Science Fiction

12 Key excerpts on "Science Fiction"

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  Science Fiction

  • Adam Roberts(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  DEFINING Science Fiction

  The term ‘Science Fiction’ resists easy definition. This is a strange thing, because most people have a sense of what Science Fiction is. Any bookstore will have a section devoted to SF: shelves of mostly brightly coloured paperback volumes, illustrated on their covers with photorealist paintings of intricate spaceships perhaps, or of men and women in futuristic cities or bizarre alien landscapes. Most of these novels are narratives that elaborate some imaginative or fantastic premise, perhaps involving a postulated future society, encounters with creatures from another world, travel between planets or in time. In other words, Science Fiction as a genre or division of literature distinguishes its fictional worlds to one degree or another from the world in which we actually live: a fiction of the imagination rather than observed reality, a fantastic literature.

  But when it comes down to specifying in precisely what ways SF is distinctive, and in what ways it is different from other imaginative and fantastic literatures, there is disagreement. All of the many definitions offered by critics have been contradicted or modified by other critics, and it is always possible to point to texts consensually called SF that fall outside the usual definitions. It is, perhaps, for this reason that some critics try to content themselves with definitions of the mode that are mere tautologies, as if ‘we’ all know what it is and elaboration is superfluous. Edward James suggests that ‘SF is what is marketed as SF’ (although he concedes that, as a definition, this is ‘a beginning, nothing more’) (James 1994: 3). Damon Knight says that ‘Science Fiction is what we point to when we say it’; and Norman Spinraid argues that ‘Science Fiction is anything published as Science Fiction’ (quoted in Clute and Nicholls 1993: 314). There is a kind of weariness in this sort of circular reasoning, as if the whole business of definition is nothing more than a cynical marketing exercise. Lance Parkin suggests that ‘SF is a notoriously difficult term to define, but when it comes down to it, a book appears on the SF shelves if the publisher thinks they will maximize their sales by labelling it as such’ (Parkin 1999: 4). This mistrust of definition has interesting implications for the self-image of SF as a genre, although it doesn’t get us very far as a starting point.

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  Science, Culture and Society

  Understanding Science in the 21st Century

  • Mark Erickson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  Science Fiction is reliant on science for plots and ideas, and we can track changes in these as the cutting edge of science has shifted (Marvel comic character Hulk’s genesis changing from being the result of a nuclear accident in the 1960s to genetic engineering in the 2000s is a good example of this). But Science Fiction is not simply a sponge that picks up the themes of scientific research. Science Fiction presents a version of science to audiences that will concur, at least to some extent, with audiences’ hopes, and fears, for the future. The space opera vision of limitless, technologically driven human expansion and the cyberpunk vision of a dystopic, technocratic and soulless future both emerge from societies with ambiguous attitudes towards scientists, scientific institutions and scientific knowledge. Even the hard Science Fiction narratives of avowed cheerleaders for science as activity, and as project, see, at the very least, challenges emerging from the continuation of scientific research into areas such as nanotechnology, genetic engineering and quantum physics. In hard Science Fiction texts we not only learn about science as activity and as attitude, but also discover that scientific progress may be harmful to humanity – although this harm almost invariably comes from the ‘corruption’ of science by politics or big business. Science Fiction shows us that we have a complex and contested relationship with science – a mixture of positive, negative and unknown. Science Fiction tends to reconfirm existing notions of the project of science and does not disabuse us of our distorted knowledge of what actually takes place inside scientific workplaces. The science of Science Fiction remains, even in hard Science Fiction, an occluded set of processes, a black box, out of which emerge technologies, sometimes dangerous, that transform our world, scientists who retain control of crucial knowledge, institutions that exclude most members of society, and a project that has a momentum of its own and an inexorable drive towards ‘progress’.

  This version of science is not simply a product of the content of Science Fiction narratives. As we have seen, such narratives rely to a large extent on our pre-existing knowledge of science and of Science Fiction and its conventions. Much more important is the context within which these narratives are located: it is the context of the narrative that is providing the meaning of science that we see in Science Fiction. Our narratives of futurity have changed because our social understanding of the future has changed, not because we decided to construct new stories of space exploration.

  Further reading

  It is difficult to find definitive guides to Science Fiction as it is such a diverse and extensive genre. However, these two books provide a good overview of Science Fiction and a good starting point for further investigation:Luckhurst, R. (2005) Science Fiction, Cambridge: Polity.Roberts, A. (2006) Science Fiction

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  Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines

  Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century

  • Martin Willis(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1 Literature, Science, and Science Fiction I T MAY SEEM PECULIAR, BUT IT IS nevertheless true that extended readings of the use of science in Science Fiction texts are extremely rare. They are even rarer if we limit the Science Fiction texts to those written in the nineteenth century, as this book does. Why might this be? Several explanations can be offered: the lack of attention paid to nineteenth-century Science Fiction, the motivation of Science Fiction scholarship, and the difficulty of gaining expertise in more than one discipline. Whatever the reason, there is a significant lack of interdisciplinary work on Science Fiction and science, a lack that is not apparent in other areas of literary study. The interaction of science with literature has been widely explored in Renaissance drama, the Victorian novel, and the modernist poem. In genre fiction too—if we would like to characterize Science Fiction as a genre—there has been a broad consideration of the impact of science on the literary imagination. In studies of gothic or crime fiction, scientific developments are accepted as having some influence on the shaping of the text. Yet in Science Fiction criticism there is only infrequent study of science—the kind of detailed and sustained study that characterizes the best in interdisciplinarity. This book attempts to show how readings of Science Fiction texts benefit from extended exposure to the specific scientific histories that were so important in their making. The focus is the nineteenth century: from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816) to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). In that eighty-year period between publications, science and Science Fiction changed dramatically. Science Fiction emerged from the gothic romances of science made so influential by Hoffmann and Mary Shelley into a fully fledged genre of fiction under the directorship of, first, Jules Verne and, thereafter, H. G. Wells

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  Science Fiction: A Critical Guide

  • Patrick Parrinder, Patrick Parrinder(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  What finally links religious aspirations and the best Science Fiction is a common interest in transcending our present reality. Both have a cosmic dimension. Both have a common focus on the future of man, an interest especially built into Judaism and Christianity. Cosmic awe, the perspective that comes from contemplating the stars, makes us realize our littleness, as Troilus looks down from the eighth sphere at the end of Chaucer’s poem and smiles at the triviality of our concerns. Science Fiction relates us to vast cosmic forces. It is the opposite as a genre to what D. H. Lawrence once called ‘wearisome sickening little personal novels’. Our earthly viewpoint is bound to be narrow and half-blind, and the epistemological sophistication of modern science confirms this: ‘We see through a glass darkly’, writes Philip K. Dick, quoting St Paul, and as the critic Bruce Gillespie explains, Dick’s aim is not to give us an ecstatic religious vision but to show us the frailty of our reality and the intimations of another. Father Simon Tugwell says that our world and our present human status are ‘provisional’. He cites St Thomas Aquinas’s view that genuine religious prophecy needs imagination, a gift for seeing that things could be other than they are, a gift of seeing from God’s viewpoint. We are not to be ‘conformed to the present age’ (Romans 12, 2). He also explains that transcendence is more a temporal than a spatial concept. In the future man will be radically different from what he is now, conformed not to the present age, but to Christ, the ‘first fruits’ of the new humanity:

  It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

  (1 John 3, 1-2, Revised Standard Version)

  The genre of Science Fiction can help shatter the complacencies of our present views of reality, and make our imaginations enjoyably receptive to new visions of the future. Obviously the great mass of work in the genre is formulaic. Its material is of interest to the psychologist, the sociologist and even the theologian as a record of man’s aspirations and prejudices. It can entertain us and soothe us with predictable futures and safe horrors. But it bears the same relationship to the greatest achievements and potential of the genre as a British country-house detective novel of the 1920s bears to Crime and Punishment. The idea of transcendence creates a common ground between aesthetic criteria for evaluating Science Fiction and a degree of theological interest that goes beyond the purely diagnostic. For, in the best Science Fiction with theological implications, we are startled in some way. It may merely be that shock of newness which is essential for the effect of a witty or even blasphemous manipulation of religious ideas. It may be the playful shock of an intellectual puzzle in which a tired dogma is confronted with a facet of reality that tests or breaks it. Or the aesthetic shock may come from the comedy or the tragedy of man’s attempts to transcend himself through science and technology. Religious Science Fiction might condemn the attempt as futile by the standards of a different transcendent vision altogether, or it might even celebrate it as an epic, God-given and marvellous creative struggle, as Teilhard de Chardin does. But the aesthetic shock to our complacencies that the best Science Fiction brings is cognitive , a reminder of our provisional status. We get the sense in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men

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  Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers

  Exploring Radical Potentials

  • Urvashi Kuhad(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  23 To this, Vandana Singh adds that the mythological stories did surely encourage her to write SF but she too does not consider them to be SF. Various attempts have been made to define SF by both scholars and critics. Some of the most important contributions are discussed below:

  1.1 Darko Suvin

  The genre of Science Fiction operates in reality as well as imaginations through the imaginary worlds it creates. In this context, a definition of Science Fiction that takes into account the correlation between reality and fiction proposed by Darko Suvin in 197924 needs to be discussed. According to him, Science Fiction is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”25 The above lines generate interest to focus the investigation on two important terms: “estrangement”, and “cognition”. The “estrangement” to which Suvin refers to is “the new idea that shocks us into perception.”26 This idea of Suvin was supported by Carl D. Malgren, who explains that “estrangement” forces the reader to look at things from a different perspective. To him, the reader is made to inhabit this perspective and take it back to their everyday world. Similarly, the term “cognition” from the definition argues that the aspects of SF that prompt us to try and understand, to comprehend the alien landscape of a given SF book, film or story. Further, Elise Edwards, in her book Race, Aliens and the U.S. Government in African American Science Fiction, supports this by saying that it is only by the balance of the two, “cognition” and “estrangement”, that the SF texts can be made relevant to our world, and that they will be in a position to challenge the ordinary and taken for granted. In addition, the “imaginary framework” or the “alternative world” of which Suvin speaks of “need to be conceivable in regard to the field of science”.27 Thus, any “alternative” world should be based on “certain logical principles” that do not contradict each another.28

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  Science Fiction and Innovation Design

  • Thomas Michaud(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-ISTE

    (Publisher)

  In the United States, literature is more optimistic. The reason for this is that the authors come more from literary spheres, whereas elsewhere they navigate more in scientific ones [ KLE 16 ], and therefore more marked by self-criticism. Moreover, imaginaries evolve over time. On the subject of the technoimaginary world, Georges Balandier [ CHA 94 ] observes a transformation: “techno-messianic utopias” are gradually being replaced by “techno-catastrophic” utopias, a sign of a much more critical time and of this loss of idealism. The literary or cinematographic genre of “Science Fiction” is special in that it makes science and technology one of its main ingredients. A kind of exploration, of impulse, of a frontier [ CON 12 ], it is one of the most relevant vectors allowing us to explore, through fiction, our link with technology. Indeed, the imaginary worlds present in Science Fiction stories are largely carried by the technical objects that populate the proposed universes: space shuttles, underground habitats, flying cars, light sabers, humanoid robots, modified or augmented humans. Not only are these the markers of the genre, but they also advance the story with props or even main or secondary characters. In doing so, the technology present in Science Fiction “is always a mixture of tekhné and logos” [ MUS 13, authors’ translation]; that is to say, it is the result of a technical act, a fabrication, and it generates knowledge and a discourse, a word

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  The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

  • Istvan Csicsery-Ronay(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wesleyan University Press

    (Publisher)

  The once-regnant view that sf can’t help but be vulgar and artistically shallow is fading. As the world undergoes daily transformations via the development of technoscience in every imaginable aspect of life, (and, more important, as people become aware of these transformations) sf has come to be seen as an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. However much sf texts vary in artistic quality, intellectual sophistication, and their capacity to give pleasure, they share a mass social energy, a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world.

  In the past forty years, not only have sf artists produced more artistically ambitious works than in the previous hundred, but works of criticism have established the foundations for definition and self-examination characteristic of mature artistic movements. Major critical works—from Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) to Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity (1993), journals of academic scholarship and criticism (Foundation, Extrapolation, Science Fiction Studies, The New York Review of Science Fiction ), and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ’s second edition, which gave the first comprehensive overview of the history of the genre for scholars—have provided tools for thinking about the genre and its implications in sophisticated philosophical and historical terms.

  At this moment, a strikingly high proportion of films, commercial art, popular music, video and computer games, and nongenre fiction are overtly sf or contain elements of it. This widespread normalization of what is essentially a style of estrangement and dislocation has stimulated the development of science-fictional habits of mind, so that we no longer treat sf as purely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but rather as a kind of awareness we might call science-fictionality , a mode of response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of Science Fiction. It is one mode of response among many others, and it influences people’s actions to different degrees. Some are inspired to create, as H. G. Wells’s novel The World Set Free inspired Leo Szilárd to imagine nuclear fission,3 or as William Gibson’s depiction of the cyberspace matrix and virtual reality in Neuromancer stimulated countless computer programmers.4

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  Get Started in Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

  How to write compelling and imaginative sci-fi and fantasy fiction

  • Adam Roberts(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  2 What are Science Fiction and fantasy? (And what does that mean about how you write them?)

  The point of this chapter is not to fight through the tedious arguments about the academic ‘definitions’ of Science Fiction and fantasy. It is to talk through a sense of genre as a practical guide, to help you.

  During the course of this chapter we will work through some of the (very) many subgenres of Science Fiction and fantasy, consider the advantages and disadvantages of positioning yourself generically and discuss how to gauge the appropriate level of research for your chosen subgenre. Then we will go on to sketch out accounts of ‘hard SF’, ‘soft SF’, ‘heroic fantasy’ and the anti-Tolkien, or Grimdark, fantastical traditions.

  ‘Genre’ is the French word for a ‘type’ or ‘sort’ of thing. In general discourse today it is often used to distinguish between high and popular culture – between the ‘literary’ novel on the one hand, and the ‘genre’ output of writers of crime, chicklit, horror, historical, thriller, fantasy and SF novels on the other. I’ve never liked this usage, if I’m honest – party because the ‘literary’ novel (the sort of book that might win the Pulitzer or Booker Prize) is also a genre, but mostly because the literary history of the last 30 years has been one of (to use critic Gary Wolfe’s phrase) the ‘evaporation’ of genres. Pulitzer Prize winning novels like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), or Booker winners like Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013), draw deeply on the tropes of Science Fiction and the fantastic.

  There’s another point: to think in terms of genres is to undertake the pigeonholing of literature. It means bundling together various books that may be in other respects completely different from one another and slotting them all into categories marked things like ‘defeating the monster’, ‘time travel’ or ‘alien invasion’. The film based on the Old English epic Beowulf and the 1982 movie The Terminator are both about defeating a monster, yet these two films are as different from one another as could be imagined. Wells’s The Time Machine is a time-travel story; so is Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu

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  A Writer's Guide to Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy

  • Crawford Kilian, Silvia Moreno-Garcia(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Self-Counsel Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2

  Understanding Genre

  “Genre” simply means a kind of literature (usually fiction) dealing with a particular topic, setting, or issue. When we know that a story is in a certain genre, we adjust our expectations and read the story as a variation on a familiar theme — a comment on earlier stories in the same genre.

  Even so-called mainstream fiction has its subgenres: the coming-of-age story, for example, and the bildungsroman, about the education, formal and otherwise, of the main character.

  In the last few decades, genre in North America has become synonymous with “category” — types of fiction that are commercially successful because they are predictable treatments of familiar material: the Regency romance, the hard-boiled detective novel, the space opera.

  Genre or category fiction often demands an understanding of your genre’s conventions if you are going to succeed. For example, a romance novel needs a happy ending. Without a happy ending, the reader looking for this type of entertainment will feel cheated.

  You can strengthen your story by playing with those conventions and showing your readers that you’re writing to wake them up, not to put them to sleep.

  1. Defining Our Terms

  First, a few definitions. Speculative fiction can be divided into three main arenas: Science Fiction, fantasy, and horror.

  In Science Fiction, the story couldn’t happen without its scientific content. The story can’t contradict what we currently accept as scientific fact, such as the impossibility of going faster than light, but it can speculate on what may turn out to be fact — such as a way to travel through some other kind of space where the speed of light is not a factor.

  A fantasy story is one in which the conditions are flatly contrary to known scientific fact. Magic works. Supernatural beings intervene in human affairs. People have destinies, often foretold long before their birth.

  Horror fiction attempts to frighten the reader. Horror can be supernatural (ghosts, monsters, curses) or rooted in reality (killers, science experiments gone wrong). Fantasy and Science Fiction constitute the larger bulk of the speculative fiction market with horror occupying a much smaller commercial space. We will not be discussing horror in this book (sorry, folks).

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  Encyclopedia of Time

  • Samuel L. Macey(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The consequence of this liberty is fairly evident once realized, though perhaps not obvious before it is articulated. It is this. Setting a tale in the future has absolutely nothing to do, in imaginative or cognitive terms, with the matter of time. In purpose and in its consequences, it is entirely different from carrying a protagonist forward through time into a new setting; or from speculating upon the mysteries of time-to-be. Indeed, such speculations, because they transform the literary device of future setting into a problematic, are actively avoided by most writers of genre Science Fiction. As a whole, then, Science Fiction is not about time.

  There are, however, two kinds of genre Science Fiction that escape this self-censorship. Tales involving Time Travel: Future and Time Travel: Past do exist in genre Science Fiction and in their two highly contrastive ways both sub-genres have generated incisive patterns of speculation, and both have made imaginative use of the profound mystery of time. One further kind of genre Science Fiction may be mentioned at this point. The Science Fiction tale of cosmogony is generally written by authors (they include Asimov and Wolfe, as well as Poul Anderson, James Blish, Larry Niven, and Dan Simmons) who are scientifically numerate, and whose fictions of origin and destiny necessarily incorporate a sophisticated sense of the twentieth-century paradigm in physics which argues that space and time are no more than (put vulgarly) different expressions on the face of ultimate reality. Such fictions from genre writers, however numerate, tend, however, to slur over or to make hyperbolic use of hard physics; and it is perhaps more useful to think of matters of cosmogony in their own right.

  [I.e.]

  See also Cosmology ; Futuristic Fiction ; Physics ; Time Travel: Future ; Time Travel: Past ; Utopias and Dystopias .

   

  FURTHER READINGS

  Aldiss, Brian W. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. New York: Atheneum, 1986.

  Eizykman, B. “Temporality in Science-Fiction Narrative.” Ed. R.M. Philmus. Trans. R. Rosenthall and B. Eizykman. Science-Fiction Studies 12 (March 1985): 66–87.

  Huntington, John. The Logic of Fantasy: H.G. Wells and Science Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. McConnell, Frank. The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.

  Philmus, Robert M. Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H.G. Wells.

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  Phraseology and Style in Subgenres of the Novel

  A Synthesis of Corpus and Literary Perspectives

  • Iva Novakova, Dirk Siepmann, Iva Novakova, Dirk Siepmann(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The two tables above seem to show that the major differences exist between Science Fiction and fantasy rather than between French and English. In the next sections, we will propose both a stylistic analysis of these genre differences and discuss what the classification of RLTs with our semantic grid revealed. 4 Contribution to Differentiating Science Fiction and Fantasy in French and in English In our introduction, we labeled the Science Fiction and fantasy genres as belonging to the “littérature de l’imaginaire”, an editorial category that emphasizes the similarities of novels whose plot and characters help construct an imaginary world. But there are also important theoretical distinctions between these two genres, for example, in the way each of them represents the world. The traditional elements invoked to establish distinctions within the massive and disparate corpus are often simplistic. The main difference claimed is a conflict between the science in Science Fiction and the magic in fantasy. Also implied is the perhaps more convenient opposition between rational sense on the one hand and imagination on the other that Besson calls “régimes de sens” (that is, opposing schemes for representing reality and its comprehension, Besson 2007). But, more recent literary analysis points out that the difference may instead lie in the way we read the genres (Saint-Gelais 1999). This difference would seem to let us examine the specificities of each of these genres most effectively. Saint-Gelais explained that Science Fiction and fantasy offer readers opposite experiences: where Science Fiction initiates awareness or attentiveness in the reader’s mind, fantasy books play with his confidence and his euphoria. For instance, while a Science Fiction reader is often on the look-out for clues to understand and discuss the scientific explanation of a story based on the strange and unusual, a reader of fantasy is supposed to accept magic and supernatural events as factual

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  Scraps Of The Untainted Sky

  Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia

  • Thomas Moylan(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  33 Like Russ, he proceeds from a typology of literary forms in present-day culture and in the sweep of Western history and gradually zeroes in on the formal specificity of sf. Working dialectically, he characterizes sf in terms of "non-naturalist" literary modes, but as a modern variant that has appropriated, refunctioned qualities of naturalist writing. He connects sf with earlier forms of writing that refuse immediate accounts of the given world and generate "radically different" figures or contexts, and he thereby acknowledges sf's kinship with literary subgenres such as "the Greek and Hellenistic 'blessed island' stories, the 'fabulous voyage' from Antiquity on, the Renaissance and Baroque 'utopia' and 'planetary novel,' the Enlightenment 'state (political) novel,' the modern 'anticipation,' 'anti-utopia'" ("Poetics" 372).

  Further emphasizing its refusal of empiricism, he notes that sf shares "an opposition to naturalistic or empiricist literary genres" with myth, fantasy, fairy tale, and the pastoral insofar as these are all "non-naturalistic or meta-empirical genres" ("Poetics" 372). But he then turns in the opposite direction and posits a spectrum, "or spread of literary subject-matter," that runs "from the ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author's empirical environment to exclusive interest in a strange newness, a novum

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