Science fiction is a subcategory of a broad range of fiction that can be best described as literature of the fantastic. Other literatures of the fantastic include horror and fantasy.

Miriam Allen de Ford has noted: "Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities."

Science fiction has many progenitors in literature, namely:

• Mythical adventures such as The Odyssey
• Voyages of discovery
• Stories of ideal societies such as Thomas More's Utopia

But science fiction adds technological imagery and is generally considered to attempt an extrapolation into the future of known concepts of science and technology.

We can divide the development of science fiction as literature into the following overlapping stages:

• Prehistory: from the beginnings of literature to the development of the scientific method c. 1600
• Pioneers: (1818-1930): initially dominated by the gothic strain of the Romantic as embodied by Shelley, Hawthorne, and Poe, then influenced by the scientific romances of H.G. Wells and the prodigious output of Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Early Modern Science Fiction: (c. 1930-38): dominated by Hugo Gernsback and the first pulp magazines
• Golden Age Science Fiction: (c. 1938-45): dominated by editor John W. Campbell and his stable of writers
• Modern Science Fiction: (c. 1945-65): science fiction written in the shadow of the nuclear arms race and the emerging space race
• Contemporary Science Fiction: (1965 to the present): science fiction in the Space Age and beyond, including the emergence of the New Wave and Cyberpunk