science fictionn.adj.

1851 W. Wilson Little Earnest Bk. upon Great Old Subj. x. 139 Campbell says that ‘Fiction in Poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and enchanting resemblance.’ Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true—thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of Life.

1898 Bull. Pharmacy Oct. 466/1 Mr. H. G. Wells, the imaginative writer of science-fiction, has recently brought out a thrilling romance whose basis is the intended conquest of the earth by the inhabitants of Mars.

1927 Amazing Stories Jan. 974/2 Remember that Jules Verne was a sort of Shakespeare in science fiction.

1933 Astounding Stories Dec. 142/1 Intelligent people, as a rule, will read science fiction.

1942 ‘H. H. Holmes’ Rocket to Morgue 51 Science fiction was headed for a blind alley until the realization came that even science fiction must remain fiction, and fiction is basically about people, not subatomic blasters nor time warps.

1951 G. Conklin in Possible Worlds Sci. Fiction 177 For the last story on the Solar System, one has been chosen which many people will call science fantasy rather than science fiction... It deals with a world which man, by his very nature as living matter composed of chemical bonds, will never be able to explore.

a1963 C. S. Lewis Discarded Image (1964) vii. 142 The theory of the Four Zones taught that the equatorial region was too hot for life. The other hemisphere of the Earth was to us wholly inaccessible. You could write science-fiction about it, but not geography.

1982 T. Staicar Feminine Eye p. vii Only science fiction allows the freedom to create a ‘laboratory’ world where one can experiment with matriarchal societies that dominate entire nations.

1990 Thrust Winter 28/3 People to whom science fiction meant bad monster movies.

1997 Scotsman (Nexis) 10 May 17 So-called quantum computers, still the stuff of science fiction, which can exploit the property of sub-atomic particles to be, as it were, in two places at once.

2008 New Yorker 24 Mar. 71/3 An idea often played with in science fiction, a problem of causality and time travel known as the grandfather paradox.

1929 Pop. Mech. Sept. (Advertising section) 46/2 Air Wonder Stories is a revelation in Science Fiction Stories of the Air.

1953 Bull. Atomic Scientists July 209/1 It's not that science fiction characters are stereotypes; it's that they are a limited choice of stereotypes.

1972 Sci. Amer. Sept. 38/2 I for one would rather command a computer through a keyboard than talk to it, even if that science-fiction dream were possible.

1980 M. Babson Dangerous to Know viii. 56 The long open-plan Newsroom..always gave me a science-fiction feeling of being the last man alive.

2012 L. Dormehl Apple Revol. viii. 228 Advertisements for computers had been so terrified of scaring off potential customers that they had avoided mentioning anything that was too science fiction, too threatening.

1936 Let. in Astounding Stories Nov. 155/2 Leinster is a writer first, a science-fictioneer, second. As a result he never loses sight of that fundamental to successful writing—the story.

1977 Times Lit. Suppl. 14 Jan. 26/1 Put one science-fictioneer on a desert island and he will start a magazine.

1994 Interzone Apr. 64/2 Science-fictioneers such as Robert Sheckley, Joe Haldeman and Frederik Pohl.

1953 Variety 2 Sept. 27/1 Assuming the flaws will be corrected within the next couple of showings..the science fictioner should make good juvenile viewing.

1974 Derrick (Oil City, Pa.) 13 July 7/5 ‘Attack of the 60-foot Woman’..Allison Hayes, William Hudson. Science-fictioner could be amusing if you just don't take it seriously.

1999 Press (Christchurch, N.Z.) (Nexis) 3 Dec. 20 The Matrix. Visually stylish science-fictioner with a plot that keeps you guessing.

1929 Let. in Sci. Wonder Stories Aug. 279/2 Moved by a vast curiosity we beseech the science fictionist to create new tools and adapt them to use. We delight in the warp of Romance woven into the cloth of Fancy.

1953 C. Ryan Conquest of Moon i. 3 The ships the explorers will use for the long journey through space will bear little resemblance to those depicted by the science-fictionists.

1991 Locus Sept. 72/3 Isn't there some way that the international community of science-fictionists can persuade these guys to ask permission before taking stuff?

1957 Ada (Okla.) Evening News 24 Nov. 1/5 And for sheer teeth-cracking suspense in an everyday world, nothing fantastic or science-fictiony about it: ‘Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket’.

1982 Dragon Mag. Oct. 59/1 Nobody would have wasted any great amount of war effort on anything so science-fictiony as an atomic bomb, and they wouldn't have gotten a bomb in time to affect the outcome of the war.

2010 N.Y. Times (National ed.) 7 Feb. (Arts & Leisure section) 14/3 You could say that ‘The Time Traveler's Wife’ is a science-fictiony romance about eternal love and all that sniffy, weepy stuff.