The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (later Fantasy & Science Fiction and usually referred to as just F&SF) is a digest-size American fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in 1949 by Mystery House and then by Fantasy House. Both were subsidiaries of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Publications, which took over as publisher in 1958. Spilogale, Inc. has published the magazine since 2001. Since the April/May 2009 issue, it is published bimonthly with 256 pages per issue.

Titles

It began as The Magazine of Fantasy (Fall 1949), with Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas as editors. To encompass the full spectrum of speculative fiction, the title expanded into The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with the second issue. The quarterly became a bimonthly with the fifth issue (December 1950). Switching to an ampersand, it became The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with the sixth issue (February 1951), returning to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction when it went monthly with issue 17 (October 1952). The ampersand reappeared in May 1979, and the title was finally shortened to just Fantasy & Science Fiction with the October 1987 issue. With the April/May 2009 issue, it changed from monthly back to bimonthly publication.

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a "literature of ideas." It usually eschews the supernatural, and unlike the related genre of fantasy, historically science fiction stories were intended to have at least a faint grounding in science-based fact or theory at the time the story was created, but this connection has become tenuous or non-existent in much of science fiction.

Definitions

Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a wide range of subgenres and themes. Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying "science fiction is what we point to when we say it", a definition echoed by author Mark C. Glassy, who argues that the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography: you do not know what it is, but you know it when you see it.

Science fiction (disambiguation)

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with the impact of imagined innovations in science or technology.

Science Fiction may also refer to:

Music

Publications

Recursive science fiction

Recursive science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, which itself takes the form of an exploration of science fiction within the narrative of the story.

Analysis

In the book Resnick at Large, authors Mike Resnick and Robert J. Sawyer describe recursive science fiction as, "science fiction about science fiction". In the work, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders, Gary Westfahl comments, "Recursive fantasy fiction – that is, a fantasy about writing fantasy – is scarce;" one potential example of recursive fantasy, however, would be Patrick Rothfuss' The Kingkiller Chronicle.

Examples

Mike Resnick and Robert J. Sawyer cite Typewriter in the Sky by L. Ron Hubbard as an example of recursive science fiction. Gary Westfahl writes, "Luigi Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) offered a non-genre model." Westfahl noted that Hubbard's book was "an early genre example, perhaps inspired by Pirandello".