In the twentieth century, science fiction became a mass phenomenon. Magazines, pulp fiction, paperbacks and, later, film and television made the genre visible across the world. Especially influential were the so-called Big Three: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein are still widely referred to as the “Big Three” of science fiction.

Asimov brought intellectual architecture to stories about robots, empires and the cycles of civilisation. His robot stories and famous laws of robotics turned machines into moral tests rather than simple monsters. Clarke connected cosmic scale with scientific elegance. In works such as Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, humanity becomes small, but not meaningless. Heinlein wrote about freedom, militarism, social models, bodies, sexuality and political self-determination – often fascinating, often controversial, but always influential.

The Big Three gave science fiction a powerful structure: Asimov gave it logic, Clarke gave it the cosmos, Heinlein gave it the conflict between the individual and society.