Origins
Science fiction is a narrative genre that emerged in response to the revolutions in science, technology, and industrial production that commenced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Human societies had always experienced periods of tumultuous change from such causes as war, famine, and plague. However, as Robert Scholes has argued, the idea of future societies with radically different social and economic organisation was probably unthinkable before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the transformation of societies by irreversible technological change became apparent only in the nineteenth (Scholes 14-15). For the first time, it became possible to think of a future greatly different from the present as a result of continuing advances in human knowledge and technology.
This breakthrough in conceptualising the future offered new opportunities for storytelling. During the nineteenth century,...
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Citation: Blackford, Russell Kenneth. "Science Fiction". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 November 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1226, accessed 15 December 2025.]
