Sci-Fi History: Why Did Science Fiction Emerge?

Why did science fiction emerge? In Science Fiction: A Literary History, we are provided with an answer to that question. In this post, I’d like to discuss that answer and how it remains a part of our cultural psychology today. It’s a fascinating bit of history that helps put our current moment in context.

The Development of Science Fiction

In the second chapter of A Literary History, Roger Luckhurst, the book’s editor, discusses the cultural conditions in Britain and America in the late 19th century that led to the rise of the scientific romance, the precursor to science fiction.

The late 1800s were an interesting time. Significant technological innovations were changing the way people lived and perceived the world. These changes were part of a critical mass that led to the development and popularization of scientific romance stories.

“Why is the scientific romance one of these emergent genres? The other crucial contexts to consider are the significant shift of the cultural authority of science and the transformation of everyday life by electrical technologies after 1870.”

Luckhurst further notes:

“Perhaps even more significant was the visible transformation of everyday experience by technology. Steamships, newspapers, express trains, telegrams, and telephones compressed time and space, turning the globe into an interlinked network…Contemporary commentators on the late nineteenth century self-consciously regarded their era as one of restless innovation, a modernity that risked spiralling out of control. The future – its promises and cataclysms – seemed to be increasingly folded into the present.”

According to Luckhurst, it’s this restless innovation, fuelling the compression of space and time, that created the conditions for the emergence of science fiction. The genre was a reaction to major technological changes, its past and present necessarily intertwined with the future.

Folding the Future, And the Past, Into the Present

What stands out to me most about this description of science fiction’s original zeitgeist is that it’s so similar to our current zeitgeist. Indeed, much of A Literary History surprised me in this way. 

We are currently in an era of “restless innovation” in which “the future seems to be increasingly folded into the present.” One need not look far to see why and how. A gazillion apps exist today to help us with everything from work to sleep to meditation to tracking our menstrual cycles to meal planning and more. It’s a lot! And the proliferation of smartphones means we all have the entire compendium of human knowledge at our finger tips.

Talk about compression.

Indeed, the show Black Mirror can be rightly characterized as folding the future into the present, showing us that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. And that’s just one example.

Later, Luckhurst states:

“It was one of the key forms of commercial mass literature that turned the bewildering contradictions of this period into narrative form, particularly responding to scientific and technological breakthroughs, but often as much a symptom of processing these rapid changes as an attempt to diagnose them.”

As much as the genre back then helped writers and readers make sense of their brave new world, so it is for us today. We use it to take current trends and extrapolate them to their logical conclusions, taking into consideration the tendencies (good and bad) of humanity. We use it as a warning. We use it to show ourselves the way. And we use it as a mirror and a lens. And as much as it can be a reaction to the compressed nature of time and space in our world, we’ve lately been using it to make space for those who have historically been deprived of it.

So while the genre continues to evolve, and while humanity and society continue to evolve, it’s clear that the never-ending pace of technological progress has compressed us to the point of being stuck in a perpetual bewilderment. We are constantly trying to process these changes and diagnose them.

And that’s what I find so fascinating about this bit of history. It hasn’t changed. It’s history, but it’s also our present, and it’s certainly going to be our future. The fact that we worry so much about change is perhaps the only thing that ever stays the same.

Post updated July 2, 2024.