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Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology
... Iako se očevima naučne fantastike smatraju Francuz Žil Vern (Jules Verne) i Britanac Herbert Džordž Vels (Herbert George Wells) (Gavrilović, 1986;Hubble, 2013) zapravo je knjiga koja se najčešće navodi kao začetnik ovog žanra "Frankenštajn" (Frankenstein) autorke Meri Šeli (Mary Shelley) napisana 1817. godine (Alkon, 2002;Brooker, Thomas 2009). ...
... Pojedini autori, tragajući za poreklom naučne fantastike, navode druga dela, poput Platonove (Πλάτων) "Države" (375. p.n.e.), Morove (Thomas More) "Utopije" (1516), De Beržerakovog (Cyrano de Bergerac) "Drugog sveta" (1657), Sviftovih (Jonathan Swift) "Guliverovih putovanja" (1726) (Alkon, 2002)... Sva ova dela karakteriše refleksivnost u odnosu na tehnološke inovacije i društvena pitanja vremena u kojima su nastala. Ona se oslanjaju na naučna znanja tog doba, ne zarad puke fantazije, već zarad artikulacije sadašnjosti iz nove perspektive, kritike ili pretpostavljanja mogućeg ili željenog razvoja ljudskog društva. ...
... Ove velike promene društva za relativno kratko vreme izmenile su shvatanje sveta tadanjih savremenika i utrle put za razvoj i utemeljenje naučnofantastičnog žanra. Istovremeno, parna, a kasnije i električna štamparska presa umnogome su povećale mogućnost jeftinog i brzog štampanja, postepeno je uspostavljano obavezno obrazovanje mladih koje je povećalo opštu pismenost, a definisan je i fenomen slobodnog vremena (Vidulin-Orbanić, 2008;Alkon, 2002). Ovo je važno jer je sve više ljudi moglo da piše i objavljuje dela ove vrste, ali je bilo i sve više građana koji su imali sredstava i vremena da to čitaju. ...
Naučnofantastični žanr u svim vrstama medija neretko je zanemarivan u ozbiljnoj raspravi naučne javnosti. Prema ustaljenom mišljenju, njegov nastanak se povezuje sa pisanjem Žila Verna i Herberta Džordža Velsa krajem 19. veka i nije često ozbiljnije analiziran iz perpektive društvenog uticaja. Međutim, on upravo nastaje kao odgovor na velike društvene promene industrijalizacije i razvoja novih tehnologija, prikazujući mogućnosti napretka, ali i nove moralne, psihološke i društvene probleme koje ga prate. Sa pojavom filma, a naročito televizije, on dobija na svojoj izražajnoj snazi i obrađuje neke od veoma kompleksnih i značajnih problema savremenog društva kroz prizmu fikcije. Cilj rada je da kroz istorijski prikaz i analizu nekih od najznačajnijih dela naučne fantastike ukaže na društvene i tehnološke uslove njihovog nastanka i razvoja. U radu su prikazana i analizirana dela Verna, Velsa, Asimova, Klarka, Čapeka, ali i veliki televizijski i filmski serijali poput Zvezdanih staza. Utvrđeno je da postoji visok stepen uticaja društvenih okolnosti, napretka naučne misli i tehnologija na razvoj ovog žanra.
... Though science has entered into fiction as long as it has entered into life, Wells can be safely described as one of the founders of modern science fiction (Aldiss 1986;Alkon 2016;Rabkin 1983). He brought biologyand specifically Darwinian evolution-definitively onto the literary stage. ...
If the late Victorian literati were allowed only one “evolutionary myth-maker,” the title would go to H. G. Wells. Wells had an immensely prolific and visible career. Though he had ambitions as a scientist, a realist novelist, a satirist, a journalist, a global political reformer, and a historian, he is now remembered mainly for his early science fiction stories. Those stories helped transform Victorian adventure genres into scientific mythology, introducing enduring tropes like the time machine. But the stories were also shaped by Wells’s self-narrative: a fundamentally Darwinian worldview, made tolerable through a mythic split between nature and mind, with himself as the savior of mind. This chapter analyzes the psychology of Wells’s evolutionary myth-making and its imaginative expression in two of his most famous novels.
... As Thomas (2013) proposes in his study: one can argue that the tendency to use sf as a mode of expression for colonial and postcolonial concerns has been common in Western writers from the beginning of science fiction as a distinct genre. (1) Moreover, as an applicable understanding for the subgenre; he introduces postcolonial SF as an extended version of postcolonial fiction and SF which deals with the effects of technology, in a futuristic sense, rather than the technology itself giving space to discuss these effects upon cultures, religions, and human norms. (53-56) ...
Transhumanism and the Science Fiction's (SF) subgenres, namely Postcolonial SF and Afrofuturism have many common concerns about the future of humanity. The exploration of their intersectional interests can offer new ways of studying SF novels. Besides, they can clarify the possibilities for decolonizing the African American identity-'Other'. Moreover, they can illustrate the expansion of the SF genre and its ability to cover different aspects of life. The study will overview the emergence of SF to show the connection with postcolonialism, Afrofuturism, and Transhumanism in SF. In this respect, this research will shed light on Jessica Langer's futuristic postcolonialism, and the Afrofuturistic sense of Mark Dery, the global Afrofuturistic vision of Lisa Yaszek, and Nick Bostrom's human enhancement. Finally, the study concludes by proposing the term of 'Other+' to decolonize the futuristic identity of African Americans.
... Apart from his detective story, Poe also contributed to SF with what may be called as science-fictional stories. Although Bruce Franklin disregards Poe's SF as a fiction " which popularizes science for boys and girls of all ages while giving them the creeps " (Franklin quoted in Alkon, 1994: 106) and Bruce Kettner concludes that " no single work of Poe's qualifies as 'straight' science fiction " and everything he wrote can only be regarded as " marginally science-fictional " (Kettner quoted inAlkon, 1994: 106), and that Poe's SF output is pretty imaginative and visionary. ...
The aim of this study is to discuss the representation of the influence of the technological developments during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century as fascinating and the transformation of this representation to fear and dwarfing by the post-World War II USA?s techno-capitalism and its rise as the cradle of technology. The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century were eras that experienced a progress in science, technology and inventors, witnessing inventions such as the light bulb, the telephone and the plane. These inventions gave people hope about the future and this hope found its place in science fiction. Starting with the World?s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, this change was represented in science fiction popularized by Hugo Gernsback in the first quarter of the 20th century. While works that appeared during this period used the victorious exploits of the male, American inventor and the USA?s mission of being an example to the world and leading it to progress, post-war works reflected that technology was the representation of a massive, destructive force and it was no more a savior. The main argument in this study states that science and technology in science fiction underwent a paradigm shift in the post-World War II USA, and that the changes which resulted from the USA?s rise as the sole market and the cradle of technology is also represented in science fiction.
... However, books analyzing Wells' works have largely ignored the influence of his short stories. For example, Alkon's book on science fiction before 1900 only mentions The Stolen Bacillus, one of the most interesting short stories of this early period, in the list of works cited at the end of the book (Alkon, 2002). McLean (2011) noted that "Despite such recent research, the short stories remain vastly under-represented in Wells studies and deserve renewed detailed study, with the only major monograph in this area, John Hammond's H.G. Wells and the Short Story, having appeared in 1992." ...
This article analyzes H.G. Wells’ The Stolen Bacillus, one of the first works of fiction to deal with bioterrorism. Although the use of biological agents by armies in warfare is probably as old as mankind, since the last Iraq War, the fear of biological agents being used in terrorist attacks has increased. Although bioterrorism might seem a problem beginning in the late twentieth century, Wells’ short story, written in 1894, foreboded the threat of an attack with biological agents. The article reviews previous analyses of this work of fiction, contextualizes it in Victorian British society’s beliefs about anarchism and discoveries in bacteriology, and discusses other possible influences on Wells’ work of fiction.
... The concept of human machine communication is a theme that has driven the plot of many sci-fi [5] scenarios. It is a powerful overarching narrative, which allows us to question as an outsider, some of the most fundamental principles of what it means to be human. ...
When we change the way we communicate, we change society. " [1] This panel aims to provide audience with a context to understand how social media technologies and the daily updating of the self is challenging our preconceptions of screen-based 'Internet' communication and influencing the development of our cultural/ personal identity(s) and sense of self. [15] It will explore the use of portable; individual; personal; non identical; devices and their impact to our current lives through the present innovative communication apps. The panel would question whether being intimate with technology, in a non-anthropocentric way could provide new critical reflections on the self and how gender stereotypes will form the Internet of Bodies and the future human / machine directions.
... Science fiction has often been used as a medium for understanding the emotional and ethical conditions of new and developing technologies [2]. Furthermore, robots and avatars are a recurrent theme in the science fiction landscape, Famous examples such as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and Neal Stevenson's Snow Crash (1992) define the avatar and have inspired cybernetic dreams and the languaging of techno-spiritual transcendence [3]. ...
This paper considers the complex relationship between ethics and social technologies. It is particularly concerned with what it means to be intimate or share ideas of intimacy with robots and avatars. Looking to the world of theatre and situating our ethical framework within two specific plays we are able to examine new technological narratives that inspire critical reflection on our current and future relationships, sexual taboos and ethical practices. It also poses the question of the role of the arts in preparing society for dramatic technological and
social shifts that challenge what we might think of current ideas of what it means to be human and values that have troubled debates between the biological and the artificial. Such shifts are not gender, or diversity free and we recognize that ethical aspects of technology are always person-dependent, culturedependent and situation-dependent. Within ethics, discussions of privacy and identity move to the foreground of our discussions.
This chapter deals with the novel El anacronópete (1884 and 1887), written by Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau, its creation and its innovation, both, because of the satirical character and because of its belonging to the genre of science fiction. The nineteenth century witnessed a powerful scientific and technological development—development that introduced economic, political, and social changes. The value of this novel written by Gaspar y Rimbau lies not only in the fact that it precedes what is supposed to be the first time machine in Western literature, but also in the fact that it articulates the scientific and literary discourse in order to address the question of the identity of the Self versus the Other. The narration begins during the International Exhibition of Paris in 1878, where the popularity of the famous Jules Verne and his wonderful hypotheses will be considered children’s toys in the face of the magnitude of the real invention of a modest resident of Zaragoza. More than a science fiction novel, the text requires the incorporation of concepts related to the creation process of national identities from disciplines such as history, sociology, and theory of literature. All of these identities are seen from a satirical prism of a budding science fiction genre.
In recent years we have faced huge uncertainty and unpredictability across the world: Covid-19, political turbulence, climate change and war in Europe, among many other events. Through a historical analysis of worldviews, Peter Haldén provides nuance to the common belief in an uncertain world by showing the predictable nature of modern society and arguing that human beings create predictability through norms, laws, trust and collaboration. Haldén shows that, since the Renaissance, two worldviews define Western civilization: first, that the world is knowable and governed by laws, regularities, mechanisms or plan, hence it is possible to control and the future is possible to foresee; second, that the world is governed by chance, impossible to predict and control and therefore shocks and surprises are inevitable. Worlds of Uncertainty argues that between these two extremes lie positions that recognize the principal unpredictability of the world but seek pragmatic ways of navigating through it.
In 1887 Minchin published Naturae Veritas, an account of conversations with extra-terrestrial beings about human scientific understanding, written in both prose and verse. This represents one of the very first examples of scientifically based science fiction that was popularized by George Gamow in the 1940s. Minchin also gave presentations to both scientific and lay audiences in which “in the spirit of a Rabelais or a Swift, he tilted against humbug, unmasked accepted respectabilities, [and] overwhelmed dishonesty with innuendo and invective.” This chapter reviews Naturæ Veritas and four unpublished satires (written between 1891 and 1898) to examine Minchin’s views on the scientific and broader social issues of his day. The pointed views he expressed on the scientific establishment may partially account for his absence from the upper echelons of learned societies. The chapter concludes with an examination of his influences and place in the development of science fiction.
This study aims at promoting a debate about speculative narratives, particularly those commonly classified as Science Fiction or Fantasy, assuming that the first works of speculative literature were not intended to encompass a single generic category given their dialogue with epistemological changes and their close connection with religious and mythological discourses. By close readings and bibliographic analyses, we build on the literary scholarship of Gunn (2005), Alkon (1994), Araújo (2020), and Manlove (1975), among others. The results suggest that there is no stylistic uniformity in Science Fiction or Fantasy narratives, as they directly dialogue with historical, political, and cultural moments, as well as with existing literary styles or movements. Keywords: Speculative fiction; Science Fiction; Fantasy; Hybridization
Depuis le dix-neuvième siècle, des auteurs de science-fiction visionnaires ont décrit avec une stupéfiante précision le monde du futur. Capables d’imaginer les technologies les plus révolutionnaires, ils ont influencé les scientifiques les plus géniaux et les entrepreneurs les plus audacieux qui sont parvenus à commercialiser des innovations qui ont changé les modes de vie de millions de personnes. Ce livre présente l’apport considérable de ces grands esprits au monde industriel. Jules Verne et le voyage sur la Lune ou l’invention de l’hélicoptère, Kim Stanley Robinson et la terraformation, H.G Wells et la bombe atomique, William Gibson et le cyberespace, ou Neal Stephenson et le métavers sont quelques exemples de thèmes abordés dans le but d’exposer l’apport décisif de la science-fiction aux processus d’innovation technoscientifique. Cet imaginaire, souvent prophétique, a en effet démontré à maintes reprises son étonnante faculté à anticiper les grandes mutations du monde. L’économie est influencée par des fictions qui structurent les croyances des innovateurs, des entrepreneurs, des consommateurs et des investisseurs. Les visionnaires sont ainsi bien souvent des créateurs de récits qui sont devenus des réalités après avoir conquis les esprits, parfois sur plusieurs générations. L’histoire de ces visions nous rappelle l’importance de porter un regard attentif sur ces fictions afin de mieux préparer le futur.
As the author of the article claims, there exist close and lasting links between astronomy and science fiction genre. First and foremost, both of these phenomena developed in parallel since antiquity, and both have fiction at their centre as a socially established type of imagination. Scientific hypotheses use justified fabrication, and science fiction offers images of fictional cosmologies. Many writers of proto-science fiction brought astronomical concepts into social play. Among them were astronomers and philosophers who extensively used plot devices based on mythology or allegorical transformations: from Lucian of Samosata to Johannes Kepler. Space travel, beginning with Jules Verne’s prose, is an important part of the thematic resource of science fiction. Astronomy played an important role also in the beginnings of Polish science fiction, thanks to works of Michał Dymitr Krajewski and Teodor Tripplin.
This chapter presents pioneering approaches to creativity through science fiction, before developing some features of design fiction. John Arnold used a method inspired by science fiction to stimulate the creativity of young researchers. He proposed to project himself into the environment of an imaginary planet, Arcturus IV, in order to project problems and establish original solutions. Design fiction is a practice that has been developed increasingly in organizations that use the science fiction imaginary world in order to innovate. It allows a diversification of sociotechnical concepts through original works produced in an innovative framework. The institutionalization of science fiction, or science fictionalization, is the consequence of design fiction. Technotypes, like identity archetypes, belong to an ancestral psychology. Their study provides an understanding of how the economy works, as innovations are linked to an analysis and discovery of these technotypes. Technotypes are the result of a recollection of ancestral events and the activation of fundamental archetypes.
Durante las primeras décadas del siglo XX, gracias a la modernización de la industria editorial, las predicciones del fin del mundo asociadas a daños ocasionados por fenómenos celestes circularon como leitmotiv de folletines y de textos de divulgación, produciéndose una expansión de la ciencia ficción más allá de los límites literarios. Posibles choques de astros con la Tierra y teorías científicas acerca de la toxicidad de la cola de los cometas, provocaron que dentro de los magazines cercanos al paso del cometa Halley de mayo de 1910, proliferaran obras de ciencia ficción, así como textos divulgativos que imaginaban posibles situaciones apocalípticas ocasionadas por este fenómeno celeste. En ese sentido, nuestro trabajo analiza la utilización del saber astronómico para propósitos literarios, así como el uso del tono literario para difundir y popularizar la ciencia en los magazines de la editorial Zig-Zag.
Since the late 20th century, the posthumanist project of human improvement has been proposing the overcoming of the actual human capacities. Although this possibility may not yet be in practice, these hypotheses have emerged in the genre of science fiction resulting in the collective image of what is considered to be possible, even desirable. Moreover, science fiction experiments with these artificial developments up to the greatest extent and provokes a questioning of the matter. In the present study, the tensions relating to posthumanism in the fictional series Westworld are reviewed. The article focuses particularly on identity, one of the most fluctuating concepts of present day. The analysis reveals the need to approach ‘identity’ from a point of view that shows the special importance of personal experience, both from the corporal and psychological point of view.
In the early 1970 s, a number of influential science fiction scholars reached a consensus that their genre of interest developed out of Gothic fiction and that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) marked a turning point in an ongoing reorientation towards a more secular and materialist understanding of human life and progress. The protagonist’s scientific career, which advances from a fascination with the occult to academic studies of chemistry and anatomy, seemed to mirror this paradigm shift. The new status of Frankenstein as a foundational text of the modern science fiction novel has frequently led to a narrow focus on its science, the uncanny anticipation of recent bioethical debates and Victor Frankenstein’s role as the archetypal (mad) scientist. However, the generic tension between Gothic themes and science fiction elements is instrumental to the novel’s design. Frankenstein, for example, is a far more problematic character than some science fiction scholars are willing to acknowledge. Using autodidacticism, blindness, and manipulativity as my three analytical categories I shall demonstrate that he has more in common with the perpetrators of Gothic fiction than with modern scientists.
The aim of this paper is to cornpare two technological dystopias: Emile
Souvestre's Le Monde tel qu'il sera (1846) and Cordwainer Smith's "Alpha
Ralpha Boulevard" (1961). Both texts present dystopian societies experienced
by many of its inhabitants as being the best of possible worlds. The above
authors question the massive use of technology, worry about what technology
can do to human beings, how it can dehumanize them. They reveal serious
social and moral concerns regarding the less privileged. These are excluded
from the benefits of "Utopia" while making it possible. Both authors are childs
from their time: they live in a period of national pride, they can see the shadows
behind the luminous, the dangers resulting from human beings playing God
with nature and humanity. Also, they are innovators: Souvestre announces
dystopian science fiction and Smith renews the genre announcing the
New Wave movement in Anglo-American science fiction.
http://hdl.handle.net/10362/14301
Frenchman Jules Verne and Englishman Herbert George Wells remain, arguably, the two most famous writers of science fiction in the genre’s history. Their names are conventionally linked, as in the present chapter, although they never met, came from different generations
Most SF written during the earliest years of the nineteenth century continued to excavate the premises determined by the late eighteenth-century revolutionary turmoil, especially with regard to future-fantasies. But the period as a whole came to be dominated in SF terms by two Anglophone writers, who had the greatest impact on the continuing development of the genre and will be discussed in some detail in this chapter. They are Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe.
The French writer Jules Verne and the Englishman H. G. Wells remain, arguably, the two most famous writers of science fiction. Their names are conventionally linked, as in this chapter, although they never met, and in fact come from different generations (Verne was 38 when Wells was born). But, for reasons to do with the period in which they wrote as much as the individual excellence of their writing, their key SF texts consolidated the increasing cultural dominance of SF as a form.
Increasingly, as the nineteenth century progressed, advances in science were changing the way human beings thought about their position in the cosmos, with profound implications for the development of SF. The geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) challenged the Bible-inspired notion that the Earth was less than 6,000 years old in Principles of Geology (1830–33), introducing the idea of ‘deep time’ to a wide audience. A few years later, Charles Darwin (1809–1882), perhaps the most famous scientist between Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, published his world-changing On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection (1859), which confirmed the vertiginously long time-scale in its portrayal of the valueless proliferation and evolution of life. William Beddoes’ (1803–1849) posthumously published Death’s Jest Book, or the Fool’s Tragedy (1850) gives a sense of the way this new understanding of time in its aspect of ‘the Sublime’ inflected the far-future imagination. In place of the personalised ‘last man’ narratives of secular apocalypse from earlier in the century, Beddoes tolls a more impersonal and impressive knell:
Tis nearly passed, for I begin to hear Strange but sweet sounds, and the loud rocky dashing Of waves, where time into Eternity Falls over ruined worlds.
(Beddoes, Death’s Jest Book, IV.iii.107–10)
Science fiction was reborn in one year, 1600, the year that the Catholic Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno the Nolan at the stake for arguing in favour of the notion that the universe was infinite and contained innumerable worlds. Bruno’s was a fundamentally science-fictional conception.
DefinitionsMad Scientists and their MonstersImaginary Voyages and JourneysUtopias and DystopiasApocalypse NowCoda
An ethical frame grounded in science fiction literature shaped the discourse on cloning following the announcement of Dolly-the-sheep's birth through nuclear transfer. Using methodologies drawn from the social shaping of technology (SST) and rhetoric of science, my analysis demonstrates how individuals and institutions, including the media, ethicists, policymakers, and legislators, appropriated and re-appropriated this ethical frame. In doing so, they employed science-fiction stories as rhetorical tropes, thereby providing the public with a frame for understanding the social issues involved with cloning. However, these institutions used science fiction as a way to simplify and present ethical arguments that silenced dissent rather than encouraged dialog. While ethics discourse can validly make use of literature in debates about technology, such a simplistic view of the literature misrepresents the themes the authors explored in their works and limits discussion. I conclude by offering a deeper analysis and reading of some of these stories, relying on the texts themselves rather than the myths that have evolved around these texts as my primary source material. Such a reading provides a valuable counter-narrative to the on-going debate, one that more adequately explains the effects of technology in a society. In short, this dissertation demonstrates that the reductionist interpretation of works from the science fiction genre had real effects on policy formulation. People utilized their literary-derived perceptions of cloning in political discussions about technology. Thus, policy discussions of the perceived effects of the technology developed much of their meaning and significance from fictional depictions of the technology. System requirements: PC, World Wide Web browser, and PDF reader. Available electronically via the Internet. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2007. Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references.
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