Lecture 7分析和总结最新分析和总结.docxVIP

The 20th -Century British Literature Lecture 7 Science Fiction and Fantasy by Luo Lianggong Brief Introduction Definition Science fiction is a popular modern branch of prose fiction that explores the probable consequences of some improbable or impossible transformation of the basic conditions of human (or intelligent non-human) existence. This transformation need not be brought about by a technological invention, but may involve some mutation of known biological or physical reality, eg. time travel, extraterrestrial invasion, ecological catastrophe. Science fiction is a form of literary fantasy or romance that often draws upon earlier kinds of utopian and apocalyptic writing. The term itself was first given general currency by Hugo Gernsback, editor of the American magazine Amazing Storiefsrom 1926 onwards. Before that such works were called scientific romances by H. G. Wells and others. Several early precedents have been claimed for this genre, especially Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818), but true modern science fiction begins with Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). Once uniformly dismissed as pulp trash, sci-fi gained greater respect during the 1950s. Sci-fi has also had an important influence on postmodernist fiction by writers not devoted to this genre alone like Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Doris Lessing. Distinction between Sci-fi and Fantasy 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 technol