Science fiction is a
genre of
fiction. It differs from
fantasy in that, within the context of the
story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within
scientifically established or scientifically postulated
laws of nature (though some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation). Exploring the consequences of such differences is the traditional purpose of science fiction, making it a "literature of ideas". Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possibilities. The
settings for science fiction are often contrary to known reality.
Following the
Age of Enlightenment and the development of modern
science itself,
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was one of the first true science fiction works, together with Voltaire's Micromégas and Kepler's
Somnium. This latter work is considered by
Carl Sagan and
Isaac Asimov to be the first science fiction story. It depicts a journey to the Moon and how the Earth's motion is seen from there. Another example is
Ludvig Holberg's novel Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum, 1741. (Translated to Danish by Hans Hagerup in 1742 as Niels Klims underjordiske Rejse.) (Eng.
Niels Klim's Underground Travels.)
The study of science fiction, or
science fiction studies, is the critical assessment, interpretation, and discussion of science fiction literature, film, new media, fandom, and fan fiction. Science fiction scholars take science fiction as an object of study in order to better understand it and its relationship to science, technology, politics, and culture-at-large.
The field has grown considerably since the 1970s with the establishment of more journals, organizations, and conferences with ties to the science fiction scholarship community, and science fiction degree-granting programs such as those offered by the University of Liverpool and Kansas University.
Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future is a
science fiction novel written in 1930 by the
British author
Olaf Stapledon. A work of unprecedented scale in the genre, it describes the
history of humanity from the present onwards across two billion years and eighteen distinct human
species, of which our own is the first and most primitive. Stapledon's conception of history is based on the
Hegelian Dialectic, following a repetitive cycle with many varied
civilizations rising from and descending back into savagery over millions of years, but it is also one of progress, as the later civilizations rise to far greater heights than the first. The book anticipates the science of
genetic engineering, and is an early example of the fictional
supermind; a consciousness composed of many
telepathically-linked individuals.
A controversial part of the book depicts humans, in the far-off future, escaping the dying Earth and settling on
Venus — in the process totally exterminating its native inhabitants, an intelligent marine species. Stapledon's book has been interpreted by some as condoning such interplanetary
genocide as a justified act if necessary for racial survival, though a number of Stapledon's partisans denied that such was his intention, arguing instead that Stapledon was merely showing that although mankind had advanced in a number of ways in the future, at bottom it still possessed the same capacity for savagery as it has always had.