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James John Bell

Document Type

Essay

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Science fiction, as a genre of popular fiction, can trace its roots as far back as the 2nd century AD, where fantastical worlds were conjured up in order to comment on current beliefs. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1996) outlines a very specific ancestry:

    [Science Fiction] is a descendant of the type of prose fiction sometimes referred to as Lucianic Satire (after Lucian of Samosata, a Greek writer of the 2nd century AD). Lucianic Satire -- also commonly known as "Menippean Satire" after an earlier writer, Menippus, whose works are now lost -- is a kind of fiction which tends to the fantastic but also puts considerable emphasis on the discussion and dramatization of ideas…. In Lucian's fictions, the ideas discussed, and frequently lampooned, were those of Classical Greek philosophers, many of whom were exponents of early "science". (13)

In the 17th century, such tales were slugged with many different names, like "utopian fiction," and dealt with the technologies spawned by the discovery of science (formerly known as the "mechanical philosophy"). It was in the 18th century that realist authors discovered the future. Scholars point to L'An 2440 (translated as Memoirs of the Year 2500) written by Louis Sebastien Mercier in 1771 as the first popular "future novel." The truly "first" science fiction novel noted by scholars is Mary Shelley's Gothic horror tale, Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus (1818). The term "science fiction" didn't come along until pulp magazine editor Hugo Gernsback used the word "scientifiction" in April 1926 to describe a "Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe kind of story." The somewhat derogatory "sci-fi" was coined in the 1950s, by analogy with hi-fi. It was at this time that science fiction (SF) split with the pulps and blended science, technology, politics and the future into its own genre.

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