of the human condition from an outside perspective. Aldiss argues that science fiction in general derives its conventions from the gothic novel. Another futuristic Shelley novel, The Last Man, is also often cited as the first true science fiction novel.

The European brand of science fiction proper began, however, later in the 19th century with the scientific romances of Jules Verne, whose science was rather on the level of invention, as well as the science-oriented novels of social criticism of H.G. Wells.

Verne's adventure stories, notably Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869) mixed daring romantic adventure with technology that was either up to the minute or logically extrapolated into the future. They were tremendous commercial successes and established that an author could make a career out of such whimsical material. L. Sprague de Camp calls Verne "the world's first full-time science fiction novelist."

Wells's stories, on the other hand, use science fiction devices to make didactic points about his society. In The Time Machine (1895), for example, the technical details of the machine are glossed over quickly so that the Time Traveller can tell a story that criticizes the stratification of English society. In The War of the Worlds (1898), the Martians' technology is not explained as it would have been in a Verne story, and the story is resolved by an illogical deus ex machina.

The differences between Verne and Wells highlight a tension that would exist in science fiction throughout its history. The question of whether to present realistic technology or to focus on characters and ideas has been ever-present, as has the question of whether to tell an exciting story or make a didactic point.

Wells and Verne had quite a few rivals in early science fiction. Short stories and novelettes with themes of fantastic imagining appeared in journals throughout the late 19th century and many of these employed scientific ideas as the springboard to the imagination. Erewhon is a novel by Samuel Butler published in 1872 and dealing with the concept that machines could one day become sentient and supplant the human race. Although better known for Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote early science fiction, as did Rudyard Kipling.

Wells and Verne both had an international readership and influenced writers in America, especially. Soon a home-grown American science fiction was thriving. European writers found more readers by selling to the American market and writing in an Americanised style.

American Proto-Science Fiction

In the last decades of the 19th century, works of science fiction for adults and children were numerous, though not yet given the name "science fiction."

Mark Twain explored themes of science in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. By means of "transmigration of souls", "transposition of epochs -- and bodies" Twain's Yankee is transported back in time and his knowledge of 19th-century technology with him. The results are catastrophic. The chivalry of King Arthur's aristocracy is subverted by the increased killing power afforded by Gatling guns, barbed wire and explosives. Written in 1889, A Connecticut Yankee seems to predict the events of World War I, when Europe's old ideas of chivalry in warfare were shattered by new weapons and tactics.

There were science-fiction elements in the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Fitz-James O'Brien. Edgar Allan Poe is often mentioned with Verne and Wells as the founders of science fiction. A number of his short stories, and the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym are science fictional.

One of the most successful works of early American science fiction was the second-best selling novel in the U.S. in the 19th century: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), its effects extending far beyond the field of literature. Looking Backward extrapolates a future society based on observation of the current society.

Jack London wrote several science fiction stories, including The Red One (a story involving extraterrestrials), The Iron Heel (set in the future from London's point of view) and The Unparalleled Invasion (a story involving future germ warfare and ethnic cleansing). He also wrote a story about invisibility and a story about an irresistible energy weapon. These stories began to change the features of science fiction.

Edward Everett Hale wrote The Brick Moon, a Verne-inspired novel notable as the first work to describe an artificial satellite. Written in much the same style as his other work, it employs pseudojournalistic realism to tell an adventure story with little basis in reality.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) began writing science fiction for pulp magazines just before World War I, getting his first story Under the Moons of Mars published in 1912. He continued to publish adventure stories, many of them science fiction, throughout the rest of his life. The pulps published adventure stories of all kinds. Science fiction stories had to fit in alongside murder mysteries, horror, fantasy and Edgar Rice Burroughs' own Tarzan.

The Early Twentieth Century

The Birth of the Pulps

The writer and publisher Hugo Gernsback began publishing science fictional stories alongside science fact articles in magazines including Modern Electrics, The Electrical Experimenter, and Science and Invention in the 1910s.

The development of American science fiction as a self-conscious genre dates in part from 1926, when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories magazine, which was devoted exclusively to science fiction stories. Though science fiction magazines had been published in Sweden and Germany before, Amazing Stories was the first English language magazine to solely publish science fiction. Since he is notable for having chosen the variant term scientifiction to describe this incipient genre, the stage in the genre's development, his name and the term "scientifiction" are often thought to be inextricably linked. Though Gernsback encouraged stories featuring scientific realism to educate his readers about scientific principles, such stories shared the pages with exciting stories with little basis in reality. Published in this and other pulp magazines with great and growing success, such scientifiction stories were not viewed as serious literature but as sensationalism. Nevertheless, a magazine devoted entirely to science fiction was a great boost to the public awareness of the scientific speculation story.

Amazing Stories competed with other pulp magazines, including Weird Tales, which primarily published fantasy stories, Astounding Stories, and Wonder throughout the 1930s.

Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927), in which the first cinematic humanoid robot was seen, and the Italian Futurists' love of machines are indicative of both the hopes and fears of the world between the big European wars. Metropolis was an extremely successful film and its art-deco inspired aesthetic became the guiding aesthetic of the science fiction pulps for some time.

The next great British science fiction writer after H. G. Wells was Olaf Stapledon (1886 to 1950), whose four major works Last and First Men (1930), Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937), and Sirius (1940), introduced a myriad of ideas that writers have since adopted.

Modernist writing

Writers attempted to respond to the new world in the post-World War I era. In the 1920s and 30s writers entirely unconnected with science fiction were exploring new ways of telling a story and new ways of treating time, space and experience in the narrative form. The posthumously published works of Franz Kafka (who died in 1924) and the works of modernist and magic realist writers like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and others featured stories where time and individual identity could be expanded, contracted, looped etc. All of this was unconnected to science fiction as a genre, though it dealt with the impact of modernity (technology, science and change) upon people's lives.

Czech playwright Karel Capek's plays The Makropulos Affair, R.U.R., and War with the Newts blended Modernist literature of the time with important science fiction motifs. R.U.R. in particular is noted for introducing the word robot to the world's vocabulary.

A strong theme in modernistic writing was alienation, the making strange of familiar surroundings so that settings and behaviour usually regarded as "normal" are seen as though they were the seemingly bizarre practices of an alien culture. The audience of modernist plays or the readership of modern novels is often led to question everything.

At the same time, a tradition of more literary science fiction novels, treating with a dissonance between perceived Utopian conditions and the full expression of human desires, began to develop. This literary tradition is called the dystopian novel. For some time, the science fictional elements of these works were ignored by mainstream literary critics, though they owe a much greater debt to the science fiction genre than the modernists do.

Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We in 1920. It depicts a totalitarian attempt to create a utopia, and demonstrates that the result is dystopic. resulting in a loss of free will. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, presents a vision of a stable, happy society built by human mastery of genetic manipulation that bridged the gap between the literary establishment and the world of science fiction. George Orwell wrote perhaps the most highly regarded of these literary dystopias, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1950. He envisions a technologically governed totalitarian regime that dominates society through total information control.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, much of Kurt Vonnegut's writing, and many other works of later science fiction patterned themselves on the tradition of these dystopian novels.

Public mythology

Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre produced a radio version of The War of the Worlds which, famously, panicked large numbers of people who believed the programme to be a real newscast. The idea of visitors or invaders from outer space became firmly part of the public mythology.

During World War II pilots speculated on the possible origins of the Foo fighters they saw around them in the air. The German flying bombs, V1s and V2s added to the growing wonder about the future of space travel. Jet planes and the atom bomb were developed. When a story of a flying saucer crash was circulated from Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, science fiction had become folklore.

The Golden Age

Astounding Magazine

With the emergence in 1937 of a demanding editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., at Astounding Science Fiction (founded in 1930), and with the publication of stories and novels by such writers as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction began to gain status as serious fiction.

Campbell exercised an extraordinary influence over the work of his stable of writers, thus shaping the direction of science fiction. Asimov wrote, "We were extensions of himself; we were his literary clones." Under Campbell's direction, the years from 1938-1950 would become known as the "Golden Age" of science fiction, though Asimov points out that the term Golden Age has been used more loosely to refer to other periods in science fiction's history.

Campbell's guidance to his writers included his famous dictum, "Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man." He emphasized a higher quality of writing than editors before him, giving special attention to developing the group of young writers who attached themselves to him.

Ventures into the genre by writers who were not devoted exclusively to science fiction also added respectability. Magazine covers of bug-eyed monsters and scantily-clad women, however, preserved the image of a sensational genre appealing only to adolescents. There was naturally a public desire for sensation, a desire of people to be taken out of their dull lives to the worlds of space travel and adventure.

An interesting footnote to Campbell's regime is his contribution to the rise of L. Ron Hubbard's religion Scientology. Hubbard was considered a promising science fiction writer and a protege of Campbell, who published Hubbard's first articles about Dianetics and his new religion. As Campbell's reign as editor of Astounding progressed, Campbell gave more attention to ideas like Hubbard's, writing editorials in support of Dianetics. Readers started turning to other magazines to find science fiction stories.

The Golden Age in Other Media

With the new source material provided by the Golden Age writers, advances in special effects, and a public desire for material that treated with the advances in technology of the time, all the elements were in place to create significant works of science fiction film.

As a result, science fiction film came into its own in the 1950s, producing films like Destination Moon,Them!, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet, and many others. Many of these movies were based on stories by Campbell's writers. The Thing was adapted from a Campbell story, Them was based on a Jack Finney novel, Destination Moon on a Heinlein novel, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was derived from a Ray Bradbury short story. John Wyndham's cosy catastrophes, including The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, provided important source material as well.

At the same time, science fiction began to appear on a new medium- the television. In the mid-50s, The Quatermass Experiment was shown on British television, the first significant science fiction show. In the United States, science fiction heroes like Captain Video, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rodgers were shown on shows that more closely resembled pre-Campbellian science fiction.

The End of the Golden Age

Seeking greater freedom of expression, writers started to publish their articles in other magazines, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, If, a resurrected Amazing Stories, and most notably, Galaxy.

Under editors H.L. Gold and then Frederik Pohl, Galaxy stressed a more literary form of science fiction that took cues from more mainstream literature. It was less insistent on scientific plausibility than Campbell's Astounding. The rise of Galaxy signaled the end of Golden Age science fiction, though most of the Golden Age writers were able to adapt to the changes in the genre and keep writing. Some, however, moved to other fields. Isaac Asimov and several others began to write scientific fact almost exclusively.

The New Wave and its Aftermath

The Beat Generation

Samuel Beckett's modernistic writings The Unnamable and Waiting for Godot were influential upon writing in the 1950s. In the former all sense of place and time are dispensed with and all that remains is a voice poised between the urge to continue existing and the urge to find silence and oblivion. In the latter, time and the meaning of cause and effect are played with to great effect. Beckett's influence could be felt on science fiction, which moved toward more serious reflection on being.

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) was the writer who finally brought science fiction together with the modernist trend in literature. With the help of Jack Kerouac Burroughs published Naked Lunch, the first of a series of novels employing a semi-dadaistic technique called the Cut-up and modernistic deconstructions of conventional society, pulling away the mask of normality to reveal horrors beneath. Burroughs showed visions of society as a conspiracy of aliens, monsters, police states, drug dealers and alternate levels of reality. The linguistics of science fiction merged with the experiments of modernism in a beat generation nightmare.

The New Wave

In 1960 British novelist Kingsley Amis published New Maps of Hell, a literary history and examination of the field of science fiction. This serious attention from a mainstream, acceptable writer did a great deal of good, eventually, for the reputation of science fiction.

A major milestone was the publication, in 1965, of Frank Herbert's Dune, a dense, complex, and detailed work of fiction featuring political intrigue in a future galaxy, strange and mystical religious beliefs, and the eco-system of the desert planet Arrakis.

Also in 1965 French director Jean-Luc Godard's film Alphaville used the medium of dystopian and apocalyptic science fiction to explore language and society.

In Britain, the 1960s generation of writers, dubbed "The New Wave", were experimenting with different forms of science fiction, stretching the genre towards surrealism, psychological drama and mainstream currents. The 60s New Wave was centred around the writing in the magazine New Worlds after Michael Moorcock assumed editorial control in 1963. William Burroughs was a big influence. The writers of the New Wave also believed themselves to be building on the legacy of the French New Wave artistic movement. Though the New Wave was largely a British movement, there were parallel developments taking place in American science fiction at the same time. The relation of the British New Wave to American science fiction was made clear by Harlan Ellison's original anthology Dangerous Visions, which presented science fiction writers, both American and British, writing stories that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in a science fiction magazine. Isaac Asimov, writing an introduction to the anthology, labeled it the Second Revolution, after the first revolution that produced the Golden Age.

The New Wave and their contemporaries placed a greater emphasis on style and a more highbrow form of a storytelling. They also sought controversy in subjects older science fiction writers had avoided. For the first time sexuality, which Kingsley Amis had complained was nearly ignored in science fiction, was given serious consideration by writers like Samuel Delany, Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon. Contemporary political issues were also given voice, as John Brunner and J.G. Ballard wrote cautionary tales about a ruined environment.

Asimov noted that the Second Revolution was far less clear cut than the first, attributing this to the development of the anthology, which made older stories more prominent. But a number of Golden Age writers changed their style as the New Wave hit. Robert Heinlein switched from his Campbellian Future History stories to stylistically adventuresome, sexually open works of fiction, notably Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Isaac Asimov wrote the New Wave-ish The Gods Themselves. Many others also continued successfully as styles changed.

Science fiction films took inspiration from the changes in the genre. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Doctor Strangelove, and A Clockwork Orange gave visual form to the genre's new dependence on style.

Ursula LeGuin, working off small modifications to an imagined society, extrapolated science fictional visions that were anthropological rather than technical. Philip K. Dick explored the metaphysics of the mind in a series of novels and stories that rarely seemed dependent on their science fictional content. LeGuin, Dick, and others like them became associated with the concept of soft science fiction more than with the New Wave.

Soft science fiction was contrasted to the notion of hard science fiction. Though scientific plausibility had been a central tenet of the genre since Gernsback, writers like Larry Niven and Poul Anderson gave the idea new life, crafting stories with a more sophisticated writing style and more deeply characterized heroes, while preserving a high level of scientific sophistication.

Science Fiction in the 80s

Cyberpunk

By the early 1980s, the New Wave had faded out as an important presence in the science fiction landscape. As new personal computing technologies became an integral part of society, science fiction writers felt the urge to make statements about its influence on the cultural and political landscape. Drawing on the work of the New Wave, the Cyberpunk movement developed in the early 80s. Though it placed the same influence on style that the New Wave did, it developed its own unique style, typically focusing on the 'punks' of their imagined future underworld. William Gibson's Neuromancer, published in 1984 announced the cyberpunk movement to the larger literary world and was a tremendous commercial success. Other key writers in the movement included Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and later Neal Stephenson. Though Cyberpunk would later be cross-pollinated with other styles of science-fiction, there seemed in the beginning to be some notion of ideological purity in the beginning. John Shirley compared the Cyberpunk movement to a tribe (Cadigan 2002).

The New Space Opera

Counter to this trend toward gritty, near-future stories as embodied by the Cyberpunks was the revisiting by a number of authors of the tradition of Space opera. The Star Wars movies may have provided the inspiration for this trend, though its exemplars are typically more complicated and sophisticated than Star Wars. The trend is typified by the return of Isaac Asimov to his Foundation Series, as well as the introduction of David Brin's Uplift Saga, C.J. Cherryh's Merchanter Universe, and the Ender novels of Orson Scott Card. This new Space Opera built on the work of 1970s hard science fiction and typically featured more realistic science and more detailed characters than traditional Space Opera, yet still retained the epic settings and galactic intrigues that were the hallmarks of the original subgenre. Though in the 1980s Cyberpunk was more well-known, this New Space Opera received more acclaim from the mainstream science fiction community. Though Gibson won both the Nebula Award and Hugo Award for Neuromancer, the majority of the winners of these awards in the 1980s wrote work that would be classified as New Space Opera. This would change in the 1990s as the mainstream assimilated stylistic and conceptual ideas from the Cyberpunk movement. Several authors identified with the New Space Opera have written work in the 1990s that can identified as cyberpunk .

Contemporary Science Fiction and its Future

Contemporary science fiction has been marked by the spread of cyberpunk to other parts of the marketplace of ideas. No longer is cyberpunk a ghettoized tribe within science fiction, but an integral part of the field whose interactions with other parts have been the primary theme of science fiction at the turn of the century.

Notably, cyberpunk has influenced film, in such works as Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix series. This entrance of cyberpunk into mainstream culture has led to the introduction of cyberpunk's stylistic motifs to the masses, particularly the cyberpunk fashion style.

The cyberpunk reliance on near-future science fiction has deepened. In William Gibson's 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, the story is a cyberpunk story told in the present, the ultimate limit of the near-future extrapolation. Some feel that in a world so thoroughly dominated by technology, science fiction has outlived its purpose. Work which would have once been clearly science fiction can now be considered traditional mainstream fiction.

Cyberpunk's ideas have spread in other directions, though. Space opera writers have written work featuring cyberpunk motifs, including David Brin's Kiln People and Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series. This merging of the two disparate threads of science fiction in the 1980s has produced an extrapolational literature in contrast to those technological stories told in the present.

John Clute writes that science fiction at the turn of the century can be understood in two ways- "a vision of the triumph of SF as a genre and as a series of outstanding texts which figured to our gaze the significant futures that, during those years, came to pass... [or]... indecipherable from the world during those years... fatally indistinguishable from the world it attempted to adumbrate, to signify."

These conflicting views of science fiction, one holding triumphantly that science fiction has successfully predicted much of the cultural and technological changes of the late 20th century and the other holding that in the process, science fiction lost its significance, epitomize the conflict that will surely push science fiction into the future.

References

Aldiss, Brian, and David Hargrove. Trillion Year Spree. Atheneum, 1986.

Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1960.

Asimov, Isaac. Asimov on Science Fiction.Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1981.

Cadigan, Pat. The Ultimate Cyberpunk iBooks, 2002.

de Camp, L. Sprague and Catherine Crook de Camp. Science Fiction Handbook, Revised. Owlswick Press, 1975.

Ellison, Harlan. Dangerous Visions. Signet Books, 1967.

Landon, Brooks. Science Fiction after 1900. Twayne Publishers, 1997.

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge University Press, 2003.