In 1916 Hugo Gernsback coined the term 'Scientifiction' to describe the stories his magazines published. And Jules Verne and H.G. Wells provided a lot of his material. But did anyone 'invent' science fiction?
Brian Aldiss believed that "Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode."
Aldiss references the Gothic in his definition of science fiction because he believes Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is pivotal to the birth of sci-fi. Whether the Gothic is equally pivotal is a moot point.
But before Mary Shelly there is Margaret Cavendish, and before her is Johannes Kepler, and so on and so on. Can we even pin down a science fiction Ur-text?
Well a lot depends on the status yiu afford 'science' in this kind of fiction? Is it just a plot device, offering an otherwise impossible solution to a common human problem as Algis Budrys once said? Is it just magic dressed up as a spaceship?
Well there's certainly a lot of gizmo fiction to be found in sci-fi, and it's true that its roots did thrive in the soil of adventure stories...
But if sci-fi is also a meditation on 'the status of man in the universe' then a lot of hard sci-fi and some science fantasy would fail the test. Aldiss is from the New Wave of 1960s sci-fi which was somewhat esoteric as well as experimental.
Ursula K. Le Guin believed "science fiction changed around 1960... towards an increase in the number of writers and readers, the breadth of subject, the depth of treatment, the sophistication of language and technique, and the political and literary consciousness of the writing."
Others felt that sci-fi was too Western-centric. Kôichi Yamano led the charge with a 1969 essay arguing that SF had the capacity to be avant garde, rather than simply copying the themes of Golden Age American stories.
So what's the difference between science fiction and science fantasy? , Rod Serling claimed that the former was "the improbable made possible" while the latter was "the impossible made probable."
J.G. Ballard believed the biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needed to be explored. "Accuracy, that last refuge of the unimaginative, doesn't matter a hoot."
Michael Moorcock, one of the founders of New Wave sci-fi was highly critical of the Golden Age stories as literature. They lacked "passion, subtlety, irony, original characterization, original and good style, a sense of involvement in human affairs, colour, density, depth..."
New Wave sci-fi began to decline in the early 1970s. "(It) failed to move people" Jack Williamson said. "I'm not sure if this failure was due to its pessimistic themes or to people feeling the stuff was too pretentious. But it never really grabbed hold of people's imaginations."
Without the speculative possibilities of science most sci-fi wouldn't be that different from more prosaic fiction. Sci-fi grabs the imagination by showing possibilities - garbed in technology - that lead to interesting situations, be they unique or familiar ones.
But I've thought for a long time that the real 'science' in sci-fi isn't physics, or biology or engineering:
It's sociology.
Good science fiction is good sociology. It looks at society and asks what transformations might happen in it, and to it, if we continue to progress in a certain way.
And its versatility is due to the huge number of questions we have about society, along with our deep-seated fears that we do not know where we are headed.
So perhaps Swift, rather than Wells, deserves some credit for melding tboughts of social critique with the idea of fantastical adventure and placing them into story form.
Feel free to disagree...
Perhaps we should leave the last word to Frederik Pohl: "Someone once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. We agree."
More stories another time...
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Today in pulp: the searing, evocative power of a well crafted opening sentence!
For this thread I will draw my examples from the greatest writer* in the English language: the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe.
(*based on synonym use)
On death:
"Bellenger was dead when they found him. That Bellenger was dead was probably the understatement of the year. Bellenger was horribly, violently dead!"
On crowds:
"The crowd had to be seen to be believed. There are crowds and crowds but this was the crowd to end all crowds. Never, perhaps ever before in the whole of human history had there been such a massive congregation. Such a teeming of humanity."
Today in pulp I look at time travel. It's full of paradoxes but there's one we rarely explore: does it break the Law of Conservation of Energy?
Let’s investigate…
Time travel is a staple of pulp science fiction and it often involves a paradox: changing history, killing your grandfather, creating a time loop etc. Solving the paradox, or realising too late that one is happening, is half the fun of these stories.
Thinking about the nature of time is also fun. Does it exist or is it emergent? It is a local or global event? How many dimensions does it come in? Why is there an ‘arrow of time’? There are many possible answers.
"I wanted a mission. And for my sins they gave me one."
"Your mission is to proceed up the Nung River by Navy patrol boat, pick up Colonel Kurtz's path at Nu Mung Ba, infiltrate his team by whatever means available... and terminate the Colonel's command."
People who feel they have no voice can have a powerful creative spark, sometimes born of suffering or solitude. Mostly it's hidden, but in the 20th century it began to be admired, celebrated, and even perhaps exploited.
Let's look at the story of 'Outsider Art'...
Outsider Art, Art Brut, Visionary Art, Naïve Art: nobody has really settled on a name for artworks made by untrained artists which express a raw, energetic experience of the world. It's art from a different perspective, demanding to be heard.
Outsider Art began to be recognised in 1911 by Der Blaue Reiter group of artists in Munich. The group was short-lived but influential: fundamental to Expressionism and admiring of artworks created by people struggling with their mental health.