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.

It was the cover story of the issue of Astounding that is sometimes described as having ushered in the " Golden Age " of science fiction.

The story served as the inspiration for a number of science fiction movies.

* Absalom is the name of a short science fiction story by Henry Kuttner about the conflict between a father and son over the son's education.

In his story " Gulf ", science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein used a constructed language, in which every Basic English word is replaced with a single phoneme, as an appropriate means of communication for a race of genius supermen.

Many games, including card games, are fabricated by science fiction authors and screenwriters to distance a culture depicted in the story from present-day Western culture.

In novels such as The City and the Stars and the story " The Sentinel " ( upon which 2001: A Space Odyssey was based ) Clarke presents ultra-advanced technologies developed by hyperintelligences limited only by fundamental science.

Gibson defined cyberpunk's antipathy towards utopian SF in his 1981 short story " The Gernsback Continuum ," which pokes fun at and, to a certain extent, condemns utopian science fiction.

Canadian-born science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt reimagined Robert Graves ' Claudius story in his two novels Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn.

The 1972 science fiction novel Cyborg, by Martin Caidin, told the story of a man whose damaged body parts are replaced by mechanical devices (" bionics ").

It garnered major science fiction awards and has received universal praise for its characters, story, strong voice acting, animation and soundtrack.

The term " cyberspace " was first used by the cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson, though the concept was described somewhat earlier, for example in the Vernor Vinge short story " True Names ," and even earlier in John M. Ford's novel, Web of Angels.

The word " cyberspace " ( from cybernetics and space ) was coined by science fiction novelist and seminal cyberpunk author William Gibson in his 1982 story " Burning Chrome " and popularized by his 1984 novel Neuromancer.

Doom, a science fiction / horror themed video game, has a background which is given in the game's instruction manual ; the rest of the story is advanced with short messages displayed between each section of the game ( called episodes ), the action as the player character progresses through the levels, and some visual cues.

Its story of a subterranean race waiting to reclaim the surface of the Earth is an early science fiction theme.

Approaching a given genre, certain assumed background information covers the nature and purpose of possible predictable elements of the story, such as the appearance of dragons and wizards in high fantasy, warp drives in science fiction, or shootouts at high noon in Westerns.

One of the first writers of science fiction was Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein ( 1818 ) dealt with the asexual creation of new life, a re-telling of the Adam and Eve story.

His idea of a perfect science fiction story was " 75 percent literature interwoven with 25 percent science ".

Even though Ralph 124C 41 + is one of the most influential science fiction stories of all time, and filled with numerous science fiction ideas, few people still read the story.

There is a degree of flexibility in how far from " real science " a story can stray before it leaves the realm of hard SF.

After it was rejected by Esquire magazine in 1955, Hefner agreed to publish in Playboy the Charles Beaumont science fiction short story, " The Crooked Man ", about straight men being persecuted in a world where homosexuality was the norm.

Before the revelation of Sheldon's identity, Tiptree was often referred to as an unusually macho male ( see, e. g., Robert Silverberg's commentaries ) as well as an unusually feminist science fiction writer ( for a male ) — particularly for " The Women Men Don't See ", a story of two women who go looking for aliens to escape from male-dominated society on Earth.

" In January 2006, MacLean reflected on the science behind the story:

Terminus Est is a sword in the science fiction series The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.

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.

Mankind, as a result, attains previously undreamed of levels of civilization and culture, a golden age which the Overlords, a very evident symbol of science, have helped produce by introducing reason and the scientific method into human activities.

and Robert Sheckley's The Status Civilization ( 1960 ) describes a world which, frightened by the powers of destruction science has given it, becomes static and conformist.

What Sam Rayburn's life proves to us all is the magnificent lesson in political science that one can devotedly and with absolute dedication represent the seemingly provincial interests of one's own community, one's own district, one's own State, and by that help himself represent even better the sweep and scope of the problems of this the greatest nation of all time.

Here I was accompanied by Mrs. Okamoto ( Fumio's mother ), her son, Mr. Washizu ( a prospective student with whom I have been corresponding for more than a year ), and Mr. Nishima, one of the science teachers.

Proceeds will be used by the section to further its program in science, education and social action on local, national and international levels.

The progress of science over these last few centuries and the gradual replacement of Biblical by scientific categories of reality have to a large extent emptied the spirit world of the entities which previously populated it.

Despite these achievements, the influence of Aristotle's errors is considered by some to have held back science considerably.

The term was originally coined in the 19th century by the founding sociologist and philosopher of science, Auguste Comte, and has become a major topic for psychologists ( especially evolutionary psychology researchers ), evolutionary biologists, and ethologists.

In the science of ethology ( the study of animal behaviour ), and more generally in the study of social evolution, altruism refers to behaviour by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing the fitness of the actor.

It is part of the field of biomechatronics, the science of using mechanical devices with human muscle, skeleton, and nervous systems to assist or enhance motor control lost by trauma, disease, or defect.

Ethics cannot be based on the authoritative certainty given by mathematics and logic, or prescribed directly from the empirical findings of science.

His system included modifying the way we consider the world, e. g., with an attitude of " I don't know ; let's see ," to better discover or reflect its realities as revealed by modern science.

After starting his writing career by writing for " true confession " style pulp magazines like True Story, van Vogt decided to switch to writing something he enjoyed, science fiction.

Although the Indian and Greek concepts of the atom were based purely on philosophy, modern science has retained the name coined by Democritus.

* Semantic analysis ( computer science ) – a pass by a compiler that adds semantical information to the parse tree and performs certain checks

Since the 1950s, this type of fiction has to a large extent merged with science fictional tropes involving cross-time travel between alternate histories or psychic awareness of the existence of " our " universe by the people in another ; or ordinary voyaging uptime ( into the past ) or downtime ( into the future ) that results in history splitting into two or more time-lines.

* In the 1976 science fiction novel Children of Dune, written by Frank Herbert, Agamemnon is mentioned as an ancestor of the Atreides family.