© 2006 G.N. Jacobs
Back to Welcome Screen – Click Here!
Really? Science Fiction is dying? Who says! Enjoy Part 1!
Science Fiction as a separate genre is dying. Yes, I appreciate the irony of a genre writer calling out one of his primary genres, science fiction, as flopping on the deck. No, I’m not biting the hand that feeds, not when you consider that SF writers like their close kin fantasy and horror writers are masters of the Genre Cuisinart. We blend everything to the consistency of applesauce and whatever we put in that’s new revitalizes our stories if not the genres with which they are labeled.
So while the stories will continue it will simply be more and more incorrect to label them as science fiction, thus a genre dies. I can think of at least three reasons why science fiction is dying and will be folded back into the adventure and fantasy fiction that primarily spawned it. There may be more, but these three will do for now.
First, science fiction never really existed as a separate genre, serving as a socially and politically safe setting for otherwise illegal or radical muckraking.
Second, our technology advances daily driving us to the point where technology we can’t yet replicate is no longer a wonder inspiring fear and awe, but knowledge we simply don’t have, yet, ending the need for a genre dedicated to exploring the future.
Third, the pseudo-genre of science fiction is choking under repetitive licensed fiction that may be driving the inspiration that would keep SF alive elsewhere.
According to most scholars, science fiction begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. They have a case. A story about a mad scientist and his electrically charged golem gone postal told on a rainy night in 1805 seems like a good place to start.
But, while Frankenstein is the first recorded use of a scientific means (electricity) to animate a golem, magical golems had been roaming literature for centuries. This shows that science fiction acted as a magnet grabbing elements from other genres even from its inception. In this case, fantasy was thoroughly looted, showing why SF and Fantasy are so closely linked as two sides of the same coin where magic and technology are interchangeable for telling similar stories.
If science fiction is merely a setting overlaid on politically charged stories from other genres then it follows that dating the pseudo-genre from Frankenstein is incorrect from a certain point of view. You could make the same case for birthing science fiction from Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels which both predate the Creature by several decades or even a century at least.
These two books are vastly different works with one feature in common, social commentary. Moore directly made a political statement that he named Utopia after the Greek word for No Place. Swift made a children’s fantasy about large people and small people and Gulliver who saw and recorded it all.
BREAK FOR PART 2 (Take me out to the ballgame! Sorry, but do take a stretch)
Back to Welcome Screen – Click Here!
Forward to Part 2 – Click Here!
