Frankenstein is often considered the first work of science fiction. The novel explores larger questions about science, free will and the question of what it means to be human.
Often called the first of its kind, Frankenstein paved the way for science fiction writing. Its depiction of a then impossible scientific feat has in our time become possible and is essentially recognizable in what we now refer to as bioengineering, biomedicine, or biotechnology.
Of more importance, however, is the challenge Mary Shelley’s novel presents to the ostensibly high-minded and well-intentioned hopes and promises of the scientist/technologist.
Finally, the fictional character, Victor Frankenstein, has come to serve as the poster child and whipping boy for all scientific and technological irresponsibility, so much so that thanks to him we are able to free ourselves and our scientists from any real responsibility, since none of us ever would or could be as monstrous as Frankenstein. ( Frankenstein as Science Fiction and Fact J.M. van der Laan)
Of more importance, however, is the challenge Mary Shelley’s novel presents to the ostensibly high-minded and well-intentioned hopes and promises of the scientist/technologist.
Finally, the fictional character, Victor Frankenstein, has come to serve as the poster child and whipping boy for all scientific and technological irresponsibility, so much so that thanks to him we are able to free ourselves and our scientists from any real responsibility, since none of us ever would or could be as monstrous as Frankenstein. ( Frankenstein as Science Fiction and Fact J.M. van der Laan)
The lasting impact of Frankenstein is largely due to the fact that Shelley combines the
Gothic genre with an investigation into the transgressions of scientific inquiry.
Mary Shelley’s tale of horror is not in the classical sense a story about ghosts or monsters, but rather an insight into the consequences of technological or scientific research.
A morally irresponsible science with dire costs is the basis of a vast number of science fiction novels.
Mary Shelley’s tale of horror is not in the classical sense a story about ghosts or monsters, but rather an insight into the consequences of technological or scientific research.
A morally irresponsible science with dire costs is the basis of a vast number of science fiction novels.
Let's start by distinguishing it from other fiction:
- On one side lies fantasy, the realm of the impossible.On the other side lie all the forms of fiction that purport to represent the actual, whether past or present. Science fiction's domain is the possible.
- Its territory ranges from the present Earth we know out to the limits of the possible universes that the human imagination can project, whether in the past, present, future, or alternative time-space continuums.
- Therefore science fiction is the only literature capable of exploring the macrohistory of our species, and of placing our history, and even our daily lives, in a cosmic context.
( Science Fiction: The Early History by H. Bruce Franklin. Click HERE for full )
Easy definitions of Science Fiction (Brittanica.com)
Science fiction is a modern genre. Though writers in antiquity sometimes dealt with themes common to modern science fiction, their stories made no attempt at scientific and technological plausibility, the feature that distinguishes science fiction from earlier speculative writings and other contemporary speculative genres such as fantasy and horror. The genre formally emerged in the West, where the social transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution first led writers and intellectuals to extrapolate the future impact of technology. By the beginning of the 20th century, an array of standard science fiction “sets” had developed around certain themes, among them space travel, robots, alien beings, and time travel (see below Major science fiction themes). The customary “theatrics” of science fiction include prophetic warnings, utopian aspirations, elaborate scenarios for entirely imaginary worlds, titanic disasters, strange voyages, and political agitation of many extremist flavours, presented in the form of sermons, meditations, satires, allegories, and parodies—exhibiting every conceivable attitude toward the process of techno-social change, from cynical despair to cosmic bliss.
Science fiction has antecedents that stretch back at least two thousand years
But science fiction as a body of literature--and movies, graphic art, comic books, radio shows, futuristic exhibits, TV serials, video game machines, computer games, virtual reality, and so forth--is a new phenomenon.
It is an expression of only modern technological, scientific, industrial society, appearing when preindustrial societies are transformed by an industrial revolution.
Indeed, industrial society creates not just the consciousness characteristic of science fiction but also the very means of physically propagating science fiction in its various cultural forms, even before it was beamed as images on movie and video screens.
For science fiction, like other forms of literature typical of industrial society, is propagated in mass-produced magazines and books, which require advanced manufacturing and distribution as well as a large literate audience.
All this is very recent. The word "scientist" appeared for the first time in 1840, as a deliberate coinage. The term "science fiction" was used first in 1851 (in Chapter 10 of William Wilson's A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject): "Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true."
In the period of modern science, technology, and science fiction, which began with the Industrial Revolution just over 200 years ago, the rate of technological change has been exponential. Modern consciousness therefore is radically different from that of the peoples who inhabited the planet before the emergence of science fiction.
So my key definition is this: Science fiction is the major non-realistic mode of imaginative creation of our epoch. It is the principal cultural way we locate ourselves imaginatively in time and space.
Francis Bacon, the so-called father of modern science, used fiction to show the wonders that could be achieved using his inductive method of scientific experimentation. In his New Atlantis (posthumous 1627) he describes the discovery of a utopian society based on experimental science, including the development of "New Artificiall Metals," vivisection, genetic manipulation, telescopes, microscopes, telephones, factories, aerial flight, and submarines.
During the 17th century, technological and social change were accelerating so rapidly that they could be experienced within a person's lifetime. It would soon become possible to imagine an historical future qualitatively different from the past or the present.
Prior to this, there had never been a fiction set in a future period of human history. The closest had been millennial imaginings that had pictured the replacement of human history by God's kingdom. The first known fictions even vaguely set in future time are Francis Cheynell's six-page political tract Aulicus: His Dream of the King's Second Coming to London (1644) and Jacques Guttin's Epigone, Story of the Future Century (1659). Fully developed fictions set in the future would not appear until well into the 18th century.
During the 18th century, some authors took a bleak view of the ever-accelerating technological and social change.
- In Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift presents both an extended parody of experimental science and a vision of a terrifying superweapon, a flying island used by its rulers literally to crush any earthly opposition to their tyranny.
- Voltaire took a similar stance in Micromégas (1732), notable as the first known story of visitors from other planets: two giants, one from Saturn and one from a planet of the star Sirius, who mock the follies of the diminutive earthlings.
But science was not to be halted by warnings and ridicule. The following year Benjamin Franklin reported to the Royal Society his experimental control of electricity. Within a few decades, quantitative change would become qualitative; in other words, there would be a true Industrial Revolution.
On the eve of the resulting political revolutions in America and France, Louis-Sébastian Mercier's remarkable The Year 2440 (1770) foresees a marvelous society that worships science, with the telescope and the microscope central to each youth's first communion.
By the end of the 18th century and the opening of the 19th, industrial capitalism was beginning its conquest of the world. Modern science was providing the technological means to develop large factories, rapid large-scale transportation, and new energy sources.
Under industrial capitalism, vast numbers of people were soon spending their lives working for a handful of capitalists who owned everything the people produced, including the factories, coal mines, railroads, and ships. Not only were the workers thus alienated from the means of production and their own products, but they also found themselves increasingly alienated from nature, from each other, and from their own essence as creative beings. Human creativity now appeared in the form of monstrous alien forces exerting ever-growing power over the people who had created them.
From this matrix emerged what Brian Aldiss has so aptly labeled "the first great myth of the industrial age" in the form of a novel that many now accept as the progenitor of modern science fiction: Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
Then, less than a decade after Frankenstein, Shelley created one of the first science fiction visions of the end of the world; the title character of her The Last Man (1826) wanders alone over a dead planet, sampling the useless achievements of all human society. Mary Shelley set this scene in the year 2100. ( Science Fiction: The Early History by H. Bruce Franklin. Click HERE for full )
Frankenstein as Science Fiction
Though Brian Aldiss was not the first to detect a link between Mary Shelley and science fiction, his ground-breaking argument in Billion Year Spree (1973) for Frankenstein (1818) as the ur-text of the genre is directly or indirectly responsible for much of the currency that this idea has enjoyed for more than a quarter century.
Frankenstein remains most widely accepted as the founding text of science fiction, and it seems to me that the arguments of Aldiss and other Mary-Shelleyans remain persuasive. Though some literary elements prominent in sf are doubtless as old as literature itself, I do not think one can name an important text earlier than Frankenstein that contains every major formal characteristic that can reasonably be held to mark science fiction as a genre.
Frankenstein remains most widely accepted as the founding text of science fiction, and it seems to me that the arguments of Aldiss and other Mary-Shelleyans remain persuasive. Though some literary elements prominent in sf are doubtless as old as literature itself, I do not think one can name an important text earlier than Frankenstein that contains every major formal characteristic that can reasonably be held to mark science fiction as a genre.
It is entirely appropriate that Brian Aldiss should have worked so hard to establish Frankenstein as the foundation-stone of the modern genre of science fiction; the underlying world-view of the novel entitles it to that position. Its only significant competitor in terms of content is Willem Bilderdijk's A Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and Discovery of a New Planet (1813), which is far less plausible and was far less influential, remaining untranslated into English until 1989. (The third book of Jonathan Swift's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, 1726, must be disqualified on the grounds that its vitriolic parody of the activity and ambitions of scientists alienates it completely from the kind of proto-scientific world-view which Mary Shelley is ready to embrace, albeit in desperately anxious fashion.) On the other hand, given the nature of the most common interpretations of the text, it is by no means surprising that Isaac Asimov should have felt that the technophilic optimism of his work -- which was, of course, central to the historical development of genre science fiction -- was framed in frank opposition to a 'Frankenstein syndrome'. The central myth of Frankenstein seemed to Asimov to be an ideative monster, which must be slain by heroic and sinless robots for the benefit of future generations.
Ambivalent attitudes to science are not particularly unusual in works of speculative fiction. A great deal of the fiction nowadays categorized as science fiction is horrific, and much of it is born of a fear or even a deep-seated hatred of the scientific world-view, whose acknowledged intellectual triumph over older concepts of natural order seems to many observers to be unedifying and undesirable. Given this, it would not necessarily be inappropriate to trace the origins of the genre back to a science-hating ancestor -- but it is not at all clear that the author of Frankenstein set out with {49} the intention of attacking or scathingly criticizing the endeavours of science, even though many modern readers think that the text carries a bitterly critical moral. ( Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction
In much the same way, Mary Shelley repudiates the fantastic and Gothic prehistory of her novel when in the first chapter of the main text, which follows Walton's introductory letters. Victor is moved by an electrical experiment modeled on Franklin's to renounce his early interest in mystical, pre-scientific thinkers like Cornelius Agrippa and Albertus Magnus; in the following chapter he enters the university and begins the study of modern chemistry instead.
From this point onward, the text explicitly operates under the science-fictional protocols that are stubbornly alternative to both known reality and unknowable impossibility; and its first readers must have regarded the monstrous creature very much as we regard Asimov's robots. (Hail Mary: On the Author of "Frankenstein" and the Origins of Science Fiction)
Ambivalent attitudes to science are not particularly unusual in works of speculative fiction. A great deal of the fiction nowadays categorized as science fiction is horrific, and much of it is born of a fear or even a deep-seated hatred of the scientific world-view, whose acknowledged intellectual triumph over older concepts of natural order seems to many observers to be unedifying and undesirable. Given this, it would not necessarily be inappropriate to trace the origins of the genre back to a science-hating ancestor -- but it is not at all clear that the author of Frankenstein set out with {49} the intention of attacking or scathingly criticizing the endeavours of science, even though many modern readers think that the text carries a bitterly critical moral. ( Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction
In much the same way, Mary Shelley repudiates the fantastic and Gothic prehistory of her novel when in the first chapter of the main text, which follows Walton's introductory letters. Victor is moved by an electrical experiment modeled on Franklin's to renounce his early interest in mystical, pre-scientific thinkers like Cornelius Agrippa and Albertus Magnus; in the following chapter he enters the university and begins the study of modern chemistry instead.
From this point onward, the text explicitly operates under the science-fictional protocols that are stubbornly alternative to both known reality and unknowable impossibility; and its first readers must have regarded the monstrous creature very much as we regard Asimov's robots. (Hail Mary: On the Author of "Frankenstein" and the Origins of Science Fiction)
The focus of Mary Shelley’s insight into scientific overreaching is that the yearning for knowledge, even when expressed through a scientist leads only to tragedy and breaches boundaries that are forbidden and better left untouched.
Science, steeped in the Romantic need to transcend society, when seen in the harsh reality that Shelley invokes, fails to bring any good into the world, or to add enlightenment. (Gothic Science Fiction – a beginning by Lobke Minter)
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