Sci-Fi: Brief Look to the History of the Genre

Science fiction is still a popular genre today. Breathtaking stories are the motif of many TV series and movies. (We usually think of space adventures or fantastic items.)

So, what did this genre have before it really became a genre? In this article, I briefly analyze the history of the Sci-Fi genre and examine how it developed.

Let's begin!

Futuristic fiction and scientific breakthroughs that may have resulted from technological advances first appeared in the late 1700s, with early versions being adapted –somewhat awkwardly– within preexisting categories and storytelling frames.

The utopian fantasy genre, whose main story structure was an imaginary future trip, was a genre that was favorable to Sci-Fi theory.

Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis, and Tommaso Campanella's La Citta'del Sole are the great early examples of Sci-Fi theory.

Scientific and technical progress was considered in most subsequent utopian fantasies, but they were consigned to a secondary position while those involved in social, religious, and political transformation gained a central position.

The most severe variants of the imaginary trip collided with the traditional religious fantasy style of the dream narrative. Although imaginary trips in the 17th and 18th centuries found it feasible to transcend intergalactic space, their technologies became dreamlike. Until the 1890s, having a dream was still the only possible realistic way of getting access to the future.

Another natural sciences movement forefather, Johannes Kepler, was the first to portray a serious scientific argument – the Copernican hypothesis of the solar system – as visionary fiction. In A Dream (1634), he makes an intriguing effort to imagine how life on the moon would have evolved to accommodate the lengthy day-night period.

Because the Christian Church had integrated Aristotle's geocentric cosmology into its religion-based worldview, the theory became an essential pioneer of science in the fight against Christian belief.

In Protestant England, such debates were less hazardous than in Catholic France. Pierre Borel's A New Discourse Proving the Plurality of Worlds (1657) and Cyrano de Bergerac's The Other World, two works that were published, which prepared the way for Bernard de Fontenelle's extremely popular Discussion of the Plurality of Worlds (1686). 

Fontenelle's modification of the traditional debate into a low-key and sarcastic "debate" was intended to deflect any criticism but it also paved the way for more lifelike visionary fiction to emerge. Furthermore, such narratives were restricted throughout the 18th century by an absence of realistic storytelling mechanisms capable of expanding the mental boundaries of space and time.

While most novelists were okay with the moon as an intergalactic destination, Athanasius Kircher's Ecstatic Journey (1656) established a trend of more expansive cosmic journeys.

Cosmic travel, which encompasses all of the planets in the solar system, has evolved into a hybrid sub-genre that combines religious and scientific visions while also including utopian and apocalyptic symbolism within the same framework. Even when the perception took the shape of a trip through space, aiming to explain a cosmos in which the sun was simply one star, it had no choice but to take the form of visual fantasy.

Traditional narrative concepts failed to adapt to the job of critical conjecture due to a number of obstacles. Even in their most sincere utopian form, travelers' tales were contaminated with chronic silliness that grew as the journeys expanded into areas unreachable to ships and people.

Even the most obscenely symbolic dreams were, by definition, ghosts of the creative mind that were obliterated by reawakening. The deliberate artificiality of their conventional milieux and exemplary protagonists inhibited the transition of moral tales into Voltairean contes philosophiques.

As the development philosophy made the future a visionary region suitable for study, these issues grew more evident.

After Louis-Sebastien Mercier's The Year 2440 (1771), which prompted more cynical accounts of futurity, such as Cousin de Grainville's The Last Man (1805), the only noticeable option to the subconscious as a method of obtaining access to the future was sleeping for a long period of time.

If the information gathered could not be transferred to the present, it would be of little use to the current storyteller.

During the 19th century, the difficulty of establishing and developing proper narrative frameworks for scientific contes philosophiques naturally grew, and it was not simply overcome.

So, this is the brief look at the origin of the Sci-Fi. There will be more articles about this genre, like a series of articles. This is the first of many of them.

I hope you liked it! See you in another article!