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Science FictionScience Fiction is a popular modern branch of prose fiction that explores the probable consequences of some improbable or impossible transformation of the basic conditions of human existence. This transformation need not be brought about by a technological invention, but may involve some mutation of known biological or physical reality, e.g. time travel, extraterrestrial invasion, ecological catastrophe. Several early precedents have been claimed for the genre---notably Mary Shelley¡¯s Frankenstein (1818)---but true modern science fiction begins with Jules Verne¡¯s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864) and H. G. Wells¡¯s The Time Machine (1895). Once dismissed as pulp trash, SF has gained greater respect since the 1850s, and it has also had an important influence on postmodernist fiction.
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