Backgrounds: Starting points / Kingsley Amis -- Science fiction and literature / Robert Conquest -- Roots of science fiction / Robert Scholes -- Theory: On the poetics of the science fiction genre / Darko Suvin -- Time-travel story and related matters of SF structuring / Stanislaw Lem -- Genre criticism: science fiction and the fantastic / Eric S. Rabkin -- Approaches: On science fiction / C.S. Lewis -- Imagination of disaster / Susan Sontag -- How to play utopia / Michael Holquist -- Apocalyptic imagination, science fiction, and American literature / David Ketterer -- Science fiction and the future / John Huntington.