SOURCES OF PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE OF SCIENCE

Although school education is most peoples primary source of structured learning about science, and science news reporting a way of learning about the latest discoveries, we all pick up information about the topic through other media. TV, streaming, and YouTube documentaries represent a useful source, for instance. Additionally popular science magazines (print and online) and popular audience science books might give longer form means to learn about topics, sometimes from knowledge-creators themselves. But as with many topics, one major way we learn about Science is through fiction.

(This is also true of history. For many people fiction set in historical periods are our main ways we pick up information about life and events of the past, even though we might recognize that it is just a story.)

Science shows up in many types of fiction. Medical dramas typically hinge on the protagonists' piecing together the symptoms to properly diagnose a patient's condition. Crime scene investigation, medical examiner, and police procedural stories similarly show us how various types of detectives and investigator rely on analyses of evidence to solve a mystery. Writers like Tom Clancy built there careers on techno-thrillers, where cutting edge military and espionage technology is employed by agents of all sides. But one genre stands above all of these: science fiction.

WHAT IS SCIENCE FICTION?

Strict definitions of any literary genre are often fraught, as there are inevitably many cases on the margin that are hard to categorize. This is definitely true of science fiction ("SF" for short). Sure, many people say "if it has spaceships, robots, rayguns, and aliens, and is set on another planet, it's got to be science fiction"; but there are plenty of stories within the field that don't have any of these.

Typically a science fiction story requires at least some feature based on speculations about science and technology that is different than conditions in the world today. Furthermore, there is a tradition (although less true for TV shows, movies, and video games than for print SF) that the key to resolving the story hinges on problem-solving rather than on action.

The following are a set of possible definitions proposed by literary critics and/or SF writers that at least give a sense of what the term means to people who make a living with it:

Generally science fiction is regarded as a major genre within the larger umbrella of speculative fiction. The other speculative fiction fields often share fans, publishers, and (where they still exist) shelf space at bookstores and libraries. A look at the other speculative fiction fields can help give a sense of what makes science fiction distinctive.

Fantasy: The director inheritor of humanity's long heritage of legend, myth, and folklore. Fantasy is hugely diverse in scope, from epic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire to the magic realism of Neil Gaiman and Jorge Luis Borges and many other forms in between, fantasy is generally predicated on the concept that "magic is real", and that at least some people can wield magic powers to affect the world around them. Also (although this is not an absolute requirement), much fantasy considers spiritual "good" and "evil" to be fundamental aspects of reality; in contrast, in a science fiction story there may be characters who do good or evil deeds, but these are ethical decisions and not spiritual ones. Fantasy settings might be a separate world from our own (again, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin), or it might be own world but hidden beyond the ordinary experience of mundane people (as in the Harry Potter stories), or perhaps a combination of these where ordinary people of our world are transported to fantastic magical realms (C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, L. Frank Baum's Oz books, and [in a more adult format] Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) are all examples of this). Although by no means a requirement, fantasy stories often have settings where the technology and at least the trappings of social organization resemble ancient, Classical, or medieval Earth, or at most a Gothic milieu: warriors with enchanted swords, rings, and cloaks abound, but social media influencers with magic laptops and wifi routers are vanishingly rare.

Alternate History: The fundamental conceit here is that some change (often quite minor) happened to a historical event, resulting in the course of history unfolding in a different way than our timeline. The genre has recently had some streaming TV successes in adaptations of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (in which the Axis won WWII and partitioned the U.S. between the Third Reich and Imperial Japan) and of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (where Charles Lindbergh was nominated as the GOP's candidate on an America First platform, defeating FDR in the 1940 election). Alternate history can have settings literally any time in history. In some stories the world is self-contained; in others travel between alternate worlds might be possible.

Horror: As long as there have been people, we've told each other stories to scare and terrify, and that has not changed. There all all kinds of horror, from mundane cases where nothing in the story violates what we know about the world (such as the Saw movies), to supernatural horror (with vampires, ghosts, werewolves, or the like), to science fictional horror (such as The Walking Dead or World War Z, in which a virus reanimates the dead as flesh-eating zombies but otherwise all aspects of the world as are they are in our world), to cosmic horror (best known from the work of H.P. Lovecraft, where the protagonists learn of their insignificance in the face of a vast, and possibly malevolent, universe). The cause of the horror and the setting isn't critical: the focus is on the feelings of dread and fear that the story produces in the audience.

It is worth noting that some creators play around with traditional settings and storylines to make their stories more interesting. For instance, at first glance Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern novels have the trappings of medieval fantasy: lords and peasants, swords, castles, and of course, dragons. But the conflicts are focused on problem solving, environmental management against a non-sentient alien lifeform, and disruptions of the social order. In contrast the Star Wars franchise has the trappings of science fiction (starships, aliens, blasters, robots, and so forth), but the conflict is the battle between spiritual good and evil, primarily by families of wizard-knights (the hallmarks of fantasy).

And then there are works like the recent award-winning Broken Earth trilogy of N.K. Jemisin, which combines elements of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. And occasionally a writer or creator who gets their start firmly as a science fiction writer (such as Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, or Octavia Butler) becomes respected enough by the "literary establishment" that their works become marketed as something other than SF.

SCIENCE FICTION INFLUENCE OF GENERAL CULTURE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SF

THE POWER OF SF TO MISLEAD

IMPORTANT SF THEMES

The YouTube channel Extra Credits has had a running series on the history of science fiction since 2017. As of October 2020 there are 63 episodes: