History of Science Fiction

Science Fiction as we know it today has quite a history. Its origins can be traced all the way back to the Copernican revolution. In the sixteenth century Nicolaus Copernicus wrote his On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs (1543). In this work, Copernicus argued that the sun did not revolve around the sun but in fact that it was the opposite. Now, he was not the first to argue this and he was making a fairly bold statement due to the fact that his theory went against the Catholic Church. His work however was the first to be based on scientific observation and recorded in a way that others could test his work. The Church was obviously not pleased with his argument and tried to stop the spread of such heresy in any way they could, which led to much persecution. Copernicus’s idea, however, continued to spread and by the seventeenth century most scholars, regardless of whether or not they believed it, had heard the theory (Roberts). The church did not stop persecuting those who believed or supported this theory and thus we have people like Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler. Galileo published his scientific work in 1632, was condemned by the inquisition and forced to recant. Kepler, as a protestant, avoided the direct fury of the Catholic Church but was harassed in other ways as he continued to refine Copernicus’s model. What the Copernicus and his revolution did was unprecedented; they went against the church’s authority and came out on top. In the words of Adam Roberts “The Copernican revolution is bound up with the ways in which science supplanted religion and myth in the imaginative economy of European thought; and sf emerges from, and is shaped by, precisely that struggle.” The victory of this revolution can be seen in several forms including the writing from that century. Especially in the writing of John Donne in his work Ignatius his Conclave. In this work, Donne, mocks the pope for continuing to persecute the new science. He places Copernicus in hell because “the Papists have extended the name, and the punishment of Heresie, almost to every thing” (Donne Quoted in Roberts). By the end of this satire Copernicus goes free and all the Jesuits are sent to colonize the moon. Critics do not like to place the beginnings of science fiction with Copernicus. They argue that sf is a counterfactual literature embodying a temporal imagination or that voyage into space is the genres defining feature. Making sf an embodiment of temporal imagination is not to say that it must happen in the future but that sf represents things “not as they are, but actually as they might be, whether in the future, in an alternative past or present, or in a parallel dimension” (Roberts). Critics such as Paul Alkon insist that the “impossibility of writing about the future was widely taken for granted until the eighteenth century” (Alkon). Roberts argues however, that the Copernican Revolution not only opened the universe up for science and literature but for time as well. “By opening up cosmological spatial scales, Copernican beliefs also challenged the chronological assumptions of European Culture.” (Roberts 9) . From here we jump all the way to the latter half of the nineteenth century to the works of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and the Industrial Revolution. Rapid industrial growth as well as the spread of technology led to “a new and radical idea began to hold: that the future could be very different from the past. From this basic notion emerged…Futuristic Fiction” (Evans 14). This literature included such works as Richard Jefferies’s After London, a novel set in post-holocaust London where the citizens have reverted to barbarism. The defining feature that “futuristic fiction sought to portray- either positively or negatively- [was] humanity’s social “progress” in years to come” (Evans 14). From this backdrop developed two strains of science fiction that are still in use today. Both seek to look into the future but go about it in differing ways and with different emphasis on science. First is the hard/ didactic strain of sf developed in the writings of Jules Verne. Here the science is the subject of the story. In fact, many of his works were written to be educational, using the fantastical nature of story to impart learning upon the reader. Examples of this can be seen in the use of geology and paleontology in Journey to the Center of the Earth and through the use of oceanography and marine biology in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne’s publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, is quoted about the nature of Verne’s work in saying that “The goal of this series is, in fact, to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format,….the history of the universe” (Evans 1988: 3). The second prominent strain of sf developed around this period comes from the work of H. G. Wells. This sect of the sf genre uses science as a means for plot progression but is not the subject, “science in the narrative process itself shifts from primary position to secondary, from subject to context” (Evans 1988b: 1). Wells used many of the topoi and tropes already contained within the genre and brought them new life with his stories. The majority of these stories looked at the impact of scientific discovery on humanity. “So soon as the hypothesis is launched, the whole interest becomes the interest of looking at human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that has been acquired” (Wells quoted in Evans). Examples of this can be seen in Wells use of the time-travel novel in The Time Machine (1895) and the mad-scientist topoi represented in two novels The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897). Both strains and authors have had a huge impact on the sf genre over the past century. Contained within these diverse works is a similarity and idea that is persistent in the genre and rather important to my argument. That is, that science fiction attempts to look into the future by examining the past and present. “Looking into the future” may be taken the wrong way so let me elaborate. Science fiction is a meeting zone for cultures to deal with problems. By imaging the future of a people, or all people, the writer is imagining how current conflicts or issues will develop or be resolved. If those issues happen to be with differing cultures or differing groups of any sort then sf is trying to predict cultural interaction. Due to the diverse nature of culture these predictions are affected by many things such as geography, power relations, history, and technology but to name a few. This is the base, and a fundamental drawing point, of sf today.