science [ME] Originally science was knowledge in general, or any branch of knowledge, including the arts, and the word is from Latin scire ‘to know’ (also found in conscience [ME] ‘inner knowledge’ and *nice). The restricted modern sense of science, concentrating on the physical and natural world, dates from the 17th century. Science fiction was first mentioned in 1851, but this was an isolated use, and the term did not become common until the end of the 1920s, when US ‘pulp’ magazines (so called because of the cheap paper they were printed on) like Astounding Stories carried tales of space adventure. Before science fiction was coined the stories of writers such as Jules Verne were called scientific fiction or scientifiction.