Science Fiction

I

Introduction

Science Fiction, genre of fiction set in some imaginary time or place. In its original usage in the 1920s, science fiction referred to stories that appeared in cheap, so-called pulp magazines, but science fiction now appears in all media, including motion pictures, staged dramas, television programs, and video games, as well as short stories and book-length works. Science fiction is sometimes abbreviated SF.

In a 1960 survey of the field, New Maps of Hell, British novelist Kingsley Amis wrote that science fiction deals with events that could not happen in the world we know but are presented on the basis of some innovation in science or technology. Such works are most often concerned with the impact of these innovations—or of change in general—on humanity.

Writers and readers generally agree that a work of science fiction should not violate what is known to science, even as it speculates widely and often wildly in areas outside the known. Although science-fiction stories, especially stories on television or film, sometimes disregard this rule, they are supposed to present events in a rational manner.

Common subjects for science fiction include the future, near and far, especially future societies better or worse than our own; travel through space or time; life on other planets; crises created by technology, or by alien creatures and environments; and the creation or destruction of worlds. Stories are generally characterized by radical changes from the present; large distances in space or long spans of time; and extreme, sometimes lurid imagery.

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II

Early Subjects

Content characteristic of science fiction can be found throughout literary history. But it was not until at least the 18th century that science-fiction works became separable from the main body of literature, except in their contributions to the 18th- and 19th-century works that make up the basis of the science-fiction genre. It gradually introduced the subjects and themes around which the science-fiction genre eventually solidified: imagined civilizations, travel in space, the future as a place different from the present, marvelous beings and inventions, and the use of science and scientific knowledge to increase plausibility and to predict or prophesy.

A

Imaginary Voyages

Imaginary voyages and tales of strange people or creatures in distant lands were common in Greek and Roman literature. The best-known ancient story of this sort is the Odyssey, attributed to Greek author Homer, which tells of the 10-year homeward journey of Trojan War hero Odysseus. The theme found further expression in the 14th-century book Travels of Sir John Mandeville (see Sir John Mandeville). Descriptions of trips to the Moon appear in the 17th-century writings of figures as diverse as British prelate and historian Francis Godwin, French writer Cyrano de Bergerac, and German astronomer Johannes Kepler, among others.

One of the finest tales of an imaginary voyage is Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Anglo Irish writer Jonathan Swift. Originally titled Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, the book satirizes 18th-century society and political institutions, and spawned literary imitations in many languages. It was reprinted in France, along with many other works, in a 36-volume series called Voyages imaginaires (Imaginary Voyages, 1787-1789), which represents a significant attempt to define a genre. The series later provided inspiration and a literary category for French writer Jules Verne, who is often regarded as the father of science fiction. Verne’s famous scientific novels, written from 1863 to 1905, were published under the banner of Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages).

B

Utopias

Another early subject was the structuring of better societies here on Earth, rather than in the afterlife. The topic dates from at least the 4th century bc with The Republic by Greek philosopher Plato, but it was reintroduced and given a generic name when English statesman Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia (1516). English philosopher Francis Bacon also described a better place in his book The New Atlantis (1627), which dealt with the fictional island of Bensalem. Many other works followed and established the genre, which also includes dystopian (antiutopian) fiction where life is worse than reality.

Science fiction would not exist in its present form without the social changes that took place at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century. The first utopian novel to combine the idea of social change with technological change, and also the first to set the new society in the future rather than in a remote location in the present, was French writer Louis-Sébastian Mercier’s L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771) (Memoirs of the Year 2440). It was extremely popular, went through many editions, and was widely translated before 1800.

III

Early Writers and Works

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