A publisher friend was trying to persuade me to produce a book I did not greatly wish to write. Trying to get out of it, I wrote him a letter suggesting something slightly different. What I had in mind was a planet much like Earth, but with a longer year. I wanted no truck with our puny 365 days.

“Let’s say this planet is called Helliconia,” I wrote, on the spur of the moment.

The word was out. Helliconia! And from that word grew this book.

Science of recent years has become full of amazing concepts. Rivalling SF! We are now conversant with furious processes very distant from our solar system in both time and space. Cosmologists, talking of some new development, will often say, “It sounds like science fiction”. A perfectly just remark, reflecting as it does the relationship that exists between science fiction and science.

This relationship is not capable of precise definition, since science permeates our lives, and both scientists and writers are wayward people. It is a shifting relationship. What is clear is that science fiction functions in predictive or descriptive mode. It can attempt either to stay ahead of science, to foresee future developments or discontinuities, or it can dramatise newly achieved developments, making the bare (and, to some, arid) facts of science accessible to a wide readership.

An example of the former method (the “Wait and See” method) is Gregory Benford’s novel, Timescape, in which he talks of the intricacies of time in a way which has only recently entered discussion by the scientific community.

An example of the latter method (the “Digestive Tract” method) is H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, in which he demonstrates, as it were, the possibility of solar death—a startlingly new idea when Wells wrote.