Science Fiction: Definitions Serve to Be Destroyed

More often than not, definitions serve to be destroyed. However, the debris and shards left behind in the process have much to teach us. When it comes to science fiction, as Joanna Russ once warned Samuel R. Delany, it’s best to avoid definitions. In a letter to Delany, she writes, “Worrying about the purity of the genres is like worrying about the purity of the races.”1 Better to get lost in the genre’s fuzziness and, in doing so, avoid the crime of foregoing this or that challenging short story or novel—if only because every science fiction story, whether good or bad, is usually good fun.

Science fiction scholar John Rieder also cautions against any absolutist definition of the genre. Nevertheless, he too can’t avoid the temptation. Suggesting a historical approach to defining the genre, he traces the origins of science fiction to the imperialist imaginaries of the nineteenth century, whether as a reflection of technological hubris, geographical expansion, or interactions with the “others.”2 His approach is in line with Delany, who, ignoring Ross’s advice, considers that science fiction is comprised not simply of its stories but also of a composite of authors, editors, magazines, critics, and conventions. In other words, it is the art and its milieu, a sociology of sorts within which one can also include the genre’s tentative definitions themselves. 

In the 1960s, science fiction writer and critic Judith Merril remarked: “I cannot define science fiction, but I can locate it, philosophically and historically.”3 Well known for her ongoing anthologies SF: The Year’s Best, Merril was uniquely perceptive, and a precursor of the great tectonic shifts in science fiction as it entered that revolutionary decade. This was a period when writers and editors attempted an escape from the speculative illustrations of techno-science that marked science fiction stories in previous decades, shifting to an exploration of science and technology as it intersected with psychology, gender, feminism, sociology, anti-militarization, ecology, and fantasy—aka, the New Wave.

For her part, Merril used the signifier “SF” as an open-ended formulation of what science fiction might mean. For me, her merry definition of science fiction remains the best:

SF is an abbreviation for Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy). Science Fantasy (or Science Fiction) is really an abbreviation too. Here are some of the things it stands for …

S is for Science, Space, Satellites, Starships, and Solar exploring; also for Semantics and Sociology, Satire, Spoofing, Suspense, and good old Serendipity. (But not Spelling, without which I could have added Psychology, Civilizations, and Psi without parentheses.)

F is for Fantasy, Fiction and Fable, Folklore, Fairy-tale and Farce; also for Fission and Fusion; for Firmament, Fireball, Future and Forecast; for Fate and Free-will; Figuring; Fact-seeking, and Fancy-free. Mix well. The result is SF, or Speculative Fun … Happy reading.4

After a period in London, Merril introduced the British New Wave to US readers. A feminist pioneer herself, Merril would nonetheless be mostly ignored by those same New Wave female science fiction writers, including Russ. These fellow women tended to see Merril as a product of 1950s atomic age feminism, and interpreted her stories as constrained by a well-intentioned yet limited concern with middle-class domesticity and the solitary, alienating experience of housewives. This was deemed insufficiently bold for the feminist movement of the late twentieth century, invested as it was in dismantling gender and sexual stereotypes completely.5 Such writers may have been too hasty though, for Merril’s emphasis on the “science” in science fiction may prove valuable still. As critic Diane Newell writes, “Science-fiction is not fiction about science, but fiction which endeavors to find the meaning in science.”6 I wish to linger for a minute on this word “science,” so dear to Merril’s SF, and find in it a meaning for today’s science fiction.

Science fiction writer Judith Merril holds a picture of a spaceship in the Spaced-Out Library in Toronto, March 1975. Photograph by Dick Darrel. License: Public domain.

In 2021 I had the privilege of interviewing science fiction scholar Grace Dillon, a key figure in Indigenous Futurisms.7 In her contribution, I believe she presents a way of understanding science fiction both as a genre focused on the politics of the cosmos and as the enactment of cosmopolitics itself—that is, of the universe and our place in it, as well as how we might live together across differences in this and other worlds.

To dismantle preconceived ideas about science fiction, and consequently about both science and fiction, Dillon breaks down the distinction between science, magic, and storytelling. She describes her process as “taking the fiction out of science fiction.”8 What does this mean? Let’s try the reverse: it means taking the “science” in science fiction not merely as a noun adjunct, as in fiction about science, but more seriously as stories that fundamentally reimagine what science is. For example, Dillon takes inspiration from Native American scholar Gregory A. Cajete’s work in the field of Native sciences. Cajete asks: “What is Indigenous science?” His answer: “It is knowing how to live in a place sustainably.”9 By “sustainable” one should understand that science is rooted in places and peoples, or, better yet, in sets of ecological relations, and that only from a given ecology can science then be universalized. 

This is not an attack on the universality of scientific laws. As anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro noted elsewhere, locality does not make of science an affair of relativity, a postmodern “anything goes,” but rather a relative affair, that is: a law may very well be the same everywhere and still be rooted differently here and there.10 Well-intentioned progressives can calm down. What this means is that, although it is true that the laws of physics and biology aren’t homogeneously applied, interpreted, and internalized across earth’s many peoples and societies—much less by potential alien civilizations!—these laws are universalized through storytelling. It is only through the many traditions of storytelling that science is, in fact, lived. Science, one could say, is a negotiation between universe and world. 

It is for this reason that what can appear as magic for some people appears as science to others, and vice versa. It all depends on the “worlding” of science at stake. When it comes to interpretation, confusion and contradiction are bound to occur. Thus, to better express her idea, Dillon turns to Tsilhqot’in filmmaker Helen Haig-Brown’s 2010 short film The Cave, which “tells the story of a bear hunter who ends up in a cave, inside an alternative world where people speak to one another telepathically and you have these spirit beings floating in the air.” Dillon continues, “What’s so interesting is that Haig-Brown was filming a recorded Tsilhqot’in story, which her tribal nation gave permission to adapt … While the film may appear as science fiction, it is taking the fiction out of science fiction.”11

Again, while for certain audiences The Cave can only be seen as a fantastical tale—relegated to the minor genres of paranormal narratives and ghost stories—for those acquainted with the story’s “laws,” it is reality pure and simple. Similarly, it is for this reason that, as I’ve insisted elsewhere—against the grain of most film critics—the films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul are not surrealist or fantastical. Rather, they offer a sociology of humans, ghosts, spirits, and animal-people—a realism closer to documentary.12 Apichatpong’s films, like Haig-Brown’s, are not science fiction, or fiction, at all, but scientific tales.

It is unsurprising that Dillon would find some affinity with anthropologist Bruno Latour. In his extensive oeuvre, Latour endlessly reiterated that the truth of scientific facts results from “science-in-the-making.”13 Scientific facts, Latour suggested, are a narration, a story well told, recounted through practices and instruments that determine how reality becomes, well, reality. Akin to Latour, Donna J. Haraway too has searched for the storytelling background to scientific facts. An avid lover of science fiction herself, Haraway took inspiration from Merril’s heterodox (un)definition of SF—science fiction that can also be fantasy; speculation or semantics; fate, futurity, fabulation, and free-will, and so on. Haraway pays homage: “I am interested in the narratives of scientific fact—those potent fictions of science—within a complex field indicated by the signifier SF.” And what does she find within the heterogeneity of SF? “SF is a territory of contested cultural reproduction in high-technology worlds,” she says, “a transformative field” where the fictions of science can be threaded, translated, and transmogrified. If for Latour science is a worlding practice, for Haraway science fiction is where those worlds are put to the test.14 

Memoria, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021.

With this in mind, let me go back to the symmetry between science and magic. Famously, in his Savage Mind, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows that what magic is for many Amerindian peoples, science is for the modern (European) mind.15 This doesn’t mean that magic and science are the same. Rather, it speaks to how magic and science, as systems of knowledge and practice, perform in a given society: what they do rather than what they are. The emphasis here is on the performance. We are talking about their function, not their essence. And what do both magic and science do? They harmonize the realms of nature and culture, contributing to the healthy functioning of a society, to how a people accumulates knowledge and passes it on intergenerationally, and consequently, to how institutions are formed and performed.

In the realm of science fiction, Lévi-Strauss’s analogy was made famous in Arthur C. Clark’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”16 But the reverse is also true! Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. Between one and the other concept—magic and science—what is at stake, that is, what is being permutated into many possible (and seemingly impossible, as seen in Haig-Brown and Apichatpong’s films) variations, is the nature of reality. It is the definition of “the natural” itself.

I’ve always found science fiction’s obsession with scientific laws somewhat disquieting, given that so many of my favorite stories are anything but grounded in science. As already mentioned, Dillon clarified this insistence for me by describing how science fiction is the fiction of science. But when science is no longer what it seems, then science fiction is no longer about the myths of modern techno-scientific hubris or a modern mythos itself. Neither is it simply an artistic tool used in the deconstruction of feminism, gender, ecology, class, or race as found since the New Wave. Being all and none of these things, what science fiction does is acknowledge relations—cosmopolitical relations, to be precise. Working from Merril’s SF, as well as Clark’s third law, we might provisionally say that science fiction is the fiction that endeavors to find the meanings and rituals hidden behind science perceived as magic and magic perceived as science. In other words, science fiction is the fiction of misunderstandings.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, interview on the YouTube channel How I Write, with David Perell, 2026.

In the present landscape of speculative fiction publishing there is increasingly a confusion between science fiction and fantasy. Take, for example, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2021 novella Elder Race, which retraces Clark’s third law. Set on a faraway planet, the story jumps between the perspectives of the brash Princess Lynesse, fourth daughter of the queen in the matriarchal line that rules the land, and Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist from a space-faring civilization left for hundreds of years in the solitude of a tech-managed tower (or is it a spaceship?) to study the local population. To Lynesse, however, he is Nygroth Elder, the sorcerer, whose banal technology is utterly mystical—his “magic” powerful and unexplainable. When a monster begins to haunt the land, Lynesse goes in search of Nyr, believing that his magic will successfully cast away the creature.

Forgotten by his peers and misunderstood by the locals, Nyr blames himself for having fought for the kingdom years ago alongside Lynesse’s ancestor queen, and in doing so becoming romantically involved with the royal. “‘I am, frankly, not only the last but the worst anthropologist,” he sighs.17 All of this plunges Nyr into a deep depression. A personal computer attached to his brain, called a Dissociated Cognition System (DCS), which Lynesse perceives as terrific horns, blocks the anthropologist’s emotions, creating the double effect of appeasing his depression and further isolating him from the world. Still, reluctantly, Nyr accepts the young girl’s plea: “Now I’m on a fucking quest, with a couple of women who don’t understand things like germs or fusion power or anthropological theories of value.”18 Like a good old modern, it is not Nyr’s technology that isolates and depresses him, but the cosmological gap between him and the others.

Tchaikovsky’s book is a critique of anthropological illusions of detachment from, and unbiased judgement of, those under study by an anthropologist, prior to the awareness of participant observation. It is also a story of misunderstandings between distinct cosmologies interpreting the same phenomena differently—and each, performatively, getting away with it. In this regard, it is reminiscent of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s 1980s Darkover saga, which has a similar plot, although one more feminist in tone, in which she articulates the opposing views between a junior anthropologist and the local inhabitants of the planet Darkover. Curiously, in both Bradley and Tchaikovsky the indigenous population is, in fact, a human community long settled on the planet, which, having lost contact with earth, slowly transformed into a fantasy-like society. Elder Race reminds us that at the center of the gap between cosmologies there is nothing but interpretative storytelling. And that, just like magic, science is an intergenerational tale, and both are fragile in their dogmas. 

Similarly, N. K. Jemisin’s acclaimed Broken Earth trilogy (2015–17) is a tale of lost knowledge in a post-technological magical world where intergenerational lore binds its characters and their misunderstandings. What starts as fantasy gradually gives way to an archaeology of ancient tech and, ultimately, ecological collapse, not only of earth’s ecosystems but also beyond, with the moon, lost from earth’s orbit in an ancient war, playing a pivotal role in the plot. Intimate in tone, the trilogy is vast in scope. In the first book, The Fifth Season, we are introduced to the orogenes, a people with the natural capacity to both tame and infuriate a geologically unpredictable, earthquake-ridden supercontinent called the Stillness. Once a young apprentice in the Fulcrum, where orogenes are taught their art and duties, the defiant Syenite is coupled with Alabaster, one of the most powerful oregenes. Together they are tasked with visiting a port town, and with their earth-controlling powers they remove a reef that is disrupting trade. Despite his power, Alabaster wallows in melancholy. Once they visit a node station, a type of fortress, on their way to the town, Syenite begins to understand the reason behind his depressive mood: inheriting his power, his children are lobotomized and placed in the nodes to quell the earthquakes that disturb the Stillness and that carry with them the potential to bring the destructive Fifth Season. Arriving in town, they discover that the reef is actually a sunken obelisk—gigantic crystals of unknown origin that roam the skies of the Stillness—which reacts to Syenite, rises in the air, and reveals a stone eater, a mysterious geological creature, trapped inside it. Alarmed, the Fulcrum sends a guardian to capture Syenite and Alabaster, but the two manage to escape to a nearby island, where they have a child together. In the end, the Fulcrum discovers them and sends guardians to take the child. Trapped by the guardians, Syenite suffocates the baby, preferring to end her life rather than give her over to a life of servitude. While Alabaster, hurt and dying, finds refuge among the stone eaters, Syenite takes the name of Essun and disappears. 

Having changed identity, Essun hides her orogeny, marries a common man, and eventually has a young baby girl, Nassun. The subsequent books, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, follow Essun and Nassun’s conflicting mother and child stories. Nassun is an orogene like Essun. But what has she ever known except violence, escape, survival? Her mother is a stranger to her and their familial bond is broken. It is at this stage, with the characters dispersed across the Stillness, slowly converging on each other chapter by chapter, that we begin to understand how this fantastical world is but the result of a fallen, highly advanced technological society. The floating obelisks are its memory—devices created long ago to harness the unlimited renewable energy of the planet itself. For this geological tech to work, a sacrifice was necessary, however, and so the DNA of an enslaved population was used to create a people engineered to control the earth’s geology. A revolution ensues, civilization crumbles, the moon is lost, and the age of the Fifth Season begins. Essun and Nassun, mother and daughter, find themselves at the center of a story as old as the geological strata on which they walk. In a final moment of confrontation they must decide whether to continue or let everything collapse.

In Jemisin’s colossal tale, only stories persist. Given the time that it takes for a cosmology to take hold, it is only natural that such tales are riddled with misunderstandings about the past, reality, and the planet itself. Jemisin’s trilogy is a paramount example of intergenerational trauma and the hardships of surpassing a pain that lasts longer than a lifetime. But it is also a story of a conflict of lived worlds, where the planet itself is a character, and the land—the matter of which the world is made—is riddled with conflict, both epistemological and ontological.

A map of the Stillness, the supercontinent where N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy is set. It depicts the major cities, key regions, tectonic plates, and islands of the Stillness. Credit: Tim Paul for N. K. Jemisin.

To take Dillon’s word and her Indigenous Futurism seriously means understanding that at its origin, science fiction was not only an artistic genre representative of nineteenth-century colonial imperialism, as Rieder correctly claims. If we are to be truly historical, we should see that science fiction was both an expression and an affirmation—a naturalization—of a particular cosmology, a cosmology that attributed to technology the role of dominion over the environment, subsuming all relations to the necessity of extractivism, both human and environmental, by modern imperialisms, whether market capitalist or planned socialist. Science fiction is not a straightforward tool for reflecting the present, much less for predicting the future. Rather, it is a genre that arose from a specific understanding of modernity’s nature-culture divide. And yet, science fiction has also, always, strived to escape or corrupt this divide—hence its revolutionary, or its pure-and-simple escapist, appeal. 

In recent decades, the notion of “cosmopolitics” has come to frame the debate around the nature and culture binomial—a classic anthropological question.19 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the term arose from the increased visibility of Indigenous political movements in academic and political contexts. Armed with very different conceptual toolkits for framing the ecological emergency, many different Indigenous traditions across the world have been pushing scientists, anthropologists, and environmentalists to reflect on the fundamental concepts undergirding their scientific disciplines and political struggles. At its most radical, this collaboration across worldviews has pushed a diversity of perspectives well beyond cultural representation, embedding the debate within the realm of ontology. In other words, rather than addressing the elasticity between these two concepts (nature and culture) in purely epistemological terms, cosmopolitics asks us to look at their tension ontologically: not what things seem to be, but what they actually are. It is, after all, irrelevant to have Indigenous representation at the United Nations if Indigenous worldviews are not given a chance to change the world.

While much of postmodern deconstruction followed a multicultural framework, whereby many cultures were seen to be operating on top of one universal nature, cosmopolitics asks us to navigate the realization that there are, in fact and in practice, many natures. In other words, there are many possible negotiations between the realms of what is understood as nature and culture. For example, while for some an object (a rock, a reef, a mountain) is understood to have a spirit, for others it has none at all—and neither is necessarily wrong or right. One thing is to be political, another New Age. I’m asking us to be philosophically precise (and egalitarian at that), not righteous. What I am saying is that just like culture, the meaning of nature is not agreed upon; rather, it is an agora made of misunderstandings. What we do, politically, with those misunderstandings is up to us. And you cannot be generous in a misunderstanding unless you find comfort in the liminal and frictional space between arguments—what the writer and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha calls “the interval” and the political theorist Chantal Mouffe understands as “agonist pluralism.”20

To me, this is science fiction diplomacy: the act of finding a common ground across radically distinct worlds and only then, hopefully, constituting a universe. It is, at least, what I see the best contemporary science fiction attempting. The global explosion of the genre must mean more than simply new representational shelves in the capitalist marketplace, made to be consumed privately in our poor, fated identities. It must act on the imagination, breaking apart the universal unity of science, opening up the multiple meanings hidden within concepts, narrating cosmogonies and cosmovisions of the earth and of outer space, of the subjectivity within and of the sentience outside—call it God, call it aliens—in as many variations as possible. This responsibility is not strictly on authors. After all, sometimes all we want is an entertaining story. Readers must take these visions seriously and deploy them back in their world. 

One could thus say that science fiction happens in the tension between diverse cosmopolitics, and as such it is the practice of elasticity, confusion, and friction between cosmovisions. And that is why its rules may come across as magic to some, or why fantasy and science fiction are increasingly blurring. After all, once science gets fuzzy, its logic impenetrable to the beholder, it appears like magic; and, inversely, once magic solidifies into dogmatic rules, it shapeshifts into science.

Counterintuitively, then, science fiction might be more about nature than technology—a reflection on the expectations that constitute what is deemed natural and how this naturalization (of bodies, of ecosystems, of planets) might be speculatively disturbed. The multipolarity of science is the fiction of contemporary science fiction. And this is why I, as a reader and a fan, continue to see it as so speculative and future-oriented. Utopian even. On the matter of definitions then, better to follow the advice of the old, renowned science fiction critic Darko Suvin and say that science fiction does not begin anywhere as such, “for its ‘pre-history’ is one of fundamental impurity.”21 Let it continue forever impure.