In this introduction, we provide a short rationale for the genesis of the special issue on "The language of science fiction"and introduce its main theme - science fiction, with particular consideration of the language of estrangement - and main methodological framework - corpus linguistics. In addition, we give an overview of the contributions and motivate their grouping into four parts: (1) the influence of science fiction on non-fictional language, (2) sociolinguistic variation, (3) science fiction and the mind, and (4) lexis and literature.