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2. Science Fiction: An Overview
2.1. Question of Terminology 
Science
- the intellectual and practical 
activity encompassing the 
systematic study of the structure 
and behaviour of the physical 
and natural world through 
observation and experiment.
Scientist
– a person who is 
studying or has 
expert knowledge of 
one or more of the 
natural or physical 
science. 
Science Fiction
– fiction based on imagined
future scientific or technological 
advances and major social or 
environmental changes, frequently 
portraying space or time travel and 
life on other planets. 
(Oxford English Dictionary) 
The word science derived from Latin scientia, which means ‘knowledge’. 
However, the Oxford English Dictionary traced its specific connotation 
nowadays given to the word no further than 1725, and in Shippey’s opinion in 
a not very convincing way (3). Words such as science, scientist and scientific 
with their modern meaning are first found in dictionaries in the nineteenth 
century.
From then on […] one can see the ideas of science and the scientific method 
taking hold in more and more minds, with ever increasing power, as tools for 
establishing human control over nature […]. This immense physical, mental, 
and semantic change has had its effect on literature, in particular on […] 
fantasy and science fiction (Shippey 3-4).
The term of science fiction was first used in 1851 by Wiliam Wilson. However, 
it entered common usage only in the 1930s (Bould 1).
In times of industrial change in the 19
th
century the writer William Wilson 
paid attention to the new genre of literature, the Poetry of Science. He was, in 
this context, the first to use the term science fiction which, according to him, 
combines the truth of science embedded in a nice tale, either true or invented 
(Feige 14). 
In those days Poetry of Science, scientific fiction or scientifiction 
were various futile attempts which aimed at giving the new genre a name. In 
1916 Hugo Gernsback, an American editor and science fiction writer, coined 
the term scientifiction in his SF pulp magazines, but then in 1929 returned to 
Wilson’s term of science fiction (Bould 1) using it in his Science Wonder 
Stories (Feige 15).
In the 1980s, other contemporaries tried in different ways to find another 
term for science fiction. Hence they tried in vain to establish the synonym 
Speculative Fiction. Nowadays, science fiction is the term mostly used by 
scholars and fans of the genre (Feige 9).