scholarly journals „Skrajny kwadrant gwiazdozbioru” – astronomia w fantastyce naukowej

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-76
Author(s):  
Mariusz M. Leś
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social Play ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Lucian Of Samosata ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
Scientific Hypotheses

As the author of the article claims, there exist close and lasting links between astronomy and science fiction genre. First and foremost, both of these phenomena developed in parallel since antiquity, and both have fiction at their centre as a socially established type of imagination. Scientific hypotheses use justified fabrication, and science fiction offers images of fictional cosmologies. Many writers of proto-science fiction brought astronomical concepts into social play. Among them were astronomers and philosophers who extensively used plot devices based on mythology or allegorical transformations: from Lucian of Samosata to Johannes Kepler. Space travel, beginning with Jules Verne’s prose, is an important part of the thematic resource of science fiction. Astronomy played an important role also in the beginnings of Polish science fiction, thanks to works of Michał Dymitr Krajewski and Teodor Tripplin. 

Arthur C. Clarke

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Westfahl
Keyword(s):  
Solar System ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Distance Communication ◽  
First Time

Despite extensive critical attention, Arthur C. Clarke’s distinctive science fiction has never been fully or properly understood. This study examines some of his lighthearted shorter works for the first time and explores how Clarke’s views regularly diverge from those of other science fiction writers. Clarke thought new inventions would likely bring more problems than benefits and suspected that human space travel would never extend beyond the solar system. He accepted that humanity would probably become extinct in the future or be transformed by evolution into unimaginable new forms. He anticipated that aliens would be genuinely alien in both their physiology and psychology. He perceived a deep bond between humanity and the oceans, perhaps stronger than any developing bond between humanity and space. Despite his lifelong atheism, he frequently pondered why humans developed religions, how they might abandon them, and why religions might endure in defiance of expectations. Finally, Clarke’s characters, often criticized as bland, actually are merely reticent, and the isolated lifestyles they adopt--remaining distant or alienated from their families and relying upon connections to broader communities and long-distance communication to ameliorate their solitude--not only reflect Clarke’s own personality, as a closeted homosexual and victim of a disability, but they also constitute his most important prediction, since increasing numbers of twenty-first-century citizens are now living in this manner.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 177-180
Author(s):  
Gary Westfahl
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Personal Problems

The conclusion first notes evidence of continuing interest in Clarke’s science fiction and speculates that future readers may especially appreciate his work for two reasons. First, as space travel becomes more commonplace, and more people are living in outer space, his plausible stories about space life may be of special interest to them. Second, in contrast to characters in other twentieth-century novels, who are primarily concerned with establishing and maintaining relationships, future readers, largely living in solitude, may better identify with Clarke’s isolated protagonists. Yet Clarke’s characters also seem unlike contemporary people in their calm focus on doing their jobs instead of obsessing about their personal problems or regarding themselves as victims. Yet this might also strike future readers as refreshing.

Ideology and Futurology in Early 20th-Century Britain: Wells, Haldane, Bernal, and Their Critics

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-56
Author(s):  
Peter J. Bowler
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Collective Mentality

This chapter studies the response of rationalist writers to the claims of theologians arguing that their ideology lacked any sense of a wider purpose to human life. It is argued that to replace the spiritual dimension of religion, authors such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, and J. D. Bernal appealed to the possibility that the human race could in future develop a collective mentality and spread this awareness throughout the cosmos by space travel. Their ideas thus anticipated themes developed by later science-fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke in his 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Disability and Narrative

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 568-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bérubé
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Radioactive Fallout ◽  
The State ◽  
Premature Aging ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
World War ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
Animated Films ◽  
The World

After a decade of working in disability studies, I still find myself surprised by the presence of disability in narratives I had never considered to be “about” disability—in animated films from Dumbo to Finding Nemo; in literary texts from Huckleberry Finn to Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays; and, most curiously, even in the world of science fiction and superheroes, a world that turns out to be populated by blind Daredevils, mutant supercrips, and posthuman cyborgs of all kinds. Indeed, I now consider it plausible that the genre of science fiction is as obsessed with disability as it is with space travel and alien contact. Sometimes disability is simply underrecognized in familiar sci-fi narratives: ask Philip K. Dick fans about the importance of disability in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and you'll probably get blank stares. But the Voigt-Kampff empathy test by which the authorities distinguish humans from androids was, Dick tells us, actually developed after World War Terminus to identify “specials,” people neurologically damaged by radioactive fallout, so that the state could prevent them from reproducing. That aspect of the novel's complication of the human-android distinction is lost in the film Blade Runner, but the film does give us an engineer with a disability that involves premature aging, which links him intimately to the androids who have life spans of only four years.

Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, The Bible, and We

Slavic Review ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 680-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Gregg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Political Satire ◽  
Moral Argument ◽  
Crystal Palace ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Human Fertility

“Prophetic” is a quality which few thoughtful readers would deny Zamiatin's We. For if its moral argument (the irreconcilability of “pure” communism and individual freedom) has, to a disturbing degree, been confirmed by the course of twentieth-century history, so have some of its boldest technological predictions (for example, stateenforced restrictions on human fertility, Communist-inaugurated space travel). Even its genre (an original blend of political satire and science fiction) has proven to be a prophecy of sorts, anticipating, as it does, the more celebrated satirical fantasies of Huxley and Orwell.

scholarly journals Świadomość czy algorytm? Ludzkie maszyny jako emanacje Frankensteina Mary Shelley w naukach kognitywnych oraz tekstach kultury

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krystian Saja
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
Full Knowledge ◽  
Conscious Thinking ◽  
Scientific Hypotheses

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is without doubt a popular science-fiction novel, which has inspired many generations of artists and creators in popular culture and mass culture. It has also become an inspiration for scientific studies in the field of robotics and cybernetics. Modern cognitive sciences are looking for the perfect pattern that will allow artificial intelligence to be achieved. An important problem for scientists was the lack of full knowledge about consciousness. We are able to recreate the structure of the human body in a machine, but we are not able to fully simulate the neural processes that would create human consciousness. This problem is perfectly illustrated by cultural works, including literature and cinematography. We see in them both the emanations of the motifs contained in Shelley’s novel and the realization of scientific hypotheses that shape our image of a conscious, thinking machine.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.P. Telotte
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Space Vehicles ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
World War ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
The World

This chapter surveys the body of science fiction cartoons that appeared in approximate parallel to a burgeoning SF literature during the first years of film and continuing to World War II. It situates this material within the production and exhibition practices of the film industry and links it to modernist aesthetics, emphasizing modernism’s primary concerns with revisioning both the world and the self. It then describes the key memes typically found in these films—space vehicles and space travel, robots and mechanical figures, aliens and alien worlds, and inventions and inventors—while also suggesting the broader impact of the cartoons. Through the comic treatment of these memes, it argues, animation helped to make the SF genre both more familiar and less threatening to a wide audience.

Animating the Science Fiction Imagination

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.P. Telotte
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
World War ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Short Films ◽  
The Future ◽  
Technological Developments

Before flying saucers, robot monsters, and alien menaces invaded the movies of the 1950s, there was already a significant body of animated science fiction, produced by such studios as Disney, the Fleischers, and Terrytoons. That work has largely been overlooked or forgotten, despite the fact that the same pre-World War II era that produced this group of short films also saw the more prominent development and flourishing of SF as a literary genre. This book surveys that neglected body of work to show how it helped contribute to the burgeoning SF imagination that was manifested in pulp literature, serials, feature films, and even World’s Fairs of the era. It argues that prewar cartoons helped to create a familiarity with the scientific and technological developments that were spurring that SF imagination and build an audience for this new genre. Demonstrating the same modernist spirit as SF literature and feature films, these cartoons adopted many of the genre’s most important motifs (rockets and space travel, robots, alien worlds and their inhabitants, and fantastic inventions and inventors), offered comic visions of the era’s growing fascination with science and technology, and framed that matter in a nonthreatening fashion. Popular animation thereby not only added another dimension to the SF imagination, but also helped prepare postwar audiences to embrace SF’s vision of the future and of inevitable change.

The Conquest of Space

2018 ◽  
pp. 43-72
Author(s):  
Gary Westfahl
Keyword(s):  
Solar System ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Potential Benefits

This chapter describes how Clarke’s science fiction consistently advocates, and vividly depicts, humanity’s future achievements in space. Without providing a consistent “Future History,” his stories collectively argue that humans will gradually colonize space stations, the moon, Mars, and other planets and moons, though humans may never advance beyond the solar system. Clarke unusually acknowledges the need for computers in space, and instead of featuring pioneering expeditions, he usually focuses on the everyday lives of space colonists, emphasizing both the perils of space life and its potential benefits, such as greater longevity. Living aliens are rarely encountered, though evidence of ancient aliens may be detected. Clarke’s major novel about human space travel, Imperial Earth (1975), explores life on Titan by chronicling a resident’s visit to Earth.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document