History of science fiction
Ancient Indian poetry such as the Hindu epic the Ramayana (5th to 4th century BCE) includes Vimana, flying machines able to travel into space or under water, and destroy entire cities using advanced weapons.
In the first book of the Rigveda collection of Sanskrit hymns (1700–1100 BCE), there is a description of "mechanical birds" that are seen "jumping into space speedily with a craft using fire and water ... containing twelve stamghas (pillars), one wheel, three machines, 300 pivots, and 60 instruments".
[7] One frequently cited text is the Syrian-Greek writer Lucian of Samosata's 2nd-century satire True History, which uses a voyage to outer space and conversations with alien life forms to comment on the use of exaggeration within travel literature and debates.
Typical science fiction themes and topoi in True History include travel to outer space, encounter with alien life-forms (including the experience of a first encounter event), interplanetary warfare and planetary imperialism, motif of giganticism, creatures as products of human technology, worlds working by a set of alternative physical laws, and an explicit desire of the protagonist for exploration and adventure.
One example is "The Adventures of Bulukiya", where the protagonist Bulukiya's quest for the herb of immortality leads him to explore the seas, journey to the Garden of Eden and to Jahannam (Islamic hell), and travel across the cosmos to different worlds much larger than his own world, anticipating elements of galactic science fiction;[18] along the way, he encounters societies of jinn,[19] mermaids, talking serpents, talking trees, and other forms of life.
[17][27] Other examples of early Arabic proto-science fiction include al-Farabi's Opinions of the Residents of a Splendid City about a utopian society, and certain Arabian Nights elements such as the flying carpet.
In John Gower's Confessio Amantis, for example, Alexander the Great constructs a flying machine by tying two griffins to a platform and dangling meat above them on a pole.
The name of the society stuck, giving rise to the Utopia motif that would become so widespread in later science fiction to describe a world that is seemingly perfect but either ultimately unattainable or perversely flawed.
It shows in a first scene the body of a broken huge ship, the greatest product of the prideful and foolish mankind that called it Leviathan, wandering in a desert world where the winds blow and the anger of the wounded Nature is; humanity, finally reunited and pacified, has gone toward the stars in a starship, to look for and to bring liberty into the light.
In his novel Kort verhaal van eene aanmerkelijke luchtreis en nieuwe planeetontdekking (Short account of a remarkable journey into the skies and discovery of a new planet) Bilderdijk tells of a European somewhat stranded in an Arabic country where he boasts he is able to build a balloon that can lift people and let them fly through the air.
John Leonard Riddell, a Professor of Chemistry in New Orleans, published the short story Orrin Lindsay's plan of aerial navigation, with a narrative of his explorations in the higher regions of the atmosphere, and his wonderful voyage round the moon!
It tells the story of the student Orrin Lindsay who invents an alloy that prevents gravitational attraction, and in a spherical craft leaves Earth and travel to the Moon.
[50] Unitarian minister and writer Edward Everett Hale wrote The Brick Moon, a Verne-inspired novella, first published serially in 1869 in The Atlantic Monthy, notable as the first work to describe an artificial satellite.
A mad scientist and villain called Black Bart makes an attempt to blackmail the world with a powder made of potassium, able to destroy the planet by turning its waters into fire.
One of the most successful works of early American science fiction was the second-best selling novel in the U.S. in the 19th century: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), its effects extending far beyond the field of literature.
Charles Curtis Dail, a Kentucky lawyer, published in 1890 the novel Willmoth the Wanderer, or The Man from Saturn, had his protagonist travel through the Solar System by covering his body with an anti-gravity ointment.
Czech playwright Karel Čapek's plays The Makropulos Affair, R.U.R., The Life of the Insects, and the novel War with the Newts were modernist literature which invented important science fiction motifs.
Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre produced a radio version of The War of the Worlds which, according to urban myth, panicked large numbers of people who believed the program to be a real newscast.
Once the horror at Hiroshima took place, anyone could see that science fiction writers were not merely dreamers and crackpots after all, and that many of the motifs of that class of literature were now permanently part of the newspaper headlines".
For the first time, an author could write science fiction full-time; Barry N. Malzberg calculated that producing 1,000 words a day would earn twice the national median income,[62][63] and Asimov stopped teaching at Boston University School of Medicine after making more money as a writer.
[64] The mainstream book companies' large print runs and distribution networks lowered prices and increased availability, but displaced the small publishers; Algis Budrys later said that "they themselves would draw little but disaster" from the science fiction boom of the 1950s they helped to begin.
[62] While book sales continued to grow, the magazine industry almost collapsed from the glut of new titles, shrinking from 23 in mid-1957 to six by the end of 1960, while authors like Heinlein, Clarke, Vonnegut, and Bradbury published through non-genre publications that paid at much higher rates.
With the help of Jack Kerouac, Burroughs published Naked Lunch, the first of a series of novels employing a semi-dadaistic technique called the Cut-up and postmodern deconstructions of conventional society, pulling away the mask of normality to reveal nothingness beneath.
Another milestone was the publication, in 1965, of Frank Herbert's Dune, a complex work of fiction featuring political intrigue in a future galaxy, mystical religious beliefs, and the ecosystem of the desert planet Arrakis.
Another was the emergence of the work of Roger Zelazny, whose novels such as Lord of Light and his famous The Chronicles of Amber showed that the lines between science-fiction, fantasy, religion, and social commentary could be very fine.
In Britain, the 1960s generation of writers, dubbed "The New Wave", were experimenting with different forms of science fiction,[39] stretching the genre towards surrealism, psychological drama and mainstream currents.
For the first time sexuality, which Kingsley Amis had complained was nearly ignored in science fiction, was given serious consideration by writers like Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Norman Spinrad, and Theodore Sturgeon.
Robert A. Heinlein switched from his Campbellian Future History stories to stylistically adventuresome, sexually open works of fiction, notably Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
As new personal computing technologies became an integral part of society, science fiction writers felt the urge to make statements about its influence on the cultural and political landscape.
Space opera writers have written work featuring cyberpunk motifs, including David Brin's Kiln People and Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series.
