Science Fiction
Entry updated 14 April 2025. Tagged: Theme.
Science Fiction may be described as an interwoven array of texts set in worlds which do not exist but arguably could. (Fantasy is set in worlds which are impossible but which the story believes.) The crunch in this formulation is what "arguably" means; it might be suggested that to unpack the meaning of and to illustrate how arguable worlds are depicted, usually with some implication of cognitive rectitude, is where The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction begins and ends. The term "science fiction" (or "sf") appears many thousands of times in the over 15,000 full-text entries that make up the more than seven million words of the current text, and just as coral polyps weave a reef, each iteration of the term adds to the cumulative understanding of sf that the SFE, as a whole, is designed to convey. So the SFE is a meta-web of descriptors; not all of them, it is well understood, are mutually consistent. To enfold this thousandfold jostle of iterations into a single central entry on Science Fiction would be an enterprise of Borgesian amplitude, in which an impossibly coherent map and the territory of the world become one thing; for comments on "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" (May 1939 Sur) and other tales see Jorge Luis Borges. At the same time, some entries do not only swim in sf but are meant to contribute directly to the definition of the form. The navigational usefulness of these relatively few entries, which constitute a rough schematic of what we mean when we say sf, is clear enough. They are registered below.
The entry on Definitions of SF describes various significant attempts over the past century or so to define the genre, with copious references to the academics and authors who have generated these tries at pinning down so mutable a term. Several other entries, in which various interlinked categories of sf are discussed, are designed to articulate the remit of the SFE since 1975. In very rough chronological order, the categories under which we define and/or amplify our sense of the range of sf, some of more importance than others (see Terminology), include entries on the "cartography" of Utopia, of Fantastic Voyages, and of Dystopia, Proto SF, Ruins and Futurity, Scientific Romance, Genre SF, Space Opera, Hard SF, Speculative Fiction, Science Fantasy, Westerns, New Wave, Cyberpunk, Steampunk and the relatively new Afrofuturism. These entries variously have dozens, scores, hundreds and sometimes (as with Utopia, Dystopia and Space Opera) well in excess of a thousand incoming links – the precise current figure for each article being shown by clicking its About This Entry button. As indicated by this profusion of internal links, the SFE is very extensively mapped. No entry is an island: each of the more than 15,000 full entries in the SFE, all having something to add to our overall sense of the nature of Science Fiction, ultimately navigates to every other entry, like coral.
One final link is useful. In the entry on Fantastika, it is argued that, from around the middle of the nineteenth century, Science Fiction in all its ramifications can be seen as nesting within the larger, constantly evolving, dialogic jousting-field of the fantastic as a fruitfully inharmonious whole. [JC]
previous versions of this entry