History of science fiction

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The

scientific revolution and major discoveries in astronomy, physics, and mathematics
.

Science fiction developed and boomed in the 20th century, as the deep integration of science and inventions into daily life encouraged a greater interest in literature that explores the relationship between technology, society, and the individual. Scholar Robert Scholes calls the history of science fiction "the history of humanity's changing attitudes toward space and time ... the history of our growing understanding of the universe and the position of our species in that universe".[2] In recent decades, the genre has diversified and become firmly established as a major influence on global culture and thought.

Early science fiction

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
illustration by Neuville and Riou. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is considered one of the earliest works of modern science fiction.

Ancient and early modern precursors

One of the earliest and most commonly-cited texts for those looking for early precursors to science fiction is the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, with the earliest text versions identified as being from about 2000 BCE. American science fiction author Lester del Rey was one such supporter of using Gilgamesh as an origin point, arguing that "science fiction is precisely as old as the first recorded fiction. That is The Epic of Gilgamesh."[3] French science fiction writer Pierre Versins also argued that Gilgamesh was the first science fiction work due to its treatment of human reason and the quest for immortality.[4] In addition, Gilgamesh features a flood scene that in some ways resembles a work of apocalyptic science fiction. However, the lack of explicit science or technology in the work has led some[5] to argue that it is better categorized as fantastic literature.

1923 illustration of the Shakuna Vimana

Ancient Indian poetry such as the Hindu epic the Ramayana (5th to 4th century BCE) includes Vimana, flying machines able to travel into space or under water, and destroy entire cities using advanced weapons. In the first book of the Rigveda collection of Sanskrit hymns (1700–1100 BCE), there is a description of "mechanical birds" that are seen "jumping into space speedily with a craft using fire and water ... containing twelve stamghas (pillars), one wheel, three machines, 300 pivots, and 60 instruments".[6] The ancient Hindu mythological epic the Mahabharata (8th and 9th centuries BCE) includes the story of King Kakudmi, who travels to heaven to meet the creator Brahma and is shocked to learn that many ages have passed when he returns to Earth, anticipating the concept of time travel.[7]

William Strang illustration of Lucian's interplanetary giant spider battle

One frequently cited text is the

physical laws, and an explicit desire of the protagonist for exploration and adventure.[8] In witnessing one interplanetary battle between the People of the Moon and the People of the Sun as the fight for the right to colonize the Morning Star, Lucian describes giant space spiders who were "appointed to spin a web in the air between the Moon and the Morning Star, which was done in an instant, and made a plain campaign upon which the foot forces were planted". L. Sprague de Camp and a number of other authors argue this to be one of the earliest if not the earliest example of science fiction or proto-science fiction.[8][9][10][11][12] However, since the text was intended to be explicitly satirical and hyperbolic, other critics are ambivalent about its rightful place as a science fiction precursor. For example, English critic Kingsley Amis wrote that "It is hardly science-fiction, since it deliberately piles extravagance upon extravagance for comic effect" yet he implicitly acknowledged its SF character by comparing its plot to early 20th-century space operas: "I will merely remark that the sprightliness and sophistication of True History make it read like a joke at the expense of nearly all early-modern science fiction, that written between, say, 1910 and 1940."[13] Lucian translator Bryan Reardon is more explicit, describing the work as "an account of a fantastic journey – to the moon, the underworld, the belly of a whale, and so forth. It is not really science fiction, although it has sometimes been called that; there is no 'science' in it."[14]

Kaguya-hime returning to the Moon in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter

The early Japanese tale of Urashima Tarō involves traveling forwards in time to a distant future,[15] and was first described in the Nihongi (written in 720).[16] It was about a young fisherman named Urashima Tarō who visits an undersea palace and stays there for three days. After returning home to his village, he finds himself 300 years in the future, where he is long forgotten, his house is in ruins, and his family long dead.[15] The 10th-century Japanese narrative The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter may also be considered proto-science fiction. The protagonist of the story, Kaguya-hime, is a princess from the Moon who is sent to Earth for safety during a celestial war, and is found and raised by a bamboo cutter in Japan. She is later taken back to the Moon by her real extraterrestrial family. A manuscript illustration depicts a round flying machine similar to a flying saucer.[17]

One Thousand and One Nights

Several stories within the

serpents, talking trees, and other forms of life.[18]

In "Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman", the protagonist gains the ability to breathe underwater and discovers an underwater submarine society that is portrayed as an inverted reflection of society on land, in that the underwater society follows a form of primitive communism where concepts like money and clothing do not exist.

Other Arabian Nights tales deal with lost ancient technologies, advanced ancient civilizations that went astray, and catastrophes which overwhelmed them.[20] "The City of Brass" features a group of travellers on an archaeological expedition[21] across the Sahara to find an ancient lost city and attempt to recover a brass vessel that the biblical King Solomon once used to trap a jinn,[22] and, along the way, encounter a mummified queen, petrified inhabitants,[23] lifelike humanoid robots and automata, seductive marionettes dancing without strings,[24] and a brass robot horseman who directs the party towards the ancient city.

Arabic manuscript of the One Thousand and One Nights

"The Ebony Horse" features a robot

flying carpet.[28]

Other medieval literature

According to Dr. Abu Shadi al-Roubi,

geology. For example, it was through this novel that Ibn al-Nafis introduces his scientific theory of metabolism,[29] and he makes references to his own scientific discovery of pulmonary circulation in order to explain bodily resurrection.[30]
The novel was later translated into English as Theologus Autodidactus in the early 20th century.

During the European

smithing
techniques.

Technological inventions are also rife in the

Alexander romances. In John Gower's Confessio Amantis, for example, Alexander the Great constructs a flying machine by tying two griffins to a platform and dangling meat above them on a pole. This adventure is ended only by the direct intervention of God, who destroys the device and throws Alexander back to the ground. This does not, however, stop the legendary Alexander, who proceeds to construct a gigantic orb of glass which he uses to travel beneath the water. There, he sees extraordinary marvels which eventually exceed his comprehension.[34]

States similar to

persistent vegetative state during which autonomic processes such as the growth of facial hair continued.[35]

The boundaries between medieval fiction with scientific elements and medieval science can be fuzzy at best. In works such as

Giants, and information about the sexual reproduction of diamonds.[37] However, Mandeville's Travels and other travel narratives in its genre mix real geographical
knowledge with knowledge now known to be fictional, and it is therefore difficult to distinguish which portions should be considered science fictional or would have been seen as such in the Middle Ages.

Proto-science fiction in the Enlightenment and Age of Reason

In the wake of scientific discoveries that characterized the

Utopia describes a fictional island whose inhabitants have perfected every aspect of their society. The name of the society stuck, giving rise to the Utopia motif that would become so widespread in later science fiction to describe a world that is seemingly perfect but either ultimately unattainable or perversely flawed. The Faust legend (1587) contains an early prototype for the "mad scientist story".[38]

Frontispiece of the 1659 German translation of Godwin's The Man in the Moone

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the so-called "

Somnium (The Dream, 1634), which both Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov have referred to as the first work of science fiction. Similarly, some[who?] identify Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638) as the first work of science fiction in English, and Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1656).[39] Space travel also figures prominently in Voltaire's Micromégas
(1752), which is also notable for the suggestion that people of other worlds may be in some ways more advanced than those of Earth.

Other works containing proto-science-fiction elements from the Age of Reason of the 17th and 18th centuries include (in chronological order):

19th-century transitions

Shelley and Europe in the early 19th century

Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell (1840–41)

The 19th century saw a major acceleration of these trends and features, most clearly seen in the groundbreaking publication of

The Last Man,[42] is also often cited[who?
] as the first true science fiction novel.

In 1836 Alexander Veltman published Predki Kalimerosa[43]: Aleksandr Filippovich Makedonskii (The forebears of Kalimeros: Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon), which has been called the first original Russian science fiction novel and the first novel to use time travel.[44] Albeit time travel achieved via a magical hippogriff rather than technological means. The narrator meets Aristotle, and goes on a voyage with Alexander the Great before returning to the 19th century.

Somehow influenced by the scientific theories of the 19th century, but most certainly by the idea of human progress, Victor Hugo wrote in The Legend of the Centuries (1859) a long poem in two parts that can be viewed like a dystopia/utopia fiction, called 20th century. It shows in a first scene the body of a broken huge ship, the greatest product of the prideful and foolish mankind that called it Leviathan, wandering in a desert world where the winds blow and the anger of the wounded Nature is; humanity, finally reunited and pacified, has gone toward the stars in a starship, to look for and to bring liberty into the light.

Other notable proto-science fiction authors and works of the early 19th century include:

  • Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's Le Dernier Homme (1805, The Last Man).
  • Historian Félix Bodin's Le Roman de l'Avenir (1834) and
    Emile Souvestre
    's Le Monde Tel Qu'il Sera (1846), two novels which try to predict what the next century will be like.
  • The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century
    (1827), in which Cheops is revived by scientific means into a world in political crisis, where technology has advanced to gas-flame jewelry and houses that migrate on rails, etc.
  • alternate history of a world conquered by Napoleon
    .
  • C.I. Defontenay's Star ou Psi de Cassiopée (1854), an Olaf Stapledon
    -like chronicle of an alien world and civilization.
  • Slovak author Gustáv Reuss's Gustáv Reuss Hviezdoveda alebo životopis Krutohlava, čo na Zemi, okolo Mesiaca a Slnka skúsil a čo o obežniciach, vlasaticiach, pôvode a konci sveta vedel ("The Science of the Stars or The Life of Krutohlav who Visited the Moon and the Sun and Knew about Planets, Comets and the Beginning and the End of the World" ) (1856). In this book Gustáv Reuss sends his hero named Krutohlav, a scholar from the Gemer region, right to the Moon... in a balloon. When the hero comes back, he builds a sort of a dragon-like interstellar ship, in which the characters travel around the whole known Solar System and eventually visit all the countries of the Earth.
  • Astronomer Camille Flammarion's La Pluralité des Mondes Habités (1862) which speculated on extraterrestrial life.
  • Edward S. Ellis's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) The first novel starts when Ethan Hopkins and Mickey McSquizzle—a "Yankee" and an "Irishman"—encounter a colossal, steam-powered man in the American prairies. This steam-man was constructed by Johnny Brainerd, a teenaged boy, who uses the steam-man to carry him in a carriage on various adventures.
  • The Coming Race
    (1871), a novel where the main character discovers a highly evolved subterranean civilization. PSI-powers are given a logical and scientific explanation, achieved through biological evolution and technological progress, rather than something magical or supernatural.

Verne and Wells

Jules Verne
Jules Verne
H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells

The European brand of science fiction proper began later in the 19th century with the

science fiction novelist
."

Wells's stories, on the other hand, use science fiction devices to make

The War of the Worlds (1898), the Martians' technology is not explained as it would have been in a Verne story, and the story is resolved by a deus ex machina
, albeit a scientifically explained one.

The differences between Verne and Wells highlight a tension that has existed in science fiction throughout its history. The question of whether to present realistic technology or to focus on characters and ideas has been ever-present, as has the question of whether to tell an exciting story or make a didactic point.

Late 19th-century expansion

Leaving the opera in the year 2000, hand-coloured lithograph by Albert Robida (late 19th century)

Wells and Verne had quite a few rivals in early science fiction. Short stories and novelettes with themes of fantastic imagining appeared in journals throughout the late 19th century and many of these employed scientific ideas as the springboard to the imagination.

Begum Roquia Sakhawat Hussain, who wrote the earliest known feminist science fiction work, Sultana's Dream.[47] Another early feminist science fiction work at the time was Charlotte Perkins Gilman' Herland
. Wells and Verne both had an international readership and influenced writers in America, especially. Soon a home-grown American science fiction was thriving. European writers found more readers by selling to the American market and writing in an Americanised style.

American proto-science fiction in the late 19th century

In the last decades of the 19th century, works of science fiction for adults and children were numerous in America, though it was not yet given the name "science fiction." There were science-fiction elements in the stories of

Fitz-James O'Brien. Edgar Allan Poe is often mentioned with Verne and Wells as the founders of science fiction although Mary Shelley's Frankenstein predates these. A number of his short stories, and the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket are science fictional. An 1827 satiric novel by philosopher George Tucker A Voyage to the Moon is sometimes cited as the first American science fiction novel.[48]

In 1835 Edgar Allan Poe published a short story, "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" in which a flight to the Moon in a balloon is described. It has an account of the launch, the construction of the cabin, descriptions of strata and many more science-like aspects.[49] In addition to Poe's account the story written in 1813 by the Dutch Willem Bilderdijk is remarkable. In his novel Kort verhaal van eene aanmerkelijke luchtreis en nieuwe planeetontdekking (Short account of a remarkable journey into the skies and discovery of a new planet) Bilderdijk tells of a European somewhat stranded in an Arabic country where he boasts he is able to build a balloon that can lift people and let them fly through the air. The gasses used turn out to be far more powerful than expected and after a while he lands on a planet positioned between Earth and Moon. The writer uses the story to portray an overview of scientific knowledge concerning the Moon in all sorts of aspects the traveller to that place would encounter. Quite a few similarities can be found in the story Poe published some twenty years later.

John Leonard Riddell, a Professor of Chemistry in New Orleans, published the short story Orrin Lindsay's plan of aerial navigation, with a narrative of his explorations in the higher regions of the atmosphere, and his wonderful voyage round the moon! in 1847 on a pamphlet. It tells the story of the student Orrin Lindsay who invents an alloy that prevents gravitational attraction, and in a spherical craft leaves Earth and travel to the Moon. The story contains algebra and scientific footnotes, which makes it an early example of hard science fiction.[50]

William Henry Rhodes published in 1871 the tale The Case of Summerfield in the Sacramento Union newspaper, and introduced weapon of mass destruction. A mad scientist and villain called Black Bart makes an attempt to blackmail the world with a powder made of potassium, able to destroy the planet by turning its waters into fire.

Charles Curtis Dail, a Kentucky lawyer, published in 1890 the novel Willmoth the Wanderer, or The Man from Saturn, had his protagonist travel through the Solar System by covering his body with an anti-gravity ointment.[51][52]

The newspaperman

The Sun
for more than a decade, except for his first story which was published in Scribner's Monthly in 1874. His stories included invisibility, faster than light travels, teleportation, time travel, cryogenics, mind transfer, mutants, cyborgs and mechanical brains.

One of the most successful works of early American science fiction was the second-best selling novel in the U.S. in the 19th century: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), its effects extending far beyond the field of literature. Looking Backward extrapolates a future society based on observation of the current society.

In 1894, Will Harben published "Land of the Changing Sun," a dystopian fantasy set at the center of the Earth. In Harben's tale, the Earth's core is populated by a scientifically advanced civilization, living beneath the glow of a mechanical sun.

Mark Twain explored themes of science in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. By means of "transmigration of souls", "transposition of epochs – and bodies" Twain's Yankee is transported back in time and his knowledge of 19th-century technology with him. Written in 1889, A Connecticut Yankee seems to predict the events of World War I, when Europe's old ideas of chivalry in warfare were shattered by new weapons and tactics.

American author L. Frank Baum's series of 14 books (1900–1920) based in his outlandish Land of Oz setting, contained depictions of strange weapons (Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Glinda of Oz), mechanical men (Tik-Tok of Oz) and a bevy of not-yet-realized technological inventions and devices including perhaps the first literary appearance of handheld wireless communicators (Tik-Tok of Oz).

germ warfare and ethnic cleansing). He also wrote a story about invisibility and a story about an irresistible energy weapon
. These stories began to change the features of science fiction.

artificial satellite
. Written in much the same style as his other work, it employs pseudojournalistic realism to tell an adventure story with little basis in reality.

murder mysteries, horror, fantasy and Edgar Rice Burroughs' own Tarzan
.

Early 20th century

The next great science fiction writers after H. G. Wells were Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), whose four major works Last and First Men (1930), Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937), and Sirius (1944), introduced a myriad of ideas that writers have since adopted, and J.-H. Rosny aîné, born in Belgium, the father of "modern" French science fiction, a writer also comparable to H. G. Wells, who wrote the classic Les Xipehuz (1887) and La Mort de la Terre (1910). However, the Twenties and Thirties would see the genre represented in a new format. Robert Hugh Benson wrote one of the first modern dystopias, Lord of the World (1907).

Rudyard Kipling's contributions to science fiction go beyond their direct impact at the start of the 20th century. The

indirect exposition first appears in Kiplings' writing. Heinlein, the central influence of all science fiction from the 1930s forward, has also described himself as influenced by George Bernard Shaw, whose longest work Back to Methuselah
(1921) was itself science fiction.

Birth of the pulps

The development of American science fiction as a self-conscious

Skylark of Space and Armageddon 2419 A.D., while Weird Tales published Edmond Hamilton's Crashing Suns, all of which represented the birth of space opera
.

Futurists' love of machines are indicative of both the hopes and fears of the world between the world wars.[56]
Metropolis was an extremely successful film and its art-deco inspired aesthetic became the guiding aesthetic of the science fiction pulps for some time.

Modernist writing

Writers attempted to respond to the new world in the post-World War I era. In the 1920s and 30s writers entirely unconnected with science fiction were exploring new ways of telling a story and new ways of treating time, space and experience in the narrative form. The posthumously published works of Franz Kafka (who died in 1924) and the works of modernist writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and others featured stories in which time and individual identity could be expanded, contracted, looped and otherwise distorted. While this work was unconnected to science fiction as a genre, it did deal with the impact of modernity (technology, science, and change) upon people's lives, and decades later, during the New Wave movement, some modernist literary techniques entered science fiction.

Czech playwright Karel Čapek's plays The Makropulos Affair, R.U.R., The Life of the Insects, and the novel War with the Newts were modernist literature which invented important science fiction motifs. R.U.R. in particular is noted for introducing the word robot to the world's vocabulary.

A strong theme in modernist writing was alienation, the making strange of familiar surroundings so that settings and behaviour usually regarded as "normal" are seen as though they were the seemingly bizarre practices of an alien culture. The audience of modernist plays or the readership of modern novels is often led to question everything.

At the same time, a tradition of more literary science fiction novels, treating with a dissonance between perceived Utopian conditions and the full expression of human desires, began to develop: the dystopian novel. For some time, the science fictional elements of these works were ignored by mainstream literary critics, though they owe a much greater debt to the science fiction genre than the modernists do. Sincerely Utopian writing, including much of Wells, has also deeply influenced science fiction, beginning with Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+. Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1920 novel We depicts a totalitarian attempt to create a utopia that results in a dystopic state where free will is lost. Aldous Huxley bridged the gap between the literary establishment and the world of science fiction with Brave New World (1932), an ironic portrait of a stable and ostensibly happy society built by human mastery of genetic manipulation.

In the late 1930s,

H.L. Gold
and later Pohl as editor, and a new generation of writers began writing stories outside the Campbell mode.

George Orwell wrote perhaps the most highly regarded of these literary dystopias, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1948. He envisions a technologically governed totalitarian regime that dominates society through total information control. Zamyatin's We is recognized as an influence on both Huxley and Orwell; Orwell published a book review of We shortly after it was first published in English, several years before writing 1984.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed:An Ambiguous Utopia, much of Kurt Vonnegut's writing, and many other works of later science fiction continue this dialogue between utopia and dystopia.

Science fiction's impact on the public

The War of the Worlds which, according to urban myth, panicked large numbers of people who believed the program to be a real newscast.[58] However, there is doubt as to how much anecdotes of mass panic had any reflection in reality, and the myth may have originated among newspapers, jealous of the upstart new medium of radio.[59]
Inarguably, though, the idea of visitors or invaders from outer space became embedded in the consciousness of everyday people.

During

Astounding Science Fiction
.

Asimov said that "The

flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, science fiction had become modern folklore
.

The Golden Age

The period of the 1940s and 1950s is often referred to as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Astounding Magazine

With the emergence in 1937 of a demanding editor,

Astounding Science Fiction, and with the publication of stories and novels by such writers as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein
, science fiction began to gain status as serious fiction.

Campbell exercised an extraordinary influence over the work of his stable of writers, thus shaping the direction of science fiction. Asimov wrote, "We were extensions of himself; we were his literary clones." Under Campbell's direction, the years from 1938–1950 would become known as the "Golden Age of science fiction",[53] though Asimov points out that the term Golden Age has been used more loosely to refer to other periods in science fiction's history.

Campbell's guidance to his writers included his famous dictum, "Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man." He emphasized a higher quality of writing than editors before him, giving special attention to developing the group of young writers who attached themselves to him.

Ventures into the genre by writers who were not devoted exclusively to science fiction also added respectability. Magazine covers of bug-eyed monsters and scantily clad women, however, preserved the image of a sensational genre appealing only to adolescents. There was a public desire for sensation, a desire of people to be taken out of their dull lives to the worlds of space travel and adventure.

An interesting footnote to Campbell's regime is his contribution to the rise of L. Ron Hubbard's religion Scientology. Hubbard was considered a promising science fiction writer and a protégé of Campbell, who published Hubbard's first articles about Dianetics and his new religion. As Campbell's reign as editor of Astounding progressed, Campbell gave more attention to ideas like Hubbard's, writing editorials in support of Dianetics. Though Astounding continued to have a loyal fanbase, readers started turning to other magazines to find science fiction stories.

The Golden Age in other media

With the new source material provided by the Golden Age writers, advances in special effects, and a public desire for material that treated with the advances in technology of the time, all the elements were in place to create significant works of science fiction film.

As a result, science fiction film came into its own in the 1950s, producing films like

cosy catastrophes, including The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes
, provided important source material as well.

Science fiction had also been appearing in American comic books such as

E.C. Comics, which would include some adaptations from authors like Ray Bradbury, along with many original stories. Classics Illustrated
had already published adaptations of Wells and Verne stories.

At the same time, science fiction began to appear on a new medium – television. In 1953

were shown, programs that more closely resembled pre-Campbellian science fiction. These shows also saw comic book spin-off products.

End of the Golden Age

Seeking greater freedom of expression, writers started to publish their articles in other magazines, including

Galaxy
.

Under editors

, Galaxy stressed a more literary form of science fiction that took cues from more mainstream literature. It was less insistent on scientific plausibility than Campbell's Astounding. The rise of Galaxy signaled the end of Golden Age science fiction, though most of the Golden Age writers were able to adapt to the changes in the genre and keep writing. Some, however, moved to other fields. Isaac Asimov and several others began to write scientific fact almost exclusively.

The New Wave and its aftermath

Mainstream publishers

Until about 1950, magazines were the only way authors could publish new stories. Only small specialty presses like Arkham House and Gnome Press published science fiction hardcover books, all reprints of magazine stories. With rare exceptions like the collections Adventures in Time and Space and A Treasury of Science Fiction, large mainstream publishers only printed Verne and Wells. Most genre books were sold by mail from small magazine advertisements, because bookstores rarely carried science fiction.[62]

By 1951, the small presses proved that demand existed for science fiction books, enough to cause magazines to print regular review columns. Large, mainstream companies published

Boston University School of Medicine after making more money as a writer.[64]

The mainstream book companies' large print runs and distribution networks lowered prices and increased availability, but displaced the small publishers; Algis Budrys later said that "they themselves would draw little but disaster" from the science fiction boom of the 1950s they helped to begin.[62] While book sales continued to grow, the magazine industry almost collapsed from the glut of new titles, shrinking from 23 in mid-1957 to six by the end of 1960, while authors like Heinlein, Clarke, Vonnegut, and Bradbury published through non-genre publications that paid at much higher rates. Top writers like Budrys, Miller, Theodore Sturgeon, and Robert Silverberg left the industry.[63]

Precursors to the New Wave

Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable and Waiting for Godot were influential upon writing in the 1950s. In the former all sense of place and time are dispensed with; all that remains is a voice poised between the urge to continue existing and the urge to find silence and oblivion. (The only other major writer to use "The Unnamable" as a title was H. P. Lovecraft.) In the latter, time and the paradoxes of cause and effect become thematic. Beckett's influence on the intelligentsia—as well as the general influence of existentialism and the legal battles to publish books then classified as obscene—made science fiction more sophisticated, especially in Britain.

beat generation
gestalt.

The New Wave

In 1960, British novelist Kingsley Amis published New Maps of Hell, a literary history and examination of the field of science fiction. This serious attention from a mainstream, acceptable writer did a great deal of good, eventually, for the reputation of science fiction.

Another milestone was the publication, in 1965, of Frank Herbert's Dune, a complex work of fiction featuring political intrigue in a future galaxy, mystical religious beliefs, and the ecosystem of the desert planet Arrakis. Another was the emergence of the work of Roger Zelazny, whose novels such as Lord of Light and his famous The Chronicles of Amber showed that the lines between science-fiction, fantasy, religion, and social commentary could be very fine.

Also in 1965 French director

apocalyptic science fiction
to explore language and society.

In Britain, the 1960s generation of writers, dubbed "The New Wave", were experimenting with different forms of science fiction,[39] stretching the genre towards surrealism, psychological drama and mainstream currents. The 60s New Wave was centered around the writing in the magazine New Worlds after Michael Moorcock assumed editorial control in 1963. William Burroughs was a big influence. The writers of the New Wave also believed themselves to be building on the legacy of the French New Wave artistic movement. Though the New Wave was largely a British movement, there were parallel developments taking place in American science fiction at the same time. The relation of the British New Wave to American science fiction was made clear by Harlan Ellison's original anthology Dangerous Visions, which presented science fiction writers, both American and British, writing stories that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in a science fiction magazine. Isaac Asimov, writing an introduction to the anthology, labeled it the Second Revolution, after the first revolution that produced the Golden Age.

The New Wave and their contemporaries placed a greater emphasis on style and a more highbrow form of storytelling. They also sought controversy in subjects older science fiction writers had avoided. For the first time sexuality, which Kingsley Amis had complained was nearly ignored in science fiction, was given serious consideration by writers like

John Brunner and J. G. Ballard
wrote cautionary tales about, respectively, overpopulation and apocalypse.

Asimov noted that the Second Revolution was far less clear cut than the first, attributing this to the development of the anthology, which made older stories more prominent. But a number of Golden Age writers changed their style as the New Wave hit. Robert A. Heinlein switched from his Campbellian Future History stories to stylistically adventuresome, sexually open works of fiction, notably Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Isaac Asimov wrote the New Wave-ish The Gods Themselves. Many others also continued successfully as styles changed.

Science fiction films took inspiration from the changes in the genre.

dystopian
future.

Ursula K. Le Guin extrapolated social and biological changes that were anthropological in nature.[65] Philip K. Dick explored the metaphysics of the mind in a series of novels and stories that rarely seemed dependent on their science fictional content. Le Guin, Dick, and others like them became associated with the concept of soft science fiction more than with the New Wave.

Soft science fiction was contrasted to the notion of hard science fiction. Though scientific plausibility had been a central tenet of the genre since Gernsback, writers like Larry Niven and Poul Anderson gave hard science fiction new life, crafting stories with a more sophisticated writing style and more deeply characterized protagonists, while preserving a high level of scientific sophistication.[66]

Science fiction in the 1980s

Cyberpunk

By the early 1980s the fantasy market was much larger than that of almost all science fiction authors.[67] The New Wave had faded out as an important presence in the science fiction landscape. As new personal computing technologies became an integral part of society, science fiction writers felt the urge to make statements about its influence on the cultural and political landscape. Drawing on the work of the New Wave, the Cyberpunk movement developed in the early 80s. Though it placed the same influence on style that the New Wave did, it developed its own unique style, typically focusing on the 'punks' of their imagined future underworld. Cyberpunk authors like William Gibson turned away from the traditional optimism and support for progress of traditional science fiction.[68] William Gibson's Neuromancer, published in 1984, announced the cyberpunk movement to the larger literary world and was a tremendous commercial success. Other key writers in the movement included Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and later Neal Stephenson. Though Cyberpunk would later be cross-pollinated with other styles of science fiction, there seemed to be some notion of ideological purity in the beginning. John Shirley compared the Cyberpunk movement to a tribe.[69]

During the 1980s, a large number of cyberpunk manga and anime works were produced in Japan, the most notable being the 1982 manga Akira and its 1988 anime film adaptation, the 1985 anime Megazone 23, and the 1989 manga Ghost in the Shell which was also adapted into an anime film in 1995.

Contemporary science fiction and its future

Contemporary science fiction has been marked by the spread of cyberpunk to other parts of the marketplace of ideas. No longer is cyberpunk a ghettoized tribe within science fiction, but an integral part of the field whose interactions with other parts have been the primary theme of science fiction around the start of the 21st century.

Notably, cyberpunk has influenced film, in works such as

retro-futuristic
technology and postmodern sensibilities).

Emerging themes in the 1990s included environmental issues, the implications of the global Internet and the expanding information universe, questions about biotechnology and nanotechnology, as well as a post-Cold War interest in post-scarcity societies; Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age comprehensively explores these themes. Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels brought the character-driven story back into prominence.[70]

The cyberpunk reliance on near-future science fiction has deepened. In William Gibson's 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, the story is a cyberpunk story told in the present, the ultimate limit of the near-future extrapolation.

Cyberpunk's ideas have spread in other directions, though. Space opera writers have written work featuring cyberpunk motifs, including David Brin's Kiln People and Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series. This merging of the two disparate threads of science fiction in the 1980s has produced an extrapolational literature in contrast to those technological stories told in the present.

John Clute writes that science fiction around the start of the 21st century can be understood in two ways: "a vision of the triumph of science fiction as a genre and as a series of outstanding texts which figured to our gaze the significant futures that, during those years, came to pass ... [or]... indecipherable from the world during those years ... fatally indistinguishable from the world it attempted to adumbrate, to signify."

See also

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Further reading