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Sep 8, 2018 · Why Science Fiction Is the Most Important Genre. Historian Yuval Noah Harari believes sci-fi has the power to shape public opinion. Jonathan Nicholson/NurPhoto/Getty Images. The Geek's Guide to...
Apr 8, 2016 · Reading science fiction enables us to reflect on the ways people interact with each other, with technology, with our environment. A good science fiction work posits one vision for the future, among countless possibilities, that is built on a foundation of realism.
- Overview
- The world of science fiction
- Antecedents
Science fiction is a form of fiction that deals principally with the impact of actual or imagined science upon society or individuals.
Where was science fiction invented?
The emergence of science fiction became most evident in the West, where the social transformations caused by the Industrial Revolution first led writers to extrapolate the future impact of technology. The clearest precursor, however, was the 17th-century author Cyrano de Bergerac, who wrote about a voyager’s trip to and expulsion from the Moon.
Where does science fiction get its name?
The term science fiction was popularized, if not invented, in the 1920s by one of the genre’s principal advocates, the American publisher Hugo Gernsback, for whom the Hugo Award for science fiction novels is named. Gernsback published Amazing Stories, the first in a series of magazines devoted solely to what he called “scientifiction.”
Why was science fiction popular in the 1950s?
Science fiction is a modern genre. Though writers in antiquity sometimes dealt with themes common to modern science fiction, their stories made no attempt at scientific and technological plausibility, the feature that distinguishes science fiction from earlier speculative writings and other contemporary speculative genres such as fantasy and horror. The genre formally emerged in the West, where the social transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution first led writers and intellectuals to extrapolate the future impact of technology. By the beginning of the 20th century, an array of standard science fiction “sets” had developed around certain themes, among them space travel, robots, alien beings, and time travel (see below Major science fiction themes). The customary “theatrics” of science fiction include prophetic warnings, utopian aspirations, elaborate scenarios for entirely imaginary worlds, titanic disasters, strange voyages, and political agitation of many extremist flavours, presented in the form of sermons, meditations, satires, allegories, and parodies—exhibiting every conceivable attitude toward the process of techno-social change, from cynical despair to cosmic bliss.
Science fiction writers often seek out new scientific and technical developments in order to prognosticate freely the techno-social changes that will shock the readers’ sense of cultural propriety and expand their consciousness. This approach was central to the work of H.G. Wells, a founder of the genre and likely its greatest writer. Wells was an ardent student of the 19th-century British scientist T.H. Huxley, whose vociferous championing of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution earned him the epithet “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Wells’s literary career gives ample evidence of science fiction’s latent radicalism, its affinity for aggressive satire and utopian political agendas, as well as its dire predictions of technological destruction.
Britannica Quiz
Science Fiction Writers Quiz
This dark dystopian side can be seen especially in the work of T.H. Huxley’s grandson, Aldous Huxley, who was a social satirist, an advocate of psychedelic drugs, and the author of a dystopian classic, Brave New World (1932). The sense of dread was also cultivated by H.P. Lovecraft, who invented the famous Necronomicon, an imaginary book of knowledge so ferocious that any scientist who dares to read it succumbs to madness. On a more personal level, the works of Philip K. Dick (often adapted for film) present metaphysical conundrums about identity, humanity, and the nature of reality. Perhaps bleakest of all, the English philosopher Olaf Stapledon’s mind-stretching novels picture all of human history as a frail, passing bubble in the cold galactic stream of space and time.
Stapledon’s views were rather specialized for the typical science fiction reader. When the genre began to gel in the early 20th century, it was generally disreputable, particularly in the United States, where it first catered to a juvenile audience. Following World War II, science fiction spread throughout the world from its epicentre in the United States, spurred on by ever more staggering scientific feats, from the development of nuclear energy and atomic bombs to the advent of space travel, human visits to the Moon, and the real possibility of cloning human life.
Antecedents of science fiction can be found in the remote past. Among the earliest examples is the 2nd-century-ce Syrian-born Greek satirist Lucian, who in Trips to the Moon describes sailing to the Moon. Such flights of fancy, or fantastic tales, provided a popular format in which to satirize government, society, and religion while evading libel suits, censorship, and persecution. The clearest forerunner of the genre, however, was the 17th-century swashbuckler Cyrano de Bergerac, who wrote of a voyager to the Moon finding a utopian society of men free from war, disease, and hunger. (See below Utopias and dystopias.) The voyager eats fruit from the biblical tree of knowledge and joins lunar society as a philosopher—that is, until he is expelled from the Moon for blasphemy. Following a short return to Earth, he travels to the Sun, where a society of birds puts him on trial for humanity’s crimes. In creating his diversion, Cyrano took it as his mission to make impossible things seem plausible. Although this and his other SF-like writings were published only posthumously and in various censored versions, Cyrano had a great influence on later satirists and social critics. Two works in particular—Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752)—show Cyrano’s mark with their weird monsters, gross inversions of normalcy, and similar harsh satire.
Another precursor was Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (c. 1771; “The Year 2440”; Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred), a work of French political speculation set in a 25th-century utopian society that worships science. While many writers had depicted some future utopian “Kingdom of God” or a utopian society in some mythical land, this was the first work to postulate a utopian society on Earth in the realizable future. The book was swiftly banned by the French ancien régime, which recognized that Mercier’s fantasy about “the future” was a thin disguise for his subversive revolutionary sentiments. Despite this official sanction—or perhaps because of it—Mercier’s book became an international best seller. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned copies.
- Bruce Sterling
Oct 15, 2020 · Science fiction has been radically reimagined over the last 10 years. Seven science fiction pros explain about how everything in the genre is changing
- Tasha Robinson
Dec 3, 2018 · Tom Cassauwers explores what these movements reveal about the places in which they appear – including China, Russia and Africa – and how imagining alternative realities can be subversive. The...
Sep 10, 2018 · “Today science fiction is the most important artistic genre,” Harari says in Episode 325 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It shapes the understanding of the public on things like artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which are likely to change our lives and society more than anything else in the coming decades.”
Jun 14, 2013 · So many dystopian visions are put forth in science fiction. And why? Because sci-fi writers are futurists; we look ahead to see where we are going if we continue along our current trajectory.
