This document summarizes 10 different critics' definitions of science fiction from 1960 to 2015. Theodore Sturgeon defines it as a story with human problems and solutions that wouldn't happen without scientific elements. Ursula K. Le Guin describes it as extrapolating trends of the present into the future to make predictions, though the genre is more descriptive than predictive. Sherryl Vint argues science fiction is not a singular thing but is actively made from various materials, with cultural politics and aesthetics shaping definitions.

1. 10 Critics Define
Science Fiction
Cultural Studies 2029Y

2. Theodore Sturgeon (c. 1960)
A science fiction story is a story built around human
beings, with a human problem and a human
solution, which would not have happened at all
without its scientific content.

3. Judith Merril (c. 1960)
Speculative fiction: stories whose objective is to
explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection,
extrapolation, analogue, hypothesis-and-paper
experimentation, something about the nature of the
universe, of man, of ‘reality.’

4. Ursula K. Le Guin (c. 1969)
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. the
science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the
here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the
future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method
and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a
purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may
happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome
seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So, does the outcome of extrapolation.
Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the
Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human
liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life. Yet, Science fiction is not
predictive; it is descriptive.

5. Frederik Pohl (c. 1970)
It is that thing that people who understand science
fiction point to, when they point to something and
say ‘That’s science fiction!’

6. Donna Haraway (1985)
Science fiction is generically concerned with the
interpenetration of boundaries between
problematic selves and unexpected others and with
the exploration of possible worlds in a context
structured by transnational technoscience.

7. Samuel R. Delany (1987)
SF is a paraliterary practice of writing; its mimetic
relation to the real world is of a different order from
even literary fantasy. It grows out of a different
tradition. It has a different history. Myself, I enjoy
working within that tradition and struggling with
that history.

8. John Clute & Peter Nicholls (c. 1990)
Science fiction is a label applied to a publishing
category and its application is subject to the whims
of editors and publishers.

9. Paul Kincaid (2014)
There are many science fictions, they offer different
ways of imaginatively approaching our world, or
rather, of approaching those things that seem
implicit within our world but that are not actual.
Therefore, they are not all the same, and science
fiction is not singular but plural.”

10. Sherryl Vint (2014)
Science fiction is not a “thing” but is always actively
being made from heterogenous materials, and
larger questions of market, cultural politics, and
aesthetics inform these struggles over definition.

11. Steven Shaviro (2015)
Science fiction takes up certain implicit conditions
of our personal and social lives and makes these
conditions fully explicit in narrative.