Science fiction is a form of literature that takes place in an alternative
present, a reconceived past, or an extrapolated future. All of these alterations
in time or reality are based upon technological or sociological changes
in the observed, realistic now.
Although clear anticipations of the form can be seen in the works of
19th century European writers, science fiction is a peculiarly American
genre whose point of origin can be clearly traced. In 1926 the amateur
scientist and occasional writer Hugo Gernsback conceived Amazing
Stories, a magazine whose first issue both defined what its content
would be and stated its purpose, to publish stories based on science that
would interest young men in scientific careers.
Such established narrative frameworks as the imaginary voyage and versions
of utopia had long provided the subjects for books of fantasy. Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), a variation of the Faust legend
that had been current in European literature and folklore for centuries,
established a useful and recurring science-fiction myth: that of the mad
scientist whose arrogance challenges the laws of nature and thus creates
havoc.
In the last decades of the 19th century, Jules Verne in France
and H. G. Wells in England both produced novels that masqueraded
as science although they were, in fact, pure fantasy. Verne's
A
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864; Eng. trans., 1872) and
Twenty
Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869-70; Eng. trans., 1876) voiced
the growing infatuation with the achievements of technology and helped
develop two popular science-fiction themes: adventures in space and forays
into unknown worlds on Earth. H. G. Wells, in The Time
Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898), warned humankind
of its precarious position in an indifferent universe, a theme that in
the form of ecological disaster, alien invasion, or cosmic catastrophe,
has continued to intrigue writers of science fiction.
Other authors wrote fantasies about prehistory, future history, and
lost empires, notions that derived from contemporary discoveries in geology
and paleontology. The idea of utopias was given new form in Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris's
News from Nowhere (1891).
In addition to novels of fantasy, the United States contributed two
early pulp magazines. The All-Story (founded 1914) discovered several
important authors, including Edgar Rice Burroughs. Argosy
(founded 1882) offered such respectable fantasists as James Branch Cabell
and was the first to print the work of longtime science-fiction writer
Murray
Leinster.
The earliest issues of Gernsback's Amazing Stories were
devoted largely to reprints of Verne, Wells, and other authors
of fantasy, but slowly Gernsback developed a group of science-fiction writers,
most of them experienced pulp-magazine authors, who were able to crudely
conceive the form. "Space opera," hackneyed adventure tales in which heroes
outfitted in dubious space metal wrecked alien worlds and rescued space
maidens, was a specialty of early pulps like Amazing and the others
that followed. Their covers featured space-opera art, and some of
it was far more imaginative than the stories inside. Nevertheless, by the
mid-1930s, science-fiction writers had begun to create a group of fascinating
stories and to attract an audience of their own.
An important rival magazine, Astounding Stories (soon
to be called
Astounding Science Fiction), was founded in 1930. The
science-fiction writer John W. Campbell assumed its editorship in
1937 and was an active force in the field until his death in 1971.
Campbell's vision of science fiction was a form of literature that
would credibly show the effects of technology and of scientific advance
on individuals, culture, and society; he expected writers to achieve a
standard of technical accomplishment and maintain a rigor of approach that
would make the quality of science fiction comparable to that of any other
literary genre.
During Campbell's editorship the first generation of writers
in England and America who had been nurtured on Amazing Stories
and the early Astounding Stories began to produce their own science-fiction
literature. Under Campbell's tutelage, they are generally
agreed to have established what is still remembered as science fiction's
"golden age." Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert
A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. Van Vogt were
among the most important of this generation. In the 1950s they were
joined by Arthur Clarke, Frederik Pohl, and others whose
work extended the reach of science fiction. During the period of
Campbell's
editorship (1937-50) many of the grand themes of science fiction were invented
and explored: robots, alternate worlds, faster-than-light travel, the seeding
of the galaxies by human or alien cultures, the meeting of humans and aliens
and its many astonishing consequences, and, in the later 1940s, the full
range of possibilities presented by nuclear power.
The sudden and horrifying use of nuclear weapons in a fashion that had
been predicted by science fiction for years brought the field to a new
kind of prominence. Science fiction was read as serious literature
for the first time, largely because it was judged to have significant predictive
content. In this early postwar era major publishers were attracted
to the field and brought out anthologies drawn almost exclusively from
Astounding,
as well as reprinting older science-fiction novels and publishing new works.
An additional expansion of the field occurred with the entrance of two
new magazines, Galaxy (1950) and The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction (FSF, 1949). Both had a more humanist and satirical
orientation toward the classic themes of science fiction, cutting through
established stereotypes and exerting an influence as significant as Campbell's
in a previous generation.
Between them, the two magazines established many of the major themes
for the decades to come, and published most of the authors whose novels
would legitimize the genre as literature. Among them, Alfred Bester
wrote ironic, skeptical stories about malcontents in corrupt societies
and the relationships between androids (humanoid robots) and their human
owners. Two of his novels, The Demolished Man (1953) and The
Stars My Destination (1956) are classics of science fiction. Walter
M. Miller's masterpiece,
A Canticle for Liebowitz (1960), was
serialized in FSF. It concerns the inevitability of repeated technological
holocaust whenever the advance of science makes it possible. The
novelist Philip K. Dick
began as a short-story writer. His novels deal with notions of distorted
perception, of the effect of artificial realities, or schizophrenic mind-states,
of illusion taking over from the real world. His work has a warmth
that is rare in the world of science fiction.
Of the many other writers to start their careers in the 1950s science-fiction
magazines, two English authors are particularly significant. Brian Aldiss
brilliantly advanced the starship-as-world plot, in Starship (1958)
and wrote many other ingenious novels characterized by their humor and
extravagant inventiveness. J. G. Ballard's psychological investigations
of the significance of wrecked technologies, empty landscapes, and strange
disasters brought him a readership that was not confined to science-fiction
readers and made him one of the first authors of the so-called New Wave
movement.
Aldiss and Ballard published their stories in the British
magazine New Worlds (1946-70), long edited by writer Michael Moorcock.
Moorcock's
own fiction is closer to fantasy than to science fiction, but the authors
he published attempted other approaches to break out of what they considered
the too-rigid conventions of their genre. Thus,
New Wave was
an experimental movement, stylistically more sophisticated and metaphoric
than its predecessors, and thematically absorbed by the psychological implications
of ecology, drugs, overpopulation, disasters and sex.
The tone of science fiction, from the era of the New Wave to
the present day, is satirical, pessimistic, and anti-utopian in contrast
to attitudes at sci-fi's beginnings, which paralleled the beliefs of their
day in scientific progress and prosperity for all.
From the period of the New Wave and through the 1980s, Science
Fiction attracted many writers who used their considerable knowledge, particularly
in the behavioral sciences, to inspire their speculations. Ursula
K. Le Guin, in novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
and The Dispossessed (1974), used anthropological and sociological
theories as springboards for her plots. The British writer Ian
Watson took on both the humanistic sciences and physics and cosmology
in his work and is ranked among the most important science-fiction writers
to emerge in the 1970s. This was the period in which such notable
authors as Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Samuel R. Delany
and Robert Silverberg achieved their reputations.
A notable development of recent decades has been the growing reputation
of women science-fiction writers. They range from Le Guin,
through to authors who used male pseudonyms in order to be published.
The most famous of these are James Tiptree, Jr. to Joanna Russ,
C.
J. Cherryh and Doris Lessing, in her apocalyptic novels and
her many-volume Sirius 'Cycle.'
The computer has given science fiction new universes to explore.
Early fantasies involved the vast superiority and therefore the threat
of the machine in relation to humanity. Later work has produced the
world of the Cyberpunk, a hero whose richest experience lies inside
the computer, while the real world grows shabbier and smaller. First
among authors in the Cyberpunk mode is William Gibson (Neuromancer
[1984]; Mona Lisa Overdrive [1989]), who writes in short, flat sentences
with a heavy use of jargon, reminiscent of much of early Science Fiction.
The Polish writer and scientist Stanislaw Lem is perhaps the
most important contemporary European science-fiction writer, whose works
range from mystical planetary explorations such as Solaris (1961;
Eng. trans., 1970) to comic tales about the space pilot Pirx.
Russia owns a long science-fiction tradition. Space scientist Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky wrote, among other novels, Beyond the Planet Earth
(1920; Eng. trans., 1960), a prophetic work on the saga of space travel.
Written after the revolution, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (Eng.
trans., 1925) was a profoundly dystopian work; it was never published in
Soviet Russia. Notable among the many other Russian science-fiction
authors, the works of Aleksandr Belyaev and the Strugatsky brothers
have been translated into English.
Links:
* Locus
Online Contents
Lists
* The Pulp Zone
- The Web Guide to Pulp Magazines!
References:
Aldiss, B. W. (1986). Trillion-Year Spree;
Alkon, P. K. (1994). Science Fiction before 1900;
Barron, N. (ed.) (1990). Anatomy of Wonder, 3d ed.;
Bleiler, E. F. (1990). Science Fiction: The Early Years;
Booker, M. K. (1994). The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature;
Clute, J., and Nicholls, P. (eds.) (1993). The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction;
Gunn, J. (1992). Inside Science Fiction;
James, E. (1994). Science Fiction in the 20th Century;
Malzberg, B. N. (1982). The Engines of the Night.
