WHAT IS SCIENCE FICTION?

"Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible." – Rod Serling

His name was Hugo Gernsback. He was a Luxemburg born American radio technician, publisher, author, and shady-ass cheap motherfucker. Today, if you write a wonderful speculative fiction story in English, you could possibly win a Hugo award - named after him. If you had written that same story for Hugo himself in the nineteen twenties, there’s a real possibility he would’ve profited off it without giving you a fucking nickel.

But Gernsback looked at a certain kind of storytelling that was as old as the oldest human sciences and he did something no one had done since the first story of its kind was written in 100CE.

He named the damn thing.

In April of 1926 Hugo published Amazing Stories magazine. In his introduction to the first issue he claimed his magazine was a revolutionary moment for American publishing, and it was. The nation’s first “scientifiction” magazine!

Over the next few years people with lesser barker skills, but a better ear for language, morphed and tweaked the new title for this ancient genre. They came to call it “Science Fiction”.

Some thirty years later, in the midst of the ultra-hip, high-fidelity fifties, a far better regarded American by the name of Forrest J. Ackerman – himself a publisher and author, but also a super-fan whose love for the genre remains unparalleled to this day - reduced the tenacious genre title down to the more rocket slick phrase, “Sci-Fi”. This somehow matched the era of polished chrome atomica and extraordinary scientific discovery in which the Sci-Fi fan found themself.

Under the banner of Sci-Fi a more culturally perceptive, philosophically driven, politically astute and conceptually ambitious science fiction story began to emerge. The first generation of modernists had passed the torch to younger, still mostly white men (with a few truly notable exceptions). And by the late 1960’s Sci-Fi and the new emerging youth culture collided with such passion that they seemed to be made just for one another.

Sci-Fi had grown up. By the late 60's women and people of color , writer’s driven to break the hetero/racial-normative wall, exploded onto the scene (though not without a fight).

Now the rocket sleek term of the 1950s, "Sci-Fi", no longer seemed to speak to the emerging maturity and profound reaches the genre was grasping for. To those who believed that the genre offered something no other did - a kind of promethean fire in storytelling - calling it Sci-Fi felt quaint, commercial, rooted in a time when the stories were less philosophically or scientifically ambitious.

Mockingly, the term Skiffy emerged.

Camps arose. More and more Sci-fi (skiffy!) was applied to anything that embraced the old pulp paradigm, to anything that wasn’t either pushing the intention of scientific knowledge or wasn't striving to punch a hole in human socio-perceptions.

While the term “Science Fiction” returned in force, its banner now waved high atop the self-proclaimed “serious works”.

And here we are today, the two terms exist as separate sides of a particular speculative fiction coin. They are used to illuminate the level of pulp versus the level of science that a story is willing to engage in.

As you can imagine, the difference between the two is very often in the eye of the beholder.

So, again, we ask, what exactly is a "Science Fiction" story as opposed to a "Sci-Fi" story?

Here’s my best shot at defining this...

"Science Fiction" is the fictional speculation of the affects of authentic or conceptual science on sentient societies and individuals. In science fiction this element is the most prominent theme and the defining aspect of the work. Science Fiction does not lean on other genres (horror, action, etc.). It is a genre unto itself. It asks, "what does it mean to exist in relation to the universe and our own emerging technologies."

Or as others might call it (not me)... the boring parts of Sci-fi (skiffy!)