[...] explore an image that is so ubiquitous in the genre that it transcends the label “icon” — the image of the barrier between known and unknown. Chapters Three through Five explore specific icons that science fiction has evolved concerning artificial or unnatural environments: the spaceship, which represents entry into the unknown; the city, which represents subjugation of the unknown; and the wasteland, which represents the reemergence of the unknown. Finally, Chapters Six and Seven shift the focus from images of the environment to images of humanity itself, first as reflected in technology through the icon of the robot, and then as reflected in the images of transformation that are represented by science fiction’s various treatments of monsters, aliens, and transformed humans. Obviously, many of these icons overlap and merge in certain works. The alien being becomes the robot, the robot becomes the spaceship, the spaceship becomes the city, the city becomes the wasteland: such transformations and combinations of the favourite images of the genre become like variations on a theme [...]

— Gary K. Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (1979).

In 1972 Darko Suvin defined sf [sic] as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment”. By “cognition” Suvin appears to mean the seeking of rational understanding, and by “estrangement” something akin to Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, defined in 1948 thus: “A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time make it seem unfamiliar.” Perhaps the most important part of Suvin's definition, and the easiest with which to agree, is the emphasis he puts on what he and others have called a novum, a new thing — some difference between the world of the fiction and what Suvin calls the “empirical environment”, the real world outside. The presence of a novum is insufficient in itself, of course, to define sf, since the different and older tradition of fantasy likewise depends on the novum.

— Brian M. Stableford, John Clute and Peter Nicholls, “Definitions of SF”, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, eds John Clute and David Langford (4th edn, 2021).

Last modified June 2020.

Last modified December 2022.