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Definitions of Science Fiction

(from an interview on Science in SF, ConFuse 91)[^]Top

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.
Definition given by: William Atheling Jr., (James Blish) in The issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Fiction (Chicago, 1964)[^]Top

Darko Suvin

It [science fiction] should be defined as a fictional tale determined by the hegemonic literary device of a locus and/or dramatis personae that (1) are radically or at least significantly different from empirical times, places, and characters of "mimetic" or "naturalist" fiction, but (2) are nonetheless--to the extent that SF differs from other "fantastic" genres, that is, ensembles of fictional tales without empirical validation--simultaneously perceived as not impossible within the cognitive (cosmological and anthropological) norms of the author's epoch.
Preface, Metamorphoses Of Science Fiction, (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1979)

SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficent conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.
Chapter 1, Metamorphoses Of Science Fiction, (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1979) [^]Top

Alvin Toffler

By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.[^]Top

Jack Williamson

"Hard" science fiction ... probes alternative possible futures by means of reasoned extrapolations in much the same way that good historical fiction reconstructs the probable past. Even far-out fantasy can present a significant test of human values exposed to a new environment. Deriving its most cogent ideas from the tension between permanence and change, science fiction combines the diversions of novelty with its pertinent kind of realism.[^]Top

Donald A. Wolleheim

Science fiction is that branch of fantasy, which, while not true to present-day knowledge, is rendered plausible by the reader's recognition of the scientific possibilities of it being possible at some future date or at some uncertain point in the past.
"The Universe Makers"[^]Top
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