History and use of the term

Brian Stableford, in The Science Romance in Britain: 1890–1950, argued that early British science–fiction writers who used this term differed in (различались по) several significant ways from American science fiction writers of the time. Most notably, the British writers tended to minimize the role of individual «characters» or «heroes», took an «evolutionary perspective», held a bleak view of the future, and had little interest in space as a new frontier. Regarding «heroes», several novels by H. G. Wells have the protagonist as nameless, and often powerless, in the face of natural forces.

The evolutionary perspective can be seen in tales involving long time periods – two examples being The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine by Wells and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Even in Scientific Romances that did not involve vast stretches of time, the issue of whether mankind was just another species subject to evolutionary pressures often arose, as can be seen in parts of The Hampdenshire Wonder by J. D. Beresford and several works by S. Fowler Wright. Regarding space, C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy took the position that “as long as humanity remains flawed and sinful, our exploration of other planets will tend to do them more harm than good”; and most Scientific Romance authors had not even that much interest in the topic. As for bleakness it can be seen in many of the works by all the already cited authors: humanity was deemed by them flawed – either by original sin or, much more often, by biological factors inherited from our ape ancestors.

Nonetheless, not all British science fiction from that period comports with Stableford's thesis. Some, for example, had the adventures in space and held an optimistic view of the future. By the 1930s, there were British authors (such as Eric Frank Russell) who were intentionally writing “science fiction” for American publication. At that point, British writers who used the term “scientific romance” did so either because they were unaware of science fiction or because they chose not to be associated with it.

After World War II, the influence of American science fiction caused the term “Scientific Romance” to lose favor, a process accelerated by the fact that few writers of Scientific Romance considered themselves “Scientific Romance” writers, instead viewing themselves as “just writers” – or, on occasion, scientists – who occasionally happened to write a Scientific Romance. Even so, the Scientific Romance era writers' influence persisted in British science fiction, and indeed had some impact on the American variety.

Revival of the term

Starting in the late 1970s, the term began to be used again, this time for eccentri, usually (but not always) British science fiction that intentionally reflects a Victorian or Edwardian outlook. Christopher Priest (a member of the H. Wells Society) has, for example, used or alluded to the term “scientific romance” in some of his novels. The contemporary use of the term also includes authors who, like the original “Scientific Romance writers”, do not consider themselves to be science–fiction or scientific–romance authors. English historian Ronald Wright, for instance, wrote the Wells pasticheA Scientific Romance: A Novel.

The modern use of the term might superficially seem related to the rise of the “Steampunk” punk sub–genre, but there are notable differences between the two: modern “scientific romances” typically take a distinctly more nostalgic or romanticized view of the era than Steampunk, and also often involve the future rather than the past, albeit a future based on Victorian or Edwardian sensibilities. Modern Scientific Romances are not of any form of “punk” orcyberpunk.

Science fiction is considered a form of fiction that developed in the XX–th century and deals with principally with the impact of actual or imagined science upon society or individuals.

The term “Science fiction” is more generally used to refer to any literary fantasy that includes a scientific factor as an essential orienting component. Such literature may consist of a careful and informed extrapolation of scientific facts and principles, or it may range into far-fetched areas flatly contradictory of such facts and principles.

In either case, plausibility based on science is a requisite, so that such precursors of the genre as Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel “Frankenstein”, or the “Modern Prometheus” (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ (1886) are science fiction, whereas Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (1897), based as it is purely on the supernatural, is not.

1) Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel “Frankenstein” or “Modern Prometheus” (1818)

2) Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ (1886)

3) Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (1897)

1) Mary Shelley (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish Percy Shelley's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley’s achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser–known works such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner'sCabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46) support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.

2) Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best–known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 26 most translated authors in the world. He has been greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he «seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins.

3) Abraham «Bram» Stoker (November 8, 1847 – April 20, 1912) was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.

Dracula is an 1897 epistolary novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampireCount Dracula. It was first published as a hardcover in 1897 by Archibald Constable and Co. Dracula has been assigned to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel and invasion literature. Structurally it is an epistolary novel, that is, told as a series of letters, diary entries, ships' logs, etc. Literary critics have examined many themes in the novel, such as the role of women in Victorian culture, conventional and conservative sexuality, immigration, colonialism, postcolonialism and folklore. Although Stoker did not invent the vampire, the novel's influence on the popularity of vampires has been singularly responsible for many theatrical, film and television interpretations since its publication.

Science fiction was made possible only by the rise of modern science itself, notably the revolutions in: 1) astronomy; 2) physics; 3) computer.

Aside (окрім) from the age-old genre of fantasy literature, which does not qualify, there were notable precursors:

1. imaginary voyages to the Moon or to other planets in the XVIII–th century;

2. and space travel in Voltaire’s “Micromegas” (1752).

Alien cultures in Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726), and science–fiction elements in the XIX–th century stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Fitz–James O’Brien.

However, science fiction proper began toward the end of the XIX–th century with the scientific romances of Jules Verne, whose science was rather on the level of invention, as well as the science–oriented novels of social criticism by H. G.Wells.

The development of science fiction as a self–conscious genre dates from 1926 when Hugo Gernsback, who coined the portmanteau word scientifiction, founded Amazing Stories magazine, which was devoted exclusively to science–fiction stories. Published and other pulp magazines with great and growing success, such stories were not viewed as serious literature but as sensationalism.

With the advent in 1937 of a demanding editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., of Astounding Science Fiction (founded in 1930) and with the publication of stories and novels by such writers as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction emerged as a mode of serious fiction. Ventures into the genre by writers who were not devoted exclusively to science fiction, such as Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, and Kurt Vonnegut also added respectability.

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide–ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Huxley spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.

By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank, and highly regarded as one of the most prominent explorers of visual communication and sight–related theories as well.

Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as «Jack», was a British novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Ireland. He is well known for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer of the 20th century. He wrote such works as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse–Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blending satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

A great boom in the popularity of science fiction followed World War II. The increasing intellectual sophistication of the genre and the emphasis on wider societal and psychological issues significantly broadened the appeal of science fiction to the reading public. Serious criticism of the genre became common, and, in the United States particularly, science fiction was studied as literature in colleges and universities. Magazines arose that were dedicated to informing the science–fiction fan on all aspects of the genre. Some science–fiction works became paperback best–sellers.

Science fiction was made possible only by the rise of modern science itself, notably the revolutions in astronomy and physics. But such kind of things as laser, cells, spaceships, computers, and many other facilities appear had they not been predicted by men of letters.

Besides, impact of actual or imagined science upon societies or individuals has always been in spotlight. Sometimes it is very difficult to say what it is: prediction or fantasy. Nobody knows what can happen, and nobody knows the future. That’s why nobody can say will we have our beautiful future or horrible. Sometimes science fiction it is broadcast.

Besides such acknowledge masters of the genre as Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov, science–fiction writes of notable merit in the postwar period included A. E. Van Vogt, J. G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Brain Aldiss, Frederik Pohl, Frank Herbert and others. These writers’ approaches included predictions of future societies on Earth, analyses of the consequences of interstellar travel, and imaginative explorations of form of intelligent life and their societies in other worlds. Radio, television, and motion pictures have reinforced the popularity of such kind of genre as sciencefiction.

Heroes of R. Bradbury and Arthur Clarke and many other authors included in this book travel in space, fight and make treaties with other civilizations but they always stay humane, open-minded, and earthly.

Sciencefiction learn us believe in good predictions and beautiful future.