Fiction And Fiction: The Ideas Of Science Fiction

Science Fiction is a form of fantastic literature that attempts to portray, in rational or realistic terms, future times and environments that are different from our own. It will nevertheless show an awareness of the concerns of the times in which it is written and provide implicit commentary on contemporary society, exploring the effects, material and psychological; that any new technologies may have upon it. Any further changes that take place in this society, as well as any extrapolated future events or occurrences, will have their basis in measured and considered theory, scientific or otherwise. Science Fiction authors will use their strange and imaginative environments as a testing ground for new ideas, considering in full the implications

One of the best ways to envisage time, different from our own, to devise a temporal “laboratory” within which to test new ideas, is to look forward to the future. Science Fiction emphasizes its difference from fantasy by attempting to construct a rational frame work for anything that it describes.

Brian Aldiss defines Science fiction thus:

Science Fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science) and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or Post-Gothic mode”. (quoted by Cuddon: 791)

He also defines it more succinctly as "Hubris clobbered by nemesis".

Some Science Fictions are concerned with utopia and utopian visions, and also with dystopia. Others are set

There is no way in which these ancient texts can be meaningfully interpreted as Science Fiction, but they do offer a starting point for a more general form of fantastic literature that points out the way to the eventual emergence of the genre. But, of course, it was not until much, much later than Science Fiction would actually develop as a distinct branch of literature. I t is important to remember that for as long as human beings have been able to communicate ideas to one another, allegorical tales have existed as a useful testing ground for new ideas. However, it is only during the last two or three centuries that a recognizably modern scientific