Genres & Forms
Science Fiction
Science fiction is a literary genre that builds its fictional world on scientific or technical hypotheses, depicting the possible consequences of the development of science, the exploration of space, encounters with other forms of life, or changes in human nature itself. Unlike fantasy, its fantastic premise has a rational, pseudo-scientific justification. The founders of the genre are considered to be Jules Verne (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) and H. G. Wells (The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds); in the twentieth century it was developed by Isaac Asimov, Stanisław Lem, and Ray Bradbury. In Ukrainian literature science fiction was fruitfully developed by Oles Berdnyk (the novels The Star Corsair, Children of Infinity), combining cosmic plots with philosophy and spiritual quests; the genre was also taken up by Volodymyr Vladko, the brothers Dmytro and Vitalii Kapranov, and contemporary authors.
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Compare “Science Fiction” with another term
Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two genres of invented worlds, separated by the NATURE of their premise. Science fiction builds the impossible on a RATIONAL, pseudo-scientific basis — technology, space, the future, the consequences of discovery — and seeks at least imagined plausibility. Fantasy rests on MAGIC, myth and the supernatural as the self-evident given of a secondary world, requiring no scientific explanation. One extrapolates science; the other revives fairy tale and myth.
