1 Many people seem to think that science fiction is typified by the covers of some of the old pulp magazines the Bug-eyed Monster, embodying every trait and feature that most people find repulsive, is about to grab, and presumably ravish, a sweet, blonde, curvaceous, scantily-clad Earth girl. This is unfortunate because it demeans and degrades a worthwhile and even important literary endeavor. In contrast to this unwarranted stereotype, science fiction rarely emphasizes sex, and when it does, it is more discreet than other contemporary fiction. Instead, the basic interest of science fiction lies in the relation between man and his technology and between man and the universe. Science fiction is a literature of change and a literature of the future, and while it would be foolish to claim that science fiction is a major literary genre at this time, the aspects of human life that it considers make it well worth reading and studying—for no other literary form. does quite the same things. 2 The question is: what is science fiction? And the answer must be, unfortunately, that there have been few attempts to consider this question at any length or with much seriousness it may well be that science fiction will resist any comprehensive definition of its characteristics. To say this, however, does not mean that there are no ways of defining it nor that various facets of its totality cannot be clarified. To begin, the following definition should be helpful: science fiction is a literary sub-genre which postulates a change (for human beings) from conditions as we know them and follows the implications of these changes to conclusion. Although this definition will necessarily be modified and expanded, and probably changed, in the course of this exploration, it covers much of the basic groundwork and provides a point of departure. 3 This first point—that science fiction is a literary sub-genre—is a very important one, but one which is often overlooked or ignored in most discussions of science fiction. Specifically, science fiction is either a short story or a novel. There are only a few dramas which could be called science fiction, with Karel Capek's RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots) being the only one that is well known the body of poetry that might be labeled science fiction is only slightly larger. To say that science fiction is a sub-genre of prose fiction is to say that it has all the basic characteristics and serves the same basic functions in much the same way as prose fiction in general—that is, it shares a great deal with all other novels and short stories. 4 Everything that can be said about prose fiction, in general, applies to science fiction. Every piece of science fiction, whether short story or novel, must have a narrator, a story, a plot, a setting, characters, language, and theme. And like any prose, the themes of science fiction are concerned with interpreting man's nature and experience in relation to the world around him. Themes in science fiction are constructed and presented in exactly the same ways that themes are dealt with in any other kind of fiction. They are the result of a particular combination of narrator, story, plot, character, setting, and language. In short, the reasons for reading and enjoying science fiction, and the ways of studying and analyzing it, are basically the same as they would be for any other story or novel. Science fiction is called a literary sub-genre because__________.