11. Science fiction

Stories which are set in the future, or in which the contemporary setting is disrupted by an imaginary device such as a new invention or the introduction of an alien being. They were first labeled ‘science fiction’ in American magazines in the 1920s, a term previously used in Britain was ‘scientific romance’, and many contemporary writers and critics prefer the term ‘speculative fiction’.

Stories of this kind are distinguished from other kinds of fantastic narrative by the claim that they respect the limits of scientific possibility, and that their innovations are plausible extrapolations from modern theory and technology.

Precursors: Mary Shelly (“Frankenstein” (1818)), Edgar Alan Poe.

19^TH CENTURY began with a spate of future war stories, and the influence of Jules Verne help to popularize tales of imaginary tourism involving hypothetical flying machines, submarines and spaceships. Speculations about the future were also encouraged by movements for political reform and by ideas drawn from the theory of evolution.

By far the most ambitious and successful author of that period was H.G.Wells. He produced a series of classic romances, including:“The Time Machine”, “The Island of Dr. Moreau”, “The Invisible Man”, “The War of the Worlds”, “The First Man in the Moon”, “The Shape of things to come”, etc.

World War I had a profound effect on the British futuristic fiction, and in the period between the wars British scientific romance was dominated by the idea that a new war could obliterate civilization, plunging mankind into a new Dark Age.

A frequent outcome of the notion that man was living on the brink of catastrophe was that he must ultimately be replaced by a new species which had transcended his innate brutality. Utopian speculations in this period was not entirely stifled, but was undetermined and opposed by a determined cynicism seen in “Brave New World” (1932) by Aldous Huxley.

The USA, by contrast, was relatively untouched by World War I, and its futuristic fictions were haunted by no such anxieties. Interplanetary fiction, which played a very minor role in British scientific romance, enjoyed something of a vague in America, largely due to the examples of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who used other planets as settings for gaudy adventure stories like “A Princess of Mars” (1912).

Critics of these exuberant but preposterous space adventure stories contemptuously dubbed them “space operas”, but they embodied a mood of buoyant self-confidence that was current in America at the time.

Scientific fictions of that time were not in the least anxious about the possible destruction of civilization and had no need to imagine new species to replace mankind: in their futures the powers of human creativity, deployed in new technologies, would make men equal to all possible challenges if only they were careful enough, and would enable homo sapience to conquer the universe.

American SF remained naïve in tone until the mid-1939s, but anxieties bred by the Depression encouraged a more sober and realistic approach.

A new generation of writers included: