Science Fiction: Discussion I

Science Fiction is usually hinged on space travel, time travel or alien invasions.

The setting could be future or historical past. It could also be outer space with alien inhabitants. It includes application of scientific principles and tests their application and strength in extraordinary conditions. It could also test hypothetical conditions like ‘faster-than-light –travel’ or a world with super-intelligent robots. Wikipedia associates science fiction with ‘speculative fiction’. It is the writing about alternative possibilities

Earliest examples of science fiction could be Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. With the onset of comparatively new technologies like ‘electricity’, ‘telegraph’ and powered transportation Jules Verne and HG Wells became popular.

In the early twentieth century, pulp magazines helped develop a new generation of American writers. The tone was set by the magazine Amazing Stories founded by Hugo Gernsback. Writers called Futurians included Isaac Asimov and Damon Knight.

Nomenclature

Forrest J Ackerman publicly used the term ‘sci-fi’ at UCLA in 1954, though Robert A Heinlein had used it in private correspondence six years earlier.

By the 1970s, critics such as Terry Carr and Damon Knight used ‘sci-fi’ to distinguish hack-work from serious science fiction and around 1978, Susan Wood introduced the pronunciation ‘skiffy’.

Peter Nicholls writes that SF is the preferred abbreviation within the community of SF writers and readers.

Soft and Social SF

The description soft SF includes works based on social sciences such as psychology, economics, political science, sociology and anthropology. Authors include, Ursula K Le Guin and Philip K Dick. The stories focus on character and emotion. It branches off into Utopian and Dystopian stories.

Hard SF

Hard Science fiction is characterized by rigorous attention to detail in quantitative sciences especially physics, astrophysics and chemistry. In fact, Arthur C Clarke accurately predicted geostationary communication satellites.