Bastian Gogolin [e-mail]

Science Fiction

Science Fiction is the fictional treatment of the effects of science or future events on human beings. More
precisely, science fiction deals with events that did not happen, have not yet happened or are impossible to
happen now. It considers these events rationally in terms both of explanation and of consequences for the human
race. The most common subjects for science fiction are the future, travel through space or time, life on other
planets, and crises created by technology or alien creatures and environments.

The first major writer of science fiction in English, however, and the man who may be considered the father of
modern science fiction is H.G. Wells. More interested in biology and evolution than in the physical sciences and
more concerned about the social consequences of invention than the accuracy of the invention itself, Wells from
1894 on wrote stories of science invested with irony and realistic conviction. His reputation grew rapidly after
the publication of The Time Machine in 1895.

Time travelling is as like as space travelling a possibility to show the unreality, which is found in this kind of
literature. Referred to The Time Machine Wells is presenting time travelling as a result of scientistic
development. By this way it is easier for the reader to believe that such a kind of machine could really exist.

The subjects of science fiction have been touched upon by fantastic literature since ancient times. The
Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic dealt with a search for ultimate knowledge and the Greek myths of Daedalus with
the technology of flying just as there was the wish of flying to the moon. Trips to the moon were described by
figures as diverse as the French writer Cyrano de Bergerac and the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in the
17th century and the British philosopher and novelist William Godwin in the 19th, among others. Another
subject, the structure of better societies or better worlds, which goes back at least to the 4th century BC with
Plato's The Republic, was reintroduced and given a generic name when Sir Thomas More wrote "Utopia" in
1516. Stories of an imaginary voyage were usually written for satirical purposes; perhaps the finest example is
"Gulliver's Travels", written in 1726 by the English satirist Jonathan Swift. But science fiction could not have
existed in its present form without the recognition of social change at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
which was around 1750. The first great specialist of science fiction was the French author Jules Verne, who dealt
with geology and cave exploration in "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1864), space travel in "From the
Earth to the Moon" (1865) and "Off on a Comet" (1877), and the submarine and underwater marvels in "20,000
Leagues Under the Sea" (1870).

All in all science fiction is the lyrical way to present things and/or conditions which aren't possible at the present
moment. For the author it isn't compelling to give explanations