I received an email yesterday from Jung, one of my former students, and she made the following comment in it:

What about your science fiction book? I apologize for not having a bit of interest in that genre. I actually don’t think I have ever even read one science book.

It’s not surprising that she confused “science fiction” with “fiction about science”, because in my opinion the name “science fiction” is a misnomer. It began as Hugo Gernsback’s name for the fiction he wanted to publish in his magazines, which was all related to speculations about science. Somehow the name grew to encompass all imaginative fiction that had a rational basis, as compared to fantasy which is imaginative fiction with an irrational basis.

Frankly, I don’t enjoy reading “fiction about science” much either, so that the type of sf I prefer is generally future history. When I do read “hard science” fiction, such as Poul Anderson’s TAU ZERO or Greg Benford’s GALACTIC CENTER series, I usually enjoy them because of the story written around the science, rather than for the science itself.

In a reprinted interview recently with John Wyndham in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, he proposed a whole list of possible alternative names for “science fiction.” The one I thought most appropriate was the one I used above, “imaginative fiction,” which encompasses fantasy, future history, and (hard) science fiction, each of those having numerous sub-genres themselves, such as sword & sorcery, world building, space opera, etc.

With all these different subgenres, is it any wonder it has been so hard to define sf over the decades? I’ve tried numerous times myself, with varying degrees of success, but I think my first definition (which I published in Richard Geis’ SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW in the 70s) was still my most successful. I will reprint it here, revised to fit the new names I’ve suggested above:

Realistic imaginative fiction (“science fiction”) consists of stories which accept all the axioms of our real world (scientific theorems, historical facts, etc.) and add one or more additional axioms to them.

Unrealistic imaginative fiction (“fantasy”) accepts most of the axioms of our real world, but replaces one or more of them with alternate axioms.

Is this definition perfect? Obviously not. Its main weakness is that it moves some stories traditional considered “science fiction” into the “fantasy” category. Such as time travel stories, and stories written before modern scientific discoveries, so that their science is now “alternate” rather than “accepted”. Edgar Rice Burrough’s BARSOOM series, for example, is now fantasy. So is alternate history, which does not accept all historical facts.

But I think this definition has the advantage that any story which is generally considered either fantasy or science fiction still falls within the framework of the overall genre, while any story which is not f&sf, but only clothes itself in its images, is not.

Any suggestions?