- What is science fiction?
- Origin of science fiction
- Science fiction features
- Science fiction examples
- Science fiction elements
We explain what science fiction is and what its elements are. Also, origin, characteristics and examples of science fiction.
What is science fiction?
Science fiction is a subgenre of fiction literature (narrative, mainly), cultivated from the 20th century on in various printed media and with different audiences and acceptance margins, whose principle lies in the creation of speculative stories about the impact of the science and the technology in the life of human being.
Science fiction is traditionally thought of as a genre that dreams of future worlds and future technological capabilities, a consideration that makes the genre rely heavily on a divinatory ability, such as that attributed to Jules Verne, a writer who predicted balloon trips and in submarine in their novels of adventures.
However, the science fiction proposal is much more complex. The range of topics you are usually interested in ranges from dystopian futures and societies future, to parallel worlds, robots, interstellar travel or in the weather, virtual realities, alien cultures or physical dilemmas of the reality known. Any topic that raises a fictional story sustained in the extrapolation (exaggeration, assumption, theorization) of the discourse of science and technology can belong to this narrative genre.
Science fiction authors have extensively cultivated the genre of the story and of the novel, although it is possible to find works inscribed in this genre in the media of the movie theater, animation, comic and video games. This is due to the enormous popularity that the genre has acquired from the middle of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st, thus becoming one of the most popular and most commercially and artistically exploited popular imaginaries.
Origin of science fiction
Although there are literary works long before the creation of the genre but which could well be considered its predecessors, such as Frankenstein of Mary Shelley, the works of Jules Verne, and even the myths of the Jewish Golem and some stories from the Bible, it is considered the beginning of science fiction at the beginning of the 20th century.
In particular, the decades between 1920 and 1930, in which the great economic depression prompted the need for young generations to consume fantastic, escapist stories that allowed them to enter other parallel realities and escape their own. This is how the first magazines of comic books that popularize the genre, such as Amazing Stories by Hugo Gernsback.
This origin explains the aura of contempt and marginalization with which gender will be thought from now on, associating it with literatures escapists and low-income folk. However, in the following years authors of the literary caliber of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke will cultivate the novel and the science fiction story with great artistic merit.
Other authors who confirmed the place of this speculative genre in world literature were Phillip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Stanislav Lem, and even Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges.
Science fiction features
In general terms, we can identify science fiction as a genre characterized by being:
- Eminently narrative, whether long or short-lived, although there are also rare forays into the world of poetry.
- Interested in scientific and technological discourse, even as an excuse to question himself about reality, the weather, the life, the death and other transcendental matters of the humanity.
- Having a certain margin of technological prediction, attributable more than anything to the fact that this genre investigates the dreams and fantasies of humanity that science strives to make come true.
Science fiction examples
Some examples of science fiction literary works are:
- I robot by Isaac Asimov;
- Appointment with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke;
- Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury;
- I'm legend by Robert Matheson;
- The invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares;
- Neuromancer by William Gibson.
Science fiction elements
Each author of the genre addresses with Liberty your concerns and interests, as in any other. Still, it is possible to trace some of the recurring motifs of gender in a number of conflicts:
- Human inventiveness. The development of novel technologies that put the stability of life as we know it at risk, or that have a catastrophic, unfair or morally challenging impact on the way societies organize themselves, such as the biotechnology, time travel, etc.
- The space adventure. The exploration of universe and the positive, negative and surprising consequences that this entails, such as contact with extraterrestrial cultures, the formation of governments galactics, the encounter with the origins of the universe, the encounter with God.
- Unforeseen natural phenomena. The use of science and technology as allies of man in the fight to preserve his home (cataclysms) or to flee from extinction at the hands of unpredictable and unstoppable natural forces.
- Artificial intelligence The robotic and the exploration of artificial intelligence, with all the ethical and moral questions that it entails, if not the confrontation between the human creator and his creation.