Writers of this class of science fiction have clearly in mind the assumptions that man can master the principles of this cause-and-effect universe and that such mastery will necessarily better the human lot.

On the other hand, the bright vision of the future has been directly stated in science fiction concerned with projecting ideal societies -- science fiction, of course, is related, if sometimes distantly, to that utopian literature optimistic about science, literature whose period of greatest vigor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia.

In Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End ( 1953 ), though written after the present flood of dystopias began, we can see the bright vision of science fiction clearly defined.

Considering then the optimism which has permeated science fiction for so long, what is really remarkable is that during the last twelve years many science-fiction writers have turned about and attacked their own cherished vision of the future, have attacked the Childhood's End kind of faith that science and technology will inevitably better the human condition.

Because of the means of publication -- science-fiction magazines and cheap paperbacks -- and because dystopian science fiction is still appearing in quantity the full range and extent of this phenomenon can hardly be known, though one fact is evident: the science-fiction imagination has been immensely fertile in its extrapolations.

There is, of course, nothing new about dystopias, for they belong to a literary tradition which, including also the closely related satiric utopias, stretches from at least as far back as the eighteenth century and Swift's Gulliver's Travels to the twentieth century and Zamiatin's We, Capek's War With The Newts, Huxley's Brave New World, E. M. Forster's `` The Machine Stops '', C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and which in science fiction is represented before the present deluge as early as Wells's trilogy, The Time Machine, `` A Story Of The Days To Come '', and When The Sleeper Wakes, and as recently as Jack Williamson's `` With Folded Hands '' ( 1947 ), the classic story of men replaced by their own robots.

Not all recent science fiction, however, is dystopian, for the optimistic strain is still very much alive in Mission Of Gravity and Childhood's End, as we have seen, as well as in many other recent popular novels and stories like Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud ( 1957 ) ; ;

and among works of dystopian science fiction, not all provide intelligent criticism and very few have much merit as literature -- but then real quality has always been scarce in science fiction.

`` The human ego being what it is '', I put in, `` science fiction has always assumed that the creatures on the planets of a thousand larger solar systems than ours must look like gigantic tube-nosed fruit bats.

It is not through space nor time that the time machine most approved by science fiction must travel for a visit to the permanent prehistoric past, or the ever-existent past-fantasy future.

Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically advanced Brunner and Mond chemical plant in Billingham, Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his famous science fiction novel Brave New World ( 1932 ) states that this experience of " an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence " was one source for the novel.

Until recently, androids have largely remained within the domain of science fiction, frequently seen in film and television.

The term " droid ", coined by George Lucas for the original Star Wars film and now used widely within science fiction, originated as an abridgment of " android ", but has been used by Lucas and others to mean any robot, including distinctly non-human form machines like R2-D2.

" The term made an impact into English pulp science fiction starting from Jack Williamson's The Cometeers ( 1936 ) and the distinction between mechanical robots and fleshy androids was popularized by Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future ( 1940 – 1944 ).

For example, Heinlein was the " dean of science fiction writers " because he was " the scientist " of science fiction.

The term was coined in an October 1940 science fiction fanzine by Russ Chauvenet and first popularized within science fiction fandom, from whom it was adopted by others.

The first science fiction fanzine, The Comet, was published in 1930 by the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago and edited by Raymond A. Palmer and Walter Dennis.

Never commercial enterprises, most science fiction fanzines were ( and many still are ) available for " the usual ," meaning that a sample issue will be mailed on request ; to receive further issues, a reader sends a " letter of comment " ( LoC ) about the fanzine to the editor.

A scholar later stated that " One thing you almost never find in a science fiction fanzine is science fiction.

In 1960, Richard and Pat Lupoff launched their science fiction and comics fanzine Xero.

By the mid-1960s, several fans active in science fiction and comics fandom recognized a shared interest in rock music, and the rock fanzine was born.

Online versions of approximately 200 science fiction fanzines will be found at Bill Burns ' eFanzines web site, along with links to other SF fanzine sites.

* Grue ( fanzine ), an influential science fiction fanzine published by Dean Grennell

The first science fiction fanzine, The Comet, was published in 1930.

The first Swedish science fiction fanzine was started in the early 1950s.

Today, there are a number of science fiction clubs in the country, including Skandinavisk Förening för Science Fiction ( whose club fanzine, Science Fiction Forum, was once edited by Stieg Larsson, a board member and one-time chairman thereof ), Linköpings Science Fiction-Förening and Sigma Terra Corps.

Both got their start in science fiction fandom, with Gregory co-editor of the science fiction fanzine Void.

The first science fiction fanzine, The Comet, was published in 1930 by the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago.

Traditionally, science fiction fanzines were ( and many still are ) available for " the usual ," meaning that a sample issue will be mailed on request ; to receive further issues, a reader sends a " letter of comment " ( LoC ) about the fanzine to the editor.

The term " fanzine " is also used to refer to fan-created magazines concerning other topics: the earliest rock-and-roll fanzines were edited by science fiction fans.

* Soldat från jorden (" Soldier from Earth ") ( 1973 ; based on a earlier draft previously published as a serial in the Swedish science fiction fanzine SF-Forum )

* Habakkuk ( fanzine ), a Hugo-nominated science fiction fanzine

* ODD ( fanzine ), a Hugo-nominated science fiction fanzine

It is really the funeral day of scholastic science.

At the same time, I am aware that my recoil could be interpreted by readers of the tea leaves at the bottom of my psyche as an incestuous sign, since theirs is a science of paradox: if one hates, they say it is because one loves ; ;

`` History has this in common with every other science: that the historian is not allowed to claim any single piece of knowledge, except where he can justify his claim by exhibiting to himself in the first place, and secondly to any one else who is both able and willing to follow his demonstration, the grounds upon which it is based.

Thus science is the savior of mankind, and in this respect Childhood's End only blueprints in greater detail the vision of the future which, though not always so directly stated, has nevertheless been present in the minds of most science-fiction writers.

What makes the current phenomenon unique is that so many science-fiction writers have reversed a trend and turned to writing works critical of the impact of science and technology on human life.

Easily the best known of these three novels is The Space Merchants, a good example of a science-fiction dystopia which extrapolates much more than the impact of science on human life, though its most important warning is in this area, namely as to the use to which discoveries in the behavioral sciences may be put.

Rather what Kornbluth and Pohl are really doing is warning against the dangers inherent in perfecting `` a science of man and his motives ''.

If man is actually the product of his environment and if science can discover the laws of human nature and the ways in which environment determines what people do, then someone -- a someone probably standing outside traditional systems of values -- can turn around and develop completely efficient means for controlling people.