important contributions to the form. How then did science fiction get its bad name as "subliterary"?

With the triumph of industrial capitalism in the Civil War, there emerged a newly literate mass audience of boys and young men intrigued by the opportunities of fame and fortune in science and technology. Aimed directly at this readership was the science-fiction "dime" novel, with its teenage boy genius as hero, first presented in Edward Ellis's seminal The Steam Man of the Prairie (1865). Between the Civil War and World War I, the most popular form of literature in America was the dime novel, and its science fiction versions were to have a formative influence on American culture (as can be glimpsed in this volume's entry on Luis Senarens). Only when it becamean influential form of mass entertainment did science fiction come to be disdained as vulgar and puerile.

H. Bruce Franklin , author of Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the 19th Century , War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, and Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction!

Science fiction includes such a wide range of themes and subgenres that it is notoriously difficult to define.[1] This is a list of definitions that have been offered by authors, editors, critics and fans over the years since science fiction became clearly separate from other genres. Definitions of related terms such as "science fantasy", "speculative fiction", and "fabulation" are included where they are intended as definitions of aspects of science fiction or because they illuminate related definitions — see e.g. Robert