August 1959 cover of Super-Science Fiction
12 June 2023
The Oxford English Dictionary defines science fiction, as it is most commonly used today, as:
Fiction in which the setting and story feature hypothetical scientific or technological advances, the existence of alien life, space or time travel, etc., esp. such fiction set in the future, or an imagined alternative universe.
Jesse Sheidlower’s Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction defines it as:
a genre (of fiction, film, etc.) in which the plot or setting features speculative scientific or technological advances or differences.
One can, and many do, argue over whether or not a particular work is science fiction or speculative fiction, or science fantasy, or whatever, but such hair splitting is not needed to determine the origin of the phrase, which first appears in the late nineteenth century.
In those early appearances, the term was occasionally used to refer to a scientific hypothesis or claim that is false. This is clearly not what we mean by the current use of science fiction, no matter what hairs you split.
Before science fiction began to be commonly used, the term used to describe the genre was slightly different, scientific fiction. We find this phrase used in an 1876 obituary for the writer William Henry Rhodes, who commonly wrote under the pseudonym of Caxton. In his early years, Rhodes wrote in the genre before moving on to other types of stories:
His fondness for weaving the problems of science with fiction, which became afterwards so marked a characteristic of his literary efforts, attracted the especial attention of his professors; and had Mr. Rhodes devoted himself to this then novel department of letters, he would have become, no doubt, greatly distinguished as a writer; and the great master of scientific fiction, Jules Verne, would have found the field of his efforts already sown and reaped by the young Southern student.
By the end of that century, however, science fiction would start to displace scientific fiction as the name for the genre. But before we get to that, let’s take a look at one example of an early use of science fiction in a slightly different sense. William Wilson, in his 1851 A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject, uses the phrase to refer to stories and poetry that make use of present-day science, rather than speculative advances in the future:
Campbell says that “Fiction in Poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and enchanting resemblance.” Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true—thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of life.
A more recent example of this genre would be Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel, and the 1971 film directed by Robert Wise, The Andromeda Strain, which purports to be a history of scientists battling the arrival of a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism in the recent past (1967 or 1968). Because it does not speculate about future technologies, one might classify the book and movies as a techno-thriller rather than science fiction. (I was wrong, a little of the hair splitting is necessary to discuss the phrase’s origin.)
But this particular use of science fiction was rare, perhaps even a one-off usage.
Use of science fiction to refer to a literary work that speculates about the future dates to a least 1897. In that year, Harry B. Mason published a story in which the narrator goes to sleep in 1897 and wakes in 1917. The story appears in the 20 May issue of The Pharmaceutical Era. That seems like an odd venue for such a story, but in the story the narrator is a clerk in a drug store. Anyway, the first paragraph of the story contains these lines:
No Svengali had ushered me into the peace of oblivion. My last remembrance had been of reading Mr. Lloyd’s Etidorhpa. (And now that I thought of it, this was at the store, too. I must have been carted to the house, and allowed to sleep my sleep out, which quite broke my former records.) The complete arrest of bodily function and tissue waste which the central figure of that remarkable science-fiction achieved at the point where gravitation ceases, somewhere between here and China, impressed me deeply. Long and intense in-dwelling upon it had evidently brought about its achievement in me. Mind had exerted great power over matter and matter had knuckled.
But this use of the term refers to an individual work, not the genre as a whole, and it can be constructed in the plural; one may, for instance, write several science fictions.
Use of the term to denote the genre appears a year later, and possibly may have been written by the same Harry B. Mason. It is in a book review of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds that appears in another pharmaceutical journal, the October 1898 issue of the Bulletin of Pharmacy. (What is with pharmacists and science fiction?) The review immediately preceding this one, about a tome on rheumatoid arthritis, was authored by an “H.B.M.” The only questions are whether H.B.M. is the same Harry B. Mason and whether he also penned the book review of Wells’s novel. The review reads, in part:
Mr. H. G. Wells, the imaginative writer of science-fiction, has recently brought out a thrilling romance whose basis in the intended conquest of the earth by the inhabitants of Mars.
Perhaps Mason was the coiner of both senses of the term. In any case, the use of science fiction to denote the genre was in place before the start of the twentieth century, the century in which the genre would fully establish itself on the literary landscape.
Sources:
Barnes, W.H.L. “In Memoriam.” In Rhodes, W.H. Caxton’s Book. Daniel O’Connell, ed. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft, 1876, 6–7. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“The Beneficent Microbe.” Bulletin of Pharmacy, 12.10, October 1898, 466/1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Goranson, Stephen. “science-fiction, 1898 antedating (?),” ADS-L, 3 February 2021.
Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 12 May 2023, s.v. science fiction, n.2; 17 May 2022, s.v. science fiction, n.1.; 16 December 2020, s.v. scientific fiction, n.
Mason, Harry B. “A Rip Van Winkle Episode.” The Pharmaceutical Era, 7.20, 20 May 1897, 592/1. Google Books.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, s.v. science fiction, n. and adj., scientific, adj. and n.
Wilson, William. A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject. London: J. Wertheimer, 1851, 137, 138–40. Archive.org.
Image credit: Headline Publications, 1959. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a work published in the United States prior to 1963 whose copyright was not renewed.