Science-fiction often precedes science. Science-fiction offers a world full of information and entertainment. Fun typical aspects such as: robots, androids, cyborgs, interstellar flight, exploration of other planets and galaxies, discovery of the universe, super-powers, shiny guns, time-machines, exotic locations, incredible gadgets, faster than light travel, nanotechnology, extreme medicine, biotechnology, and immortality are among the most significant traits of Sci-Fi.
Sci-fi explores the dark aspects of the human psyche without having to resort to overused contexts. Cons of science fiction Inconsistency: Fantasy elements must be internally coherent. Also, a good story can be easily spoiled by an inconsistent fantasy element. All genres require research, but historical fiction and science-fiction need it the most. Extensive research and expert consultancy are a must. A lot of Sci-Fi novels blend together hard to make something different.
When fantasy is married to another genre, such as science fiction or history, sometimes it is hard to keep it convincing in the context of the other genre. Complexity: Sci-Fi elements require serious treatment to make fantasy elements sound plausible and convincing. Potential debating topics The use of science fiction films is successful in stimulating student curiosity in science. Visual media is an important and effective way in which scientific ideas are passed on to the general public.
Films and television blur the line between fact and fiction. Conclusion In science fiction literature, we typically find that humanity is spread out across the solar system and galaxy, using technology that is not possible according to the rules of physics -as we understand it today.
Looking beyond the robots, mutants, and spaceships in science fiction is really important, though. Within literature, it thrives in many formats—the novel, short story, picturebook, comic book, graphic novel, and poetry—and offers a blanket term for the supergenres of fantasy, science fiction, and other non-mimetic genres that may or may not be derivatives of these two, but either elude relational classification or have been established as distinct genre traditions.
These include, but are not limited to, utopia, dystopia, eutopia, horror, the gothic, steampunk, slipstream, alternative history, cyberpunk, time slip, magic al realism, supernatural romance, weird fiction, the New Weird, post apocalyptic fiction, myth, legend, traditional, retold, and fractured fairy tale, folktale, ghost fiction, New Wave fabulation, and other interstitial genres as long as they are informed by the non-mimetic impulse—that is, by the broadly conceived departure from verisimilitude to consensus reality.
This understanding of speculative fiction has been increasingly topical since the s, albeit mostly among readers, authors, and scholars who are either younger or speak from the minority perspective.
It has not yet won much support among seasoned researchers. For some it feels too baggy, covering a range of texts that slip beyond fantasy and science fiction. One criticism has been that speculative fiction explodes genre boundaries of science fiction and fantasy in ways that are not productive—for example, by including counterfactual narratives with past and present settings, elements of which have often been taken to disqualify the text as science fiction, or by embracing texts without magic or the supernatural, which traditionally would place them outside the perimeters of fantasy.
Other critics have observed that speculative fiction may refer to texts that are speculative socially, politically, or philosophically, but not scientifically. Or it may not employ any fantastic devices. In that latter sense speculative fiction has not yet been defined in a rigorous way.
This lack of taxonomic clarity, pointed out in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , accounts for why speculative fiction has been seen as too nebulous a tool for literary analyses based on close reading, which usually involve a consideration of generic boundaries, say, between post-apocalyptic dystopia and ghost fantasy or supernatural romance. Likewise, no entries on speculative fiction can be found in most genre-focused encyclopedias and companions.
Speculative fiction, it seems, is one of these new labels, complete with its own unique set of questions, assumptions, and foci. The dominant culture, however, is always challenged by the emergent culture, with its own structure of feeling based on a different set of lived experiences. The emerging culture, by contrast, has wholeheartedly owned the label of speculative fiction as a way to conceptualize its experience of new types of non-mimetic writing and to position them in a contiguous relation to older, ideologically loaded forms.
Comprising younger readers, authors, scholars, grassroots initiatives, online resources, fanzines, and more, this emergent culture draws from a different structure of feeling. In the model created by Pierre Bourdieu, field is a relatively autonomous domain of activity defined by its own field-specific rules of functioning, agents, and institutions.
Like any other field, the literary field is structured externally in relation to the somewhat abstract field of power—the space of relations of force between agents and institutions that wield the economic or cultural capital that allows them to claim dominance in different fields—and internally in relation to the principles of heteronomy and autonomy.
These indirectly correspond to the two poles in the field of power and may be thought of as the opposing ends on the spectrum of subordination of art to economic capital, as in the heteronomous principle, or rejecting it in favor of cultural capital, as in the autonomous principle.
Despite the difference between economic and cultural capital, however, any practices within a field, even these seemingly disinterested, are effectively economic practices in that they aim to maximize material or symbolic profit. Nevertheless, it was central especially in the early period when each genre fought for its own recognition and maximizing its own power within the field. This was happening through establishing genre-specific journals, organizations, conferences, presses, awards, courses, scholarship, and other initiatives.
There was little effort, however, to advocate for the collective empowerment of all non-mimetic genres within the field of literature. This move redrew the map of the literature field and reframed the power struggle within it.
First, it abandoned border wars among genres; their exclusivist definitions; and squabbles over claims to cognitive, artistic, or other primacy that have long been the feature of genre criticism. Third, adopting speculative fiction as a blanket term opened up the field of literature to fruitful interaction with other fields, including drama, film, visual arts, music, computer games, even science itself.
It is part of modern global culture in a way that the relatively isolated and largely Anglophone genre fields were not, at least not from the start. The field of speculative fiction resists stratification that was part of individual genre field dynamics, especially rankings from masterpieces to failures and the pitting of genre fiction against literary fiction.
Put otherwise, it offers a new way of allocating value by giving primacy to the system of relations within the field rather than to individual works themselves.
Even so, this trend is not without antecedents. It owes much to historically located traditions of critical reflection, especially the pioneering work of Judith Merril, Robert Scholes, Diana Waggoner, and Kathryn Hume. Feminists were perhaps the first to point out that conventional concepts of possibility and rationality used to define science fiction, fantasy, and other non-mimetic genres were limited and value laden. To project speculative fiction as a new space for articulating feminist theory and praxis was, of course, a political move.
It linked the cognitive estrangement effect of speculative fiction to priming the audience for questioning the dominant status quo and its androcentric biases. It also invested works of speculative fiction with the power, even responsibility, to voice alternative views that can move the world in the direction of gender equality. These authors used the textual power of speculative fiction to challenge the predominantly male literary establishment and patriarchal social reality—including the dominant androcentric traditions of science fiction.
But speculative fiction for these feminist authors meant something more than science fiction. The most socially transformative type of literature capable of capturing the modern, post-Einsteinian time-consciousness is, in his opinion, fiction set in the future that has a license to speculate about it.
His focus is different though. Within this framework, realism has clearly been the voice of the dominant, materialist tradition. He then locates its development diachronically, identifying three historically staggered and ideologically distinct forms of fabulation.
All these led to the emergence, sometime in the early 20th century , of structural fabulation. As this description suggests, the mutation of speculative fiction called structural fabulation transcends any single genre.
Indeed, Scholes is careful to note that not all science fiction qualifies as structural fabulation and admits that certain works of modern fantasy share a structural perception of the universe in which magic, religion, and science become indistinguishable.
Although he barely mentions other non-mimetic genres and implies that most fantasy may best be thought of as speculative rather than structural fabulation, Scholes deserves the credit for being the first to sketch out a spectrum of speculative fiction that encompasses three forms of fabulation across several genres and forms of time-consciousness.
If the argument for a larger field of speculative fiction was ahead of its time, Waggoner and Hume were among the first to theorize fantasy by placing it firmly within this broader tradition. Somewhat like Scholes, though not limited to fabulation or non-mimetic traditions alone, Waggoner proposes a classification of all Western literature into four broad classes of fiction depending on their treatment of the supernatural: pre-realistic literature, realism, post-realistic fabulation, and speculative fiction.
In these narratives the supernatural is real, as is the case in The Divine Comedy where the narrator experiences Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise as tangible places, not fundamentally divorced from ordinary reality.
Over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries , Waggoner then argues, the worldview that informed pre-realistic literature was superseded by one based on scientific materialism and skeptical empiricism. Since the supernatural was no longer accepted as part of the real world, it had no place in realistic fiction. Events that seemed supernatural were therefore explained away in realistic fiction as manipulation, coincidence, or illusion.
The problem with this approach, Waggoner notes, was that the narrowly defined realism disregarded other faculties than reason, especially the irrational yet nonetheless very real phenomena of the unconscious mind.
Realism thus offered a limited view of the human experience. The rise of sentimental fiction, the gothic, and other genres that began to move away from mimesis was a reaction to these restrictions. Put otherwise, in post-realistic fabulation, the supernatural was granted qualified reality: it was acknowledged as something that is psychologically and subjectively real only for some people. If post-realistic fabulation was thus able to handle descriptions of both everyday life and psychological phenomena in ways that realism was not, neither realism nor post-realistic fabulation considered the possibility that the supernatural might, in fact, be real.
Consequently, to claim that the supernatural—including different dimensions, extrasensory perception, different forms of non-human intelligence, existence, or powers, some of these dubbed as magic—can only refer to mere projections of the human mind overlooks the possibility that at least some of these might be objectively real, though unprovable or unmeasurable phenomena.
The emergence of speculative fiction, Waggoner concludes, was a development that provided a means by which otherwise realist texts can speculate on unprovable realities. And while speculative fiction comprises a number of non-mimetic genres, fantasy stands out among them, for in it the gap between the natural and the supernatural is the widest. According to Waggoner, fantasy must establish realistic credibility for the supernatural; if it does not, it fails not just formally but entirely, regardless of the quality of its writing.
As the most visionary genre of speculative fiction, fantasy is less constrained by the limitations of physical reality than other genres, especially science fiction, which is bound by the ideas of scientific plausibility. Nonetheless, her theorization of speculative fiction as a broad, multi-genre category that emerged at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in reaction to the representational limits of post-realist fabulation shares many affinities with the arguments made by Merril and Scholes.
Often cited as foundational works of fantasy criticism, each of these studies sought to arrive at an exclusive definition of fantasy, usually through isolating its outstanding examples or operational modes rather than describing the field at large.
Instead, Hume postulates that fantasy and mimesis are two impulses involved in the creation of all art. They are, she posits, two responses to reality and two epistemological orientations in any human activity. Suggesting instead that texts on each pole of the spectrum contain both realistic and nonrealistic elements, Hume proposes a synchronic taxonomy of literature based on its specific blends of mimetic and non-mimetic components: the literature of illusion that is primarily escapist; the literature of vision that engages the reader with new interpretations of reality; the literature of revision characterized by the dominance of the didactic component; and the literature of disillusion, in which reality is declared unknowable.
In each case, though, fantasy marks a deliberate departure from consensus reality; consequently, the works in which the fantastic impulse is dominant constitute a tradition of fiction opposed to that informed by the mimetic imperative.
As for Scholes, so too for Hume, the common aspiration of the works in this field is to wean the reader away from a limited perception of reality—whether for escape, education, enrichment, or sobering embarrassment.
Although insightful, the pioneering work on speculative fiction by Merril, Scholes, Waggoner, and Hume has been ignored by genre criticism to the extent that the re-emergence of the term in the early s can hardly be attributed to their direct influence. Nevertheless, there were larger trends operating in literary reflection on non-mimetic genres that made their merger into a field of speculative fiction almost inevitable.
The most important among these has been the variously articulated yet undeniable perception of family resemblance between fantasy and science fiction. The sense of empirical convergence of these genres, especially when set against mimetic fiction, has been shared by publishers, readers, and critics.
Specialized magazines, starting with Astounding Tales since , would publish stories across the generic range of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Authors would publish award-winning works in different non-mimetic genres—the fact recognized in the creation of the Nebula Award since curated by an organization called Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Scholars, finally, would often address fantasy and science fiction together, even though, as Gary K. Wolfe has noted in his Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship , fantasy and science fiction developed their own critical terminology largely apart from each other.
It was clear from its usage that the term included fantasy, science fiction, and horror. It was less clear what non-mimetic genres, if any, it excluded. Or on what grounds. Attracting scholars, authors, publishers, and fans of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other non-mimetic genres, the conference led to the founding, in , of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and the establishment of its periodical, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts since The fantastic as a shared multi-genre space was also validated in several reference works, starting with the much-celebrated Gary K.
One argument in favor of the use of the fantastic has been that it enables discussing modern and historic forms of fantastic literature. Another advantage has been that the fantastic better captures the flows of fantastic motifs and themes across various media, including radio, film, drama, computer games, poetry, even fan culture—cross-pollinations that are multidirectional and circulate through rather than merely flow out of the literary fantastic.
Examples of such studies are legion, from George Slusser and Eric S. Given all these advantages, the fantastic has been extensively used especially by fantasy scholars. Brian Attebery has drawn on it consistently.
The fantastic has also been embraced by many science fiction scholars—or embraced more widely than other supergenre labels including L. For one, it has been opposed by many science fiction scholars, from Suvin through Jameson, whose insistence on the unique cognitive value, epistemological gravity, and peculiar estrangement offered by science fiction have made them exclude fantasy, horror, and other non-mimetic genres from the science fiction field.
The term speculative fiction, while essentially gesturing at the territory staked by the fantastic, is free from the legacy of genre wars and hostile taxonomies. How and when its recent rise began is hard to say, but something happened around —something that surged up against genre boundaries that 20th-century criticism erected around different modes of narrative speculation based on preferences for different sets of tools.
This shift resists accurate description, and its significance will be contested. To Amazon, no shit. Humans have urges and needs, and Amazon exists to fulfill them. In Tales From the Loop , the titular Loop is a mysterious organization whose societal contributions shape the course of daily life; the startup Upload, in the show of the same name, seeks to trap paying customers in a simulated existence for all eternity.
Elsewhere, the institution interpenetrates reality, everywhere and nowhere at once: a Matrix-like simulation run by rich people in Bliss , the AI company in episode 4 of Solos. Behold the truest stand-in for Amazon. Autofac is a drone-delivery corporation, run entirely by machines, that populates the world with fake humans once the real ones die out, just so they have more customers to send products to.
At a certain point, the other big tech companies will have to make meta-science-fictional moves of their own. Apple TV already has its own burgeoning sci-fi empire, with three shows and counting, and Microsoft has sponsored a sci-fi anthology based on research from its own labs.
Why merely create the future, when you can also tell people how to live, breathe, and go to the bathroom in it? Tell whatever stories you want. Its catalog of rentables is, truth be told, unparalleled.
Costs more money to tap into, yes. And the best stuff is hard to find amid the rows and rows of agitprop. Real people. So the next time you scroll over to Solos , or Upload , or The Tomorrow War on Prime—a science fiction in which you accept your lot as powerless in the face of global domination—try this.
The more to the right you scroll, the weirder the stuff gets.
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