Science fiction



Science fiction

Science fiction is a form of fiction which deals principally with the impact of imagined science and/or technology upon society or individuals.

|Table of contents [pic] |

|1 Scope |

|2 Term |

|3 Types of science fiction |

|3.1 Hard science fiction |

|3.2 Soft science fiction |

|3.3 Other types |

|4 History of science fiction |

|4.4 Forerunners of science fiction |

|4.5 Early science fiction |

|4.6 The Golden Age |

|4.7 The post-war era |

|4.8 The modern era |

|5 Fandom |

|6 Genres and subcategories |

|7 Related topics |

|8 Reference |

|9 External links |

Scope

Sometimes the characters involved are not even human, but are imagined aliens or other products of Earth evolution. The term is more generally used to refer to any literary fantasy that includes a scientific factor as an essential orienting component, and even more generally used to refer to any fantasy at all. Such literature may consist of a careful and informed extrapolation of scientific facts and principles, or it may range into far-fetched areas flatly contradictory of such facts and principles. In either case, plausibility based on science is a requisite, so that such precursors of the genre as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Gothic novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) are plainly science fiction, whereas Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), based purely on the supernatural, is not. Sometimes utopic and dystopic literature is also regarded as science fiction, which is accurate insofar as sociology also is a science.

Term

The earliest known usage of term "science fiction" is in 1851 (in Chapter 10 of William Wilson's A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject), in which he writes: "Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true."

However this appears to be an isolated usage and the term appears to have been recoined in the 1920s where it appeared in the Amazing Stories.

Types of science fiction

Hard science fiction

Hard science fiction, or hard SF, is a subgenre of science fiction characterized by an interest in scientific detail or accuracy. Many hard SF stories focus on the natural sciences and technological developments, although many others leave the technology in the background. Some authors scrupulously eschew such implausibilities as faster-than-light travel, while others accept such plot devices but nonetheless show a concern with a realistic depiction of the worlds that such a technology might make accessible.

Character development is sometimes secondary to explorations of astronomical or physical phenomena, but other times authors make the human condition forefront in the story. However a common theme of hard SF has the resolution of the plot often hinging upon a technological point. Writers attempt to have their stories consistent with known science at the time of publication. Interestingly, some hard science fiction stories are set in an alternate universe where different physical laws apply; however, in such cases the author makes use of current physics to design a universe that is at least potentially realistic.

Hard science fiction is largely a literary genre, as the complexities of physics rarely translate well to the screen. One of the notable exceptions is , however the movie still leaves out much of the examination of the physics, computer science, and other scientific analyses present in the novel version.

Well known authors often said to be practitioners of hard SF, include

• Poul Anderson

• Isaac Asimov

• Iain M. Banks

• John Barnes

• Stephen Baxter

• Greg Bear

• Gregory Benford

• David Brin

• Arthur C. Clarke

• Hal Clement

• Greg Egan

• Michael Flynn

• Robert Forward

• Robert Heinlein

• James P. Hogan

• Nancy Kress

• Larry Niven

• Paul Preuss

• Alastair Reynolds

• Kim Stanley Robinson

• Joan Slonczewski

• Allen Steele

• Jules Verne

Masamune Shirow (manga artist). His works often examine the impact of advanced future technology in society, particularly cybernetics and information networks. He is known for going into great technical and scientific detail, to the point of using numerous captions and footnotes to explain technical aspects to the reader or even suggest possible theories/implementations for fictional technology. This extends to his drawings, where he will sometimes make a note to explain the function of a stylistic feature of a weapon or robot. He has also created the Neurohard project, a world in the hard science fiction style to be used by him and other artists. Shirow's work is unique in that it develops in equally great depth the social/cultural aspects in a 'hard' style, again providing notes on ideas, philosophy, etc. and using a somewhat techical approach in discussing ethics and social issues. The Ghost in the Shell manga (but not the anime) is a good example of his serious work. Appleseed is another story featuring heavy use of advanced technology in which, ironically, the critical moment is resolved by clever use of an actual apple seed in the midst of hardcore robotic chaos.

See the article on Hal Clement for a description of how one hard science fiction author viewed his craft.

One science-fiction television show which has consciously attempted to portray physics correctly is J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5, albeit inconsistently especially in later seasons of its half-decade run. The sequel series, Crusade, went so far as to formally enter into a working partnership with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to ensure scientific accuracy. Certain dramatic elements such as sounds in space, visible lasers in a vacuum, etc., are probably to be expected or even demanded by the casual viewer not deeply familiar with the real science involved, and any television or film SF producer must tread a gray line between pleasing the lowest and highest common denominators in his audience. However, even in these cases, the producers came up with an explanations which attempted to produce a consistent physics (i.e. the sounds in space were background music and the lasers were not lasers but plasma bolts).

An example of a web-based hard science fiction project (where many people contribute different pieces of what becomes a coherent story) is Orion's Arm.

A fan organization that has grown up around Hard Science Fiction is General Technics, populated by scientists, technical folks, and others with a specific interest in this area. General Technics' name is taken from the organization that created a global-scale computer in John Brunner's novel, Stand on Zanzibar. General Technics, though concentrated in the American Midwest, has a global membership.

Soft science fiction

Soft science fiction is science fiction whose plots and themes tend to focus on philosophy, psychology, politics and sociology while de-emphasizing the details of technological hardware and physical laws. It is so-called 'Soft' Science Fiction, because these subjects are grouped together as the Soft Sciences or Humanities.

For instance, Frank Herbert in Dune, uses the plot device of creating a universe which has rejected conscious machines and has reverted to a Feudal organisation. Consequently Herbert uses the Dune saga to comment about the human condition and makes direct and accurate parallels to current socio-political realities.

As early as 1908 the famous United States author Jack London wrote The Iron Heel, a dystopic novel set in a future where a totalitarian capitalist state, controlled by a small ruling class of the very rich, crushed democracy and any form of liberty in the United States. Technological change was barely mentioned in this novel, and in short stories also based in this dark future. The stress was placed instead on class warfare and human emotions.

Soft Science fiction may explore the reactions of societies or individuals to problems posed by natural phenomena or technological developments, but the technology will be a means to an end, not an end itself.

Authors often thought of as exemplifying soft science fiction:

• Ray Bradbury

• Ursula K. Le Guin

• Frank Herbert

• Orson Scott Card

• Nancy Kress

• Lois McMaster Bujold

• Joan Vinge

• L. E. Modesitt, Jr

• David Zindell

• Georgia Byng

• Janusz A. Zajdel

• Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski

Space opera

For other meanings of this term see Space Opera (disambiguation).

Space opera is subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes romantic adventure, faster-than-light travel and space battles where the main storyline is interstellar conflict and character drama.

|Table of contents [pic] |

|1 History |

|2 Characteristics |

|3 Sample space opera backgrounds |

|3.1 Books |

|3.2 Television |

|3.3 Film |

|3.4 Other |

|4 Articles |

History

"Space opera" was originally a derogatory term, a variant of "horse opera" and "soap opera". Wilson Tucker suggested the term in 1941. It meant action-oriented tale of space adventure instead of "respectable" science fiction story that concentrated on effects of technological progress and inventions. However there is no sharp dividing line and many authors manage to combine the space adventure and the respectable elements, ensuring that the best written space opera is represented among the best of science fiction generally.

Originators of the first space opera stories were E. E. Smith, with his Skylark and Lensman series; Edmond Hamilton; Jack Williamson; John W. Campbell; and later Leigh Brackett.

Characteristics

The scientific veracity of various backgrounds varies. In some cases, the only violation of the known laws of physics is the faster-than-light travel. At the other end of the scale, protagonists use various mystical powers and destroy whole planets and alien species. Star Wars, with its Death Star and Force lies close to the original pulp science fiction.

Character development and description varies as well. Lois McMaster Bujold and Iain M. Banks write about very human conflicts.

A popular subset of space opera stories concentrate on large-scale space battles with futuristic weapons. Some of them take their military tone and weapon system technology very seriously. See military science fiction.

Many science fiction writers use variants of space opera background with less military fervor and planet-busting xenophobia. In its best, it is a speculation about future war in space or effects of war on humans. At its worst it consists of the use of non-science fiction plots in a superficially SF background.

Many of the TV science fiction series from Battlestar Galactica to Star Trek are variants of space opera. Harry Harrison and Douglas Adams parody space opera clichés. Fritz Leiber's Wanderer tells a story about a situation when Earth sees one episode of interstellar conflict. Others, like Samuel R. Delany in Nova, refer to mythological concepts.

In his 1965 story Space Opera, Jack Vance parodied the genre by writing about an interstellar operatic company which brought culture to deprived worlds.

Sample space opera backgrounds

Books

• A Fire Upon the Deep and "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge

• The Alliance-Union Universe by C. J. Cherryh

• Barsoom (Mars) series by Edgar Rice Burroughs

• Berserker series by Fred Saberhagen

• Cities in Flight series by James Blish

• Culture series by Iain M. Banks

• Dies Irae trilogy by Brian Stableford

• Dorsai series of Gordon Dickson

• Dune by Frank Herbert - Galactic Empire

• ''Foundation series of Isaac Asimov

• The Gorrideon of Barry Stephen Nieuport

• ''Legend of the Galactic Heroes by Tanaka Yoshiki (also manga and anime - see below)

• Honor Harrington series by David Weber

• Humanx Commonwealth series by Alan Dean Foster

• Hyperion Cantos of Dan Simmons (Hyperion and sequels)

• Known Space series of Larry Niven, and its spin-off Man-Kzin Wars.

• Lensman series of E. E. Smith (possibly the prototype of all others)

• Light by M. John Harrison

• Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton

• Perry Rhodan series

• Rim worlds of A. Bertram Chandler

• ''The Serrano Legacy by Elizabeth Moon

• Uplift series of David Brin

• Vorkosigan Saga series of Lois McMaster Bujold

Television

• Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda

• J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5

• Banner of the Stars aka Seikai no Senki by Morioka Hiroyuki (anime)

• Banner of the Stars II aka Seikai no Senki II by Morioka Hiroyuki (anime)

• Battlestar Galactica

• Blake's 7

• Cowboy Bebop (anime)

• Crest of the Stars aka Seikai no Monshou by Morioka Hiroyuki (anime)

• Farscape

• Firefly

• Gundam

• Harlock Saga by Leiji Matsumoto (anime)

• Legend of the Galactic Heroes by Yoshiki Tanaka (anime)

• Macross (anime)

• Outlaw Star (anime)

• Robotech (anime)

• Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry

Film

• Star Wars, created by George Lucas

Other

• Traveller role-playing game setting created by Marc W. Miller

• Kai%2C_Death_of_Dreams - Redefining the term space opera

See also: Galactic Empire, hard science fiction, soft science fiction

Articles

• Dave Langford: Fun With Senseless Violence

Military science fiction

Military science fiction is a subset of science fiction/space opera where interstellar or interplanetary conflict and its (usually) armed solution make up the backdrop of the story. Typically, the conflict is assumed to be inevitable (Humans vs. inhuman bugs, Democracies vs. Dictatorships, ...), and the military approach is not questioned. Traditional military values (discipline, courage, chain of command) are stressed, and the action is described from the point of view of a soldier or officer. Technology is advanced, but fairly static, wars are not primarily won by R&D or even logistics, but by willpower and military virtues.

Thus, while the original Star Wars movies have an armed conflict as backdrop, they would not usually be considered military sf. Most Star Trek series are not part of this genre, although Deep Space Nine borrows some of the genre conventions in later seasons. Similarly, Babylon 5 is a borderline case. is clear military sf, but the Lensmen cycle by E.E. Doc Smith is not.

A very popular series, and a recommended intro to this subgenre is David Weber's on-going Honor Harrington series, which comes with 'reasonably' logical technology, believable plot, and (disputed by some) outstanding character depth.

Another of the defining authors of the genre is David Drake, especially with his Hammer's Slammers series, but also with many of his other works.

While much military science fiction is pure entertainment, and caters to a similar audience as historical and modern military novels, some authors manage to work within the genre conventions while posing interesting new questions. An example is Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game novel, where children are trained from a young age to fight for humanity.

Many current military science fiction books are published by Baen publishing house.

List of military science fiction positions:

• The Aldenata series by John Ringo

• Armor (1984) by John Steakley

• Bill, the Galactic Hero, (1965) Harry Harrison's parody of the whole genre

• Broken Angels (2003) by Richard Morgan

• Clash by Night (1943) by Lawrence O'Donnell (a penname of Henry Kuttner), depicting companies of mercenaries used to fight wars between fortified city states beneath the surface of the Venusian ocean after the nuclear destruction of Earth.

• Crest of the Stars by Morioka Hiroyuki (anime)

• Gaunt's Ghosts by Dan Abnett

• Hammer's Slammers series by David Drake

• Honor Harrington series by David Weber, one of the most popular series of that genre

• The Forever War (1975) by Joe Haldeman

• ''Legend of the Galactic Heroes by Tanaka Yoshiki (anime)

• Parts of the Miles Vorkosigan series (especially Borders of Infinity) by Lois McMaster Bujold

• The Serrano Legacy by Elizabeth Moon

• '' TV series

• Starship Troopers (1959) by Robert A. Heinlein

• Warhammer 40,000 universe, started as a (wargame) and spawned many comics and books (including the mentioned Gaunt's Ghosts series)

Science fantasy

For the magazine of the same name see Science Fantasy (magazine)

Science fantasy is the merging of science fiction and fantasy, two popular genres of writing. The two are notoriously difficult to define, and possibly even more difficult to distinguish. One might claim that science fiction provides a scientific explanation for all phenomena, whereas fantasy mostly takes the supernatural for granted. However, the "science" behind these explanations is often no more than mumbo-jumbo, especially in the pulp magazines. Hence, it might be said that the difference is more one of stage props: on the one hand we have spacecraft and phasers, on the other hand magic carpets and wands of smiting.

Now, since Arthur C. Clarke claims that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", this distinction also becomes blurred, and the area in which it is most blurred is science fantasy. Here, we find the props that are typical for fantasy explained in a manner typical for science fiction: monsters become aliens, and magic artifacts become relics of forgotten science.

The Martian stories of Leigh Brackett might be regarded as science fantasy, as well as M. John Harrison's Viriconium novels, or Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Many works by Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially his Barsoom novels, clearly fall into this category. Terry Brooks' world depicted in "The Sword of Shannara" sits on this line as well. Perhaps the most well-known example of science fantasy is Star Wars.

[pic][pic]Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk (a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk) is a sub-genre of science fiction which uses elements from the hard-boiled detective novel, film noir, Japanese anime, and post-modernist prose. It describes the nihilistic, underground side of the digital society which started to evolve in the last two decades of the 20th century. The dystopian world of cyberpunk has been called the antithesis of the utopian science fiction visions of the mid-20th century as typified by the world of Star Trek.

|Table of contents [pic] |

|1 History |

|2 Notable precursors to the genre |

|3 Cyberpunk writers and works |

|4 Quote |

|5 See also |

|6 External links |

History

The term was originally coined in 1980 by Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke for his short story, "Cyberpunk," which was first published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Volume 57, Number 4, November 1983, although it was quickly appropriated as a label to be applied to the works of Gibson, Rucker, and others.

In cyberpunk literature, much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace - the clear borderline between the real and the virtual becomes blurred. A typical (though not universal) feature of the genre is a direct connection between the human brain and computer systems.

Cyberpunk's world is a sinister, dark place with networked computers that dominate every aspect of life. Giant multinational corporations have replaced governments as centres of power. The alienated outsider's battle against a totalitarian system is a common theme in science fiction; however, in conventional science fiction those systems tended to be sterile, ordered, and state-controlled. In sharp contrast, Cyberpunk shows the seamy underbelly of corporatocracy, and the Sisyphean battle against their power by disillusioned renegades.

Cyberpunk literature tends to be strongly dystopian and pessimistic. It is often a metaphor for the present day, reflecting worries about large corporations, corruption in governments, and alienation. Some cyberpunk authors also intend their works to act as warnings of possible futures that may follow from current trends. As such, cyberpunk is often written with the intention of disquieting the reader and calling him to action.

Cyberpunk stories are seen by some social theorists as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet. The virtual world of the Internet often appears in cyberpunk under various names, including "cyberspace," the "Metaverse" (as seen in Snow Crash), and the "Matrix" (originally from Neuromancer, but further popularized by the movie The Matrix).

Notable precursors to the genre

• George Orwell (1984, 1948)

• Alfred Bester (The Stars My Destination (Tiger! Tiger!), 1956)

• William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959, The Soft Machine, 1961)

• Roger Zelazny (Dream Master (He Who Shapes))

• Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner))

• David Drake (Lacey and His Friends, 1974)

• John Brunner (The Shockwave Rider, 1975)

• K. W. Jeter (Dr. Adder, published in the 1980s but written earlier)

• Vernor Vinge (True Names, 1981)

Cyberpunk writers and works

William Gibson with his novel Neuromancer (1984) is likely the most famous writer connected with the term cyberpunk. He emphasized style, character development and atmosphere over traditional science-fictional tropes, and Neuromancer was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards.

Raymond Chandler with his bleak, cynical worldview and staccato prose strongly influenced the creators of the genre. The world of cyberpunk is the dystopian, hopeless world of film noir, but pushed just a little bit into the future.

Other famous cyberpunk writers include Bruce Sterling (who functioned as cyberpunk's chief ideologue with his fanzine Cheap Truth), Philip K. Dick, Rudy Rucker, Pat Cadigan, and Neal Stephenson.

The film

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic science fiction

Apocalyptic science fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of the world or civilization, through nuclear war, plague, or some other general disaster.

Post-apocalyptic science fiction is set in a world or civilization after such a disaster. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten or mythologized. The fall of civilization may also be the fall of a space based civilization. This plot device allows writers to write Soft science fiction while accounting for the lack of technological advancement and thus remain relevant to the present day no matter how far in the future the events are set.

The use of post-apocalyptic contexts in movies is now so common as to be trite and the subject of frequent parody. The use of it to convey the director's opinion that nuclear war or environmental devastation are inevitable if trends continue of if humans do not "mend their ways" can seem particularly patronizing, paternalistic and pretentiously "caring".

There is a considerable degree of blurring between this form of science fiction and that which deals with false utopias or dystopic societies.

|Table of contents [pic] |

|1 Examples (listed by nature of the catastrophe) |

|1.1 World War III |

|1.2 Pandemic |

|1.3 Astronomic impact (meteorites) |

|1.4 Alien invasion |

|1.5 Ecological catastrophe |

|1.6 The Computers take over |

|1.7 The decline and fall of the human race |

|1.8 After the Fall of Space Based Civilization |

|1.9 Various |

|1.10 To be categorized |

Examples (listed by nature of the catastrophe)

World War III

• Walter M. Miller, Jr's novel A Canticle for Leibowitz

• Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker

• Pat Frank's novel Alas Babylon

• The Planet Of The Apes film series

• The Mad Max trilogy

• Harlan Ellison's short story and 1975 film A Boy and His Dog.

• Mordecai Roshwald's novel Level 7

• David Brin's novel The Postman

• Philip K. Dick

o Dr Bloodmoney

o Deus Irae (in collaboration with Roger Zelazny).

o Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

o The Penultimate Truth

o The World Jones Made

o and many of his short stories

• Roger Zelazny's novel Damnation Alley and the film made of it

• The Polish movie Sexmisja

• Andrzej Ziemianski's short story Autobahn nach Poznan

• Robert J. Szmidt's novel Apokalipsa wedlug Pana Jana

• Marc Caro's black comedy Delicatessen

• The computer role-playing game Fallout series

• The computer role-playing game Wasteland

• The Role-playing game from Game Designer's Workshop: .

• The Polish Role-playing game from Portal Publishing: Neuroshima.

• The Role-playing game from Timeline Ltd.: The Morrow Project

• The Amtrak Wars epic novel series by Patrick Tilley

• The Day After, a 1983 film about the effects of nuclear war on a Kansas town

• the film Testament

• the Shanarra Series by Terry Brooks, a fantasy book set after WWIII destroys all technology and warps the human race into other species.

• the Vampire Hunter D novels and anime films, set ten thousand years after a nuclear war occurs in 1999.

• Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov. (A later book, Robots and Empire, gave a different explanation.)

• The novel Children of The Dust by Louise Lawerence

• Nevil Shute's novel On The Beach, and the films based on it.

• William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's Logan's Run, and the film based on it.

Pandemic

• The novel The Last Man by Mary Shelley

• The novella The Scarlet Plague (1912) by Jack London.

• The novel Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart.

• The novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, filmed as The Last Man On Earth and The Omega Man.

• The films La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys and 28 Days Later

• The novel and miniseries The Stand by Stephen King

• The novel A Gift Upon the Shore by M.K. Wren

• The BBC television series Survivors, written by Terry Nation

• The novel The Children of Men, written by P.D. James

• The Showtime cable television series Jeremiah, based off the comic of the same name.

• The novel Full Circle by Michael Boyle

• The novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

• 2004 film version of Dawn of the Dead

• The manga by Hiroki Endo

Astronomic impact (meteorites)

• The film When Worlds Collide

• ''Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

• The Forge of God by Greg Bear

• The film Armageddon

• The film Deep Impact

• The animated series Thundarr the Barbarian

Alien invasion

• H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (in several media)

• John Christopher's The Tripods

• Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters

• The TV-series V

• The film Independence Day

• Invasion of the Body Snatchers

• The anime Genesis Climber Mospeada

• The computer game Manhunter

Ecological catastrophe

• The novel Greybeard by Brian Aldiss, in which the human race becomes sterile.

• The novel The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, in which the United States is overwhelmed by environmental irresponsibility and authoritarianism.

• The novel In the Drift by Michael Swanwick (also an Alternate history story; the premise is that the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor incident resulted in a large release of radioactivity.)

• The novel Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

• The collection of stories Flight of the Horse by Larry Niven

• The film Silent Running

• The film Quintet

• The Kevin Costner film Waterworld

• The Thomas Vinterberg film It's All About Love

• The Roland Emmerich film The Day After Tomorrow

• The novel Dust by Charles Pellegrino, in which all the insect species on Earth die out, and the ecology crashes as a result.

• The film No Blade Of Grass, based off the book The Death Of Grass by John Christopher, in which a virus that destroys plants causes massive famine and societal breakdown.

• The novel Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, in which all the water on Earth freezes.

• The Harry Harrison novel Make Room! Make Room! and the 1973 film Soylent Green.

The Computers take over

• The 1909 short story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (more machinery than computers)

• The novel and movie, (not exactly an apocalypse, however)

• The novel This Perfect Day by Ira Levin

• The future depicted in the Terminator film series

• The film Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution by Jean-Luc Godard

• The film The Matrix

• Harlan Ellison's short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

• The Polish role-playing game from Portal Publishing: Neuroshima.

The decline and fall of the human race

• Planet of the Apes

• The latter part of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine

• The 1970s movie Zardoz

• The films Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead by George Romero

After the Fall of Space Based Civilization

• Isaac Asimov's Foundation series

• Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda television series

Various

• Much of the work of J. G. Ballard, in which the current era is sometimes described as the pre-Third, referring to World War III.

• Much of John Wyndham's work, e.g. The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, later reprinted in the US as Re-Birth

• After London by Richard Jefferies; the nature of the catastrophe is never stated, except that apparently most of the human race quickly dies out, leaving England to revert to nature.

• The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel (A volcanic eruption floods the earth with cyanide gas, leaving only two survivors)

• The manga and movie Dragon Head, by Mochizuki Minetaro

To be categorized

• First Spaceship on Venus

• The novel In The Country of Last Thing by Paul Auster

• Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley

• ''Aftermath by Gregory Benford

• Nosutoradamusu no daiyogen a.k.a. The Last Days of Planet Earth, a 1974 Japanese film.

''See also:

• Timeline of fictional future events

The computers take over

The computers take over is a science-fiction scenario in which a supercomputer becomes intelligent and views humans as a threat to its safety. The computer will then try to wipe out the human race, or at least take control of it.

Examples of "computers taking over"

• The Terminator series

• The Matrix series

• I, Robot

Postcyberpunk

|Table of contents [pic] |

|1 History |

|2 Examples of postcyberpunk |

|3 See also |

|4 External links |

History

In 1998, Lawrence Person published an article called Notes Towards a Postcyberpunk Manifesto in the small-press magazine Nova Express and on the popular technology website Slashdot in 1999. The well-referenced article identified the emergence of a postcyberpunk as the evolution of the cyberpunk genre of science-fiction popular in the late 1970s and 1980s characterized by movies like Blade Runner and books like William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Like its predecessor, postcyberpunk depicts realistic near-futures rather than space opera-style deep futures. The focus is on the social effects of Earth-bound technology rather than space travel. He argues that postcyberpunk is distinct from cyberpunk in the following ways:

• Cyberpunk typically dealt with alienated loners in a dystopia. Postcyberpunk tends to deal with characters who are more involved with society, and act to defend an existing social order or create a better society.

• In cyberpunk, the alienating effect of new technology is emphasised, whereas in postcyberpunk, "technology is society" (including more technocracy or cyberprep themes than traditional cyberpunk.)

Other possible characteristics:

• A more realistic depiction of computers (the replacment of virtual reality by a sort of super voice/audio/video/holographic Internet-based network.)

• A change in emphasis from metallic implants to biotechnology

Why did postcyberpunk emerge? Perhaps because SF authors and the general population began using computers, the Internet and PDAs to their benefit, without the expected massive social fragmentation of this Information Revolution predicted in the 1970s and 1980s.

Examples of postcyberpunk

• Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

• Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's Transmetropolitan

• Nancy Kress's Beggars In Spain

• Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal

• Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon

• Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net and Holy Fire

Some authors to which the label has been applied have endorsed and adopted it. However, classification is always difficult; there are many works which explore postcyberpunk themes in a dystopian way - e.g. Paul McAuley's Fairyland. Some authors are hard to classify. For example, Greg Egan's work is arguably so inventive as to defy classification into a "movement" or "sub-genre".

Postcyberpunk could become an umbrella for all sorts of interesting near-future action in movies and books such as Max Berry's satirical Jennifer Government. Postcyberpunk novels and movies have as of 2004 yet to gain as widespread popularity as their precursors (the Matrix trilogy is usually considered cyberpunk). Somewhat ironically, the technological optimism seen in postcyberpunk work can be traced back to Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics, or even to the sympathetic robots Helen O. Loy and Adam Link, all of which predate cyberpunk by a half-century.

See also

• cyberprep

• transhumanism

• technocracy

External links

• Notes Towards a Postcyberpunk Manifesto by Lawrence Person, as posted on Slashdot

• Nova Express Online Issue #16 Table of Contents

Social fiction

Social fiction (also called political fiction) is sub-genre of science fiction focused on possible development of societies (most often set in near future or a fictional country), very often dominated by totalitarian governments.

Social fiction was very popular during the Cold War as a satire of the communist rule, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. While the most famous Western social dystopias alluding to the Soviet Union (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley's Brave New World) were written in 1930s and 1940s, in countries like Poland the genre was most common in the 1980s among Polish science-fiction writers like Janusz A. Zajdel (Limes Inferior, Paradyzja) or Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski (Apostezjon trilogy). After the fall of communism, the genre became less popular.

New Wave (science fiction)

During the 1960s a number of science fiction authors began writing more experimental works than was usual in the genre: imagistic, highly metaphoric stories, inclined more towards psychology and the soft sciences than to hard SF.

This movement was perhaps stronger in Britain, where Michael Moorcock had taken over the editorship of the magazine New Worlds Science Fiction, serialising Norman Spinrad's `Bug Jack Barron', notable for being the first science fiction novel to be condemned in the UK Parliament. The New Wave movement was not restricted to the UK though, and there were new wave authors in the USA as well.

The New Wave movement started to explore many subjects, including sex in science fiction in ways that were previously unthinkable. Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions was an important milestone in the development of the New Wave.

Important New Wave authors include Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Thomas M. Disch, M. John Harrison, Roger Zelazny, and Moorcock himself.

Precursors of New Wave might be considered to be Ray Bradbury and Alfred Bester.

(The term "New Wave" is borrowed from film criticism's nouvelle vague: films characterised by the work of Jean-Luc Goddard, François Truffaut, and others. It was later applied to 1970s punk rock in the UK and to new wave music.)

Alternative history (fiction)

''This article deals with the subgenre of science fiction commonly known as alternate history.

For other meanings, see the disambiguation page Alternative history.''

Alternative history or alternate history is fiction that is set in a world in which history has diverged from history as it is generally known. While to some extent, all fiction can be classified as alternative history, this genre is used to denote fiction in which a change happens which causes history to diverge. For a variety of reasons, alternate history is generally classified as a subcategory of science fiction. Stories which were set in the future when they were written which has since come and passed (such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four) are not alternative history.

|Table of contents [pic] |

|1 Overview |

|2 Uchronie |

|3 Published alternative histories |

|4 Online alternative histories |

|5 External links |

Overview

Warning: Plot details follow.

The earliest example of alternative history appears to be Book IX, sections 17-19, of the Livy's History of Rome from Its Foundation. He contemplates the possibility of Alexander the Great expanding his father's empire westward instead of east, and attacking Rome in the 4th century BC.

The earliest alternative history published as a complete work, rather than an aside or digression in a longer work, is believed to be Louis Napoléon Geoffroy-Château’s French nationalist tale, Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812-1823 (1836). In this book, Geoffroy-Château postulates that Napoleon turned away from Moscow before the disastrous winter of 1812. Without the severe losses he suffered, Napoleon was able to conquer the world. Geoffroy-Château’s book must have been popular in France, for the subsequent years saw many similar novels published.

In the English language, the first known complete alternate history is Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "P.'s Correspondence", published in 1846 and which recounts the tale of an apparent madman and his purported encounters with various literary and political figures of the 1840s. At novel length, the first alternative history in English would seem to be Castello Holford’s Aristopia (1895). While not as nationalistic as Napoléon, Aristopia is another attempt to portray a utopian society which never existed. In Aristopia, the earliest settlers in Virginia discovered a reef made of solid gold and were able to build a utopian society in North America.

Although a number of alternate history stories and novels appeared in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the next major work is perhaps the strongest anthology of alternative history ever assembled. in 1932, British historian Sir John Squire collected a series of essays, many of which could be considered stories, in If It Had Happened Otherwise from some of the leading historians of the period. In this work, Oxford and Cambridge scholars turned their attention to such questions as "If the Moors in Spain Had Won" and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness." Four of the fourteen pieces examined the two most popular themes in alternate history: Napoleon’s victory and the American Civil War. One of the entries in Squire's volume was Winston Churchill's "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg", which considers what sort of world would have resulted if the North had won the American Civil War — from the point of view of a historian in a world where the Confederacy had won. (This kind of work which posts from the point of view of an alternate history is variously known as a "recursive alternate history", a "double-blind what-if" or an "alternative-alternative history".) Other authors appearing in Squire's book included Hilaire Belloc and Andre Maurois.

The next year, 1933, would see alternative history move into a new arena. The December issue of Astounding published Nat Schachner’s "Ancestral Voices." This was quickly followed by Murray Leinster’s "Sidewise in Time." While earlier alternative histories examined reasonably straight-forward divergences, Leinster attempted something completely different. In his world gone mad, pieces of Earth traded places with their analogs from different timelines. The story follows Robinson College Professor Minott as he wanders through these analogs, each of which features remnants of worlds which followed a different history. This period also saw the publication of the time travel novel Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp, which was similar to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but sent an American academic to the Italy of Belisarius. De Camp's work is concerned with the historical changes wrought by his time traveler, Martin Padway, thereby making the work an alternative history.

The late 1980s and 1990s saw a boom in alternate history, fueled not only by the emergence of Harry Turtledove, but also by two series of anthologies. Gregory Benford edited the "What Might Have Been" series and Mike Resnick edited the "Alternate..." series. This period also saw alternate history works by S.M. Stirling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Harry Harrison and others.

Currently, the most prolific practitioner of this type of fiction is Harry Turtledove, whose books include a series in which The South won the American Civil War. Other stories by this author include the premise that America had not been colonised from Asia during the last ice age; as a result, the continent still has living mammoths and prehuman species. See also steampunk.

The key change between our history and the alternative history is known as the "Point of divergence" (POD). In Philip K. Dick's "Man in the High Castle", the POD is the attempted assassination of Franklin Roosevelt in Miami in 1933. In our reality, this attempt failed. In Dick's novel, and in other Nazis-win-the-war scenarios, Roosevelt's death results in an America wracked by the Great Depression and holding tight to its neutrality, thus causing Britain to fall. The theory of the multiverse posits that PODs occur every instant, springing off parallel universes for each instance.

In 1995, The Sidewise Award for Alternate History was established to recognize best Long Form (novels and series) and best short form (stories) within the genres. The award is named for Murray Leinster's story "Sidewise in Time."

Several films have been made which exploit the concepts of alternative history, most notably Kevin Brownlow's It Happened Here. However, many of these movies focus on individuals rather than historical events and are not considered "true" alternate histories (e.g., Frank Capra’s It's a Wonderful Life, and more recently the film Sliding Doors).

Historians also speculate in this manner; this type of speculation is known commonly as counterfactuality. There is considerable debate within the community of historians about the validity and purpose of this type of speculation.

For alternative histories which some assert to be factual rather than speculative, see conspiracy theory and historical revisionism.

Uchronie

In France, alternative history novels are called uchronie. This neologism is based on the word utopia (a place that doesn't exist) and the Greek for time, chronos. An uchronie, then, is defined as a time that doesn't exist.

Published alternative histories

Literally thousands of altenative history stories and novels have been published. Following is a somewhat random sampling:

• Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore, in which the South was not defeated in the American Civil War.

• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick set in a world where the Axis powers won World War II.

• Fatherland by Robert Harris is also set in the 1960s in a Germany which won World War II.

• In "The Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Far Western Christian Civilization," Arnold J. Toynbee describes a world in which the Franks lost to the Muslims at the Battle of Tours in 732.

• SS-GB by Len Deighton is a detective novel set in 1941 Britain where the Germans have successfully occupied the country.

• If Hitler Had Invaded England, by C.S. Forester, is found his his collecton of published short stories, Gold from Crete. The story is a fictionalized account of a German invasion of Britain in 1940, based on what Forester saw as realistic projections of German and British capabilities. The German invasion fails short of reaching London due to continued British supremacy at sea and in the air. The resulting lack of river transport capability leads to an Allied victory.

• Pavane, by Keith Roberts, assumes that Queen Elizabeth I of England was assassinated, and in the ensuing disorder, the Spanish Armada was successful in suppressing Protestantism; the novel (actually a series of shorter pieces) is set in a 20th century where technology has advanced less than in our world, and where the Inquisition still has power.

• The Last Article is a short story by Harry Turtledove, in which Mohandas Gandhi attempts to use non-violent resistance against India's Nazi occupiers.

• The Alteration by Kingsley Amis is set in a world very similar to that of Pavane; the novel concerns the attempt to prevent a young boy with a perfect singing voice from being recruited to the Vatican's eunuch choir. There are a number of in-jokes, where famous works of fantasy and science fiction appear, under slightly different titles: 'The Wind in the Cloisters' and 'The Lord of the Chalices' for example.

• The 'Lord Darcy' fantasy series by Randall Garrett; a number of short stories and one novel (Too Many Magicians) based on the premise that King Richard I of England returned safely from France and that Roger Bacon had systematised the laws of magic. The stories are a series of traditional detective fiction-style murder mysteries with forensic magic being used in the investigation.

• See Alternate Earths (sic) (ISBN 1-55634-318-3) and Alternate Earths II (sic) (ISBN 1-55634-399-X) and "What might have been" game addendum for the GURPS Role-Playing System. Includes a Confederate victory world, a Nazi/Japanese Empire world, an Aztecs-rule-America scenario, and a unique "Gernsback" world in which the dreams of the mad scientists and Doc Savage have become reality.

• The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling is a steampunk novel which deals with a Victorian society in which Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine takes on the roles of modern computers a century early.

• Ong's Hat by Unknown is a Internet legend that deals with a group of renegade scientists from Princeton that developed a means of travel to parallel universes and fled this Universe to found a colony in another world.

• How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove is set twenty years after a Southern victory in the American Civil War established the Confederate States of America. This novel is followed by the Great War trilogy, set in the 1910s and the American Empire trilogy following the Great War. A third trilogy will eventually be released, detailing an alternate World War II.

• Making History (1996) by British actor, comedian and novelist Stephen Fry is set in a parallel world in which Adolf Hitler was never conceived, let alone born.

• For Want of a Nail (ISBN 1853675040) - an alternative history of North America by Robert Sobel, details a world in which the American Revolution failed. The British colonies become the Confederation of North America (CNA), while the defeated rebels go into exile in Spanish Tejas, eventually founding the United States of Mexico (USM) - a bitter rival to the CNA. The gigantic multinational corporation Kramer Associates, originally from Mexico but later based in Taiwan, is the third world power, and the first power to detonate an atomic bomb.

• The Domination by S. M. Stirling - after the United States conquers Canada in the War of 1812, the Loyalists move to South Africa, where they join with the Boers to set up a slavery-based empire called the Domination of the Draka. The story tells of the struggle between the Domination and the free world. As the Draka come to dominate the world, they create a superhuman race.

• Conquistador by S.M. Stirling - an interdimensional gateway is discovered in California, which gives access to a alternative Earth in which the empire of Alexander the Great flourished, and where Europeans never discovered America.

• Wild Cards edited by George R. R. Martin - A series of collaborations based on the premise that an alien race released a virus just after the WWII that gave some people super-powers and others terrible deformities.

• 1632 by Eric Flint - (found online at the Baen Books free library in various ebook formats.) Its sequels, starting with 1633 are available for sale. A series based on the premise that an entire modern West Virginia town is transported in time and space to Germany during the Thirty Years War.

• 1945 by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen assumes that the Germans perfected long-range jet aircraft by the end of World War II and conducted successful raids in North America against the US nuclear program.

• The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith One single word in the Declaration of Independence differs and the US becomes the North American Confederation, a libertarian society. In the present some scientist will invent the Probability Broach and make contact with other universes.

o The Venus Belt

o Their Majesties' Bucketeers

o The Nagasaki Vector

o Tom Paine Maru

o The Gallatin Divergence

• The Indians Won(ISBN 0843910127) by Martin Cruz Smith: What if the Native Americans had won the Indian wars and kept their land? How would Indian and Anglo governments cooperate? What other things would be different?

• The Coming of the Demons by Gwenyth Hood: What if the execution of Conradin Hohenstaufen in Naples on October 29, 1268 was averted by the arrival of the Pelezitereans, exiled alien wanderers from another galaxy, seeking an uninhabited planet on which to reestablish their advanced culture?

• Mamoru Oshii's manga Kerebos, a.k.a Hellhounds Panzer Cops in the United States, and the film , both of which take place in a 1960's Japan that was defeated and occupied by the Germans.

Online alternative histories

soc.history.what-if is a Usenet newsgroup devoted to discussing alternative histories. This newsgroup has spawned a number of interesting alternative timelines:

In online alternative history, the timeline is usually referred to by the abbreviation ATL (Alternative Time Line), as contrasted with OTL (Our Time Line) which refers to real history.

• For All Time ('Chet Arthur') is a dystopian post-WWII scenario resulting from the death of Franklin Roosevelt shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, featuring horrific race riots in the United States between white, black and Jewish gangs, and frequent usage of nuclear weapons around the world.

• Shattered World (Bobby Hardenbrook) is a devastating alternative World War II, resulting from a Soviet invasion of Poland in 1937.

• Sealion Fails (Steven Rogers) is an alternative World War II in which Germany invades England, but the invasion is defeated.

• A Shot Heard Around the World (Ed Thomas) follows from the assassination of the Prince of Wales in 1900 (who in OTL became King Edward VII), preventing the Entente Cordiale. Without Britain as an ally France and Russia are easily defeated by the Central Powers. After the war Charles de Gaulle seizes power in France, and plans a war of vengeance against the Germans.

• Decades of Darkness ('Kaiser Wilhelm III') has the early death of President Thomas Jefferson leading to the secession of New England, resulting in a United States of America dominated by slave owners.

• For All Nails is an ongoing, collaborative online continuation of For Want of a Nail, which ended in 1971, the year the book had been written. The authors believed the world depicted at the end of For Want of a Nail was an unpleasant one — hence the name inspired by Chet's For All Time.

• Ill Bethisad is an ongoing, collaborative project with currently ca. 30 participants, originally created by Andrew Smith from New Zealand.

• Mr. Hughes Goes to War An alternative history where Charles Evans Hughes is elected President of the United States in 1916

Utopian and dystopian fiction

Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world as the setting for a novel. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: creation of a nightmare world. Both are commonly found in science fiction novels and stories.

The word utopia was first used in this context by Thomas More in his work Utopia; literally it means "nowhere". In this work, More sets out a vision of an ideal society. Other examples include Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and B.F. Skinner's Walden Two. Gulliver's Travels may also be seen as a satirical utopia because it is actually a comment on the society the author lived in. The same goes for Erewhon by Samuel Butler.

For examples of dystopias, see two of George Orwell's books, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, as well as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and any of William Gibson's novels.

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A subgenre of this is ecotopian fiction, where the author posits either a utopian or dystopian world revolving around environmental conservation or destruction. Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia was the first example of this, followed by Kim Stanley Robinson in his California trilogy. Robinson has also edited a collection of short ecotopian fiction, called Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias.

Another important subgenre are feminist utopias, for example Marge Piercy's novel Woman On the Edge of Time.

Dystopia

A dystopia is any society considered to be undesirable, for any of a number of reasons. The term was coined as a converse to a Utopia, and is most usually used to refer to a fictional (often near-future) society where current social trends are taken to nightmarish extremes.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was coined in the late 19th century by John Stuart Mill, who also used Bentham's synonym, cacotopia, at the same time. Both words were based on utopia, analyzed as eu-topia, for a place where everything is as it should be; hence the converse "dys-topia" for a place where this is certainly not the case. Often, the difference between a Utopia and a Dystopia is in the author's point of view.

Dystopias are frequently written as warnings, or as satires, showing current trends extrapolated to a nightmarish conclusion. In this, they frequently differ from utopias; idealistic utopias have no roots in today's society, being in some other place or time, or after some major discontinuity in history (e.g. see H.G. Wells' utopias, such as The World Set Free).

A dystopia is all too closely connected to current-day society. A considerable number of near-future science fiction stories of the type described as 'cyberpunk' use dystopian settings of a high-technology corporate dominated world where national governments are becoming steadily more irrelevant.

The genre of post-apocalyptic science fiction often features dystopias.

Famous dystopias

• 1984 by George Orwell

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

• Anthem by Ayn Rand

• Angelwings and Finerthings by Paul M. Jessup

• Battle Royale

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (This could perhaps be considered a utopia, as the people in that society are certainly happy, but it is more generally regarded by critics as a dystopian satire, as they actually have no choice in whether they are happy or not.)

• Brazil, the urban nightmare depicted in Terry Gilliam's film

• 12 Monkeys also by Terry Gilliam

• Candide by Voltaire

• The Children of Men by P.D. James

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (filmed as Blade Runner) and the world of Time out of Joint by Philip K. Dick

• The Domination by S. M. Stirling

• Equilibrium by Kurt Wimmer

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

• A Friend of the Earth (2000) by T. C. Boyle.

• The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

• Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

• Level 7, a novel by Mordecai Roshwald

• Logan's Run, a novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

• Lord of the Flies by William Golding

• The world of The Matrix, as filmed by the Wachowski brothers.

• Neuromancer (and other cyberpunk novels) by William Gibson. (Indeed almost everything in the cyberpunk genre.)

• Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle, later filmed on two occasions (by Franklin J. Schaffner and Tim Burton)

• Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

• Make Room! Make Room by Harry Harrison (filmed as Soylent Green)

• Sexmission, a Polish film by Juliusz Machulski, depicts a feminist state with no men at all

• The Running Man by Richard Bachman, a pseudonym for Stephen King.

• The Shockwave Rider and The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

• This Perfect Day (1970) by Ira Levin

• Die Andere Seite (1973) by Alfred Kubin, filmed as Traumstadt by Johannes Schaaf, describes a utopia of total freedom that turns into a place of self destruction and perversion

• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

• The Wind That Came From Nowhere and practically the entire fictional output of J. G. Ballard

• Zardoz

• The Giver by Lois Lowry (Again, perhaps a Utopia, however it is at a cost)

Utopia

Utopia is the title of a Latin book by Thomas More (circa 1516). The word "utopia" is intended by More to suggest two Greek neologisms simultaneously: outopia (no place) and eutopia (good place).

The word utopia has taken on a more general meaning, to describe any imaginary but good image of society. Further, it has been used to describe actual communities founded in attempts to put such theories into practice. Finally, utopian is often used to refer to good but (physically, socially, economically, or politically) impossible proposals, or at least very difficult ones.

More depicts a rationally organised society, through the narration of an explorer, Raphael Hythlodaeus. Utopia is a republic which holds all property in common. For example, it has no lawyers, and rarely sends its citizens to war, but hires mercenaries from among its war-prone neighbours. Possibly More, a religious layman who once considered joining the Church as a priest, was inspired by the monachal rule when he describes the working of his society. It was an inspiration for the Reducciones established by the Jesuits to Christianize and "civilize" the Guaranis.

The utopia can be idealistic or practical, but the term has acquired a strong connotation of optimistic, idealistic, impossible perfection. The utopia may be usefully contrasted with the undesirable dystopia (anti-utopia, pseudo-utopia) and the satirical utopia.

|Table of contents [pic] |

|1 Economic |

|2 Political and historical |

|3 Religious |

|4 Scientific and technological |

|5 Examples |

|6 See also |

|7 External links |

|8 Related |

Economic

Centered on the nineteenth century, many utopian novels arose, often in response to the social disruption promoted by the development of commercialism and capitalism. Proposing a "better" situation were socialist and communist utopias that generally revolve around an equalitarian distribution of goods, frequently with the total abolition of money, and citizens only doing work which they enjoy and which is for the common good, leaving them with ample time for the cultivation of the arts and sciences. One classic was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. William Morris' News from Nowhere is another socialist utopia written in response to the top-down (bureaucratic) nature of Bellamy's utopia. George Orwell's 1984 was a dystopia that might be seen as a critique of Bellamyite socialism and also of the USSR, fascism, and the statist tendencies in the United Kingdom and in the McCarthyite United States of the time (1948).

Unlike the collectivist tone so often found in utopias, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein is an individualistic and libertarian utopia. Capitalist utopias of this sort are generally based on perfect market economies, in which there is no market failure -- or the issue is never addressed. Some cynics see most economics textbooks as being nothing but stories of capitalist utopias.

Political and historical

A global utopia of world peace is often seen as one of the possible inevitable endings of history.

Sparta was a militaristic utopia founded by Lycurgus (though some, especially Athenians, may have thought it was rather a dystopia). It was a Greek power until its defeat by the Thebans at the battle of Leuctra.

In the United States during the Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century, many radical religious groups formed utopian societies. They sought to form communities where all aspects of the people's lives could be governed by their faith. The best-known and by far the most successful of these utopian societies was the Shaker movement.

Religious

The Christian and Islamic ideas of heaven tend to be utopian, especially in their folk-religious forms: inviting speculation about existence free of sin and poverty or any sorrow, beyond the power of death (although "heaven" in Christian eschatology at least, is more nearly equivalent to life within God Himself, visualized as an earth-like paradise in the sky). In a similar sense, a Buddhist concept of Nirvana may be thought of as a kind of utopia. Religious utopias, perhaps expansively described as a garden of delights, existence free of worry amid streets paved with gold, in a bliss of enlightenment enjoying nearly godlike powers, are often a reason for perceiving benefit in remaining faithful to a religion, and an incentive for converting new members.

See also: End of the world, Eschatology, Millennialism, Utopianism

Scientific and technological

These are set in the future, when advanced science and technology will allow utopian living standards; for example, the absence of death and suffering; changes in human nature and the human condition. A technological utopia is sometimes called "extropia," especially by transhumanists.

See also: transhumanism, technological singularity

Opposing this optimism is the prediction that advanced science and technology will, through deliberate misuse or accident, cause humanity's extinction. These pessimists advocate precautions over embracement.

Examples

Warning: Plot details follow.

• The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton, a utopian society is described in the preface.

• The City of the Sun (1623) by Tommaso Campanella

• The New Atlantis (1627) by Francis Bacon

• Oceana (1656) by James Harrington

• The section in Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift depicting the calm, rational society of the Houyhnhms, is certainly utopian, but it is meant to contrast with that of the yahoos, who represent the worst that the human race can do.

• Voyage en Icarie (1840) by Etienne Cabet

• Erewhon (1872) by Samuel Butler

• Looking Backward (1888), by Edward Bellamy

• Freiland (1890) by Theodor Hertzka

• News from Nowhere (1891), by William Morris; see also the Arts and Crafts Movement founded to put his ideas into practice

• Utopia, Limited (1893) is a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in which a small island nation reforms itself along British lines, with amusingly utter success.

• A large number of books by H.G. Wells, including A Modern Utopia (1905)

• Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) can be considered an example of pseudo-utopian satire (see also dystopia). One of his other books, Island demonstrates a positive utopia.

• Islandia (1942), by Austin Tappan Wright

• B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948)

• Star Trek (1966) science fiction television series by Gene Roddenberry

• The Dispossessed (1974), a science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, is sometimes said to represent one of the few modern revivals of the utopian genre, though it is notable that one of the major themes of the work is the ambiguity of different notions of utopia. Le Guin presents a utopian world in which ditches do need digging, and sewers need unblocking---this drudgery is divided among all adults, and is contrasted, in the language of the utopia, with their everyday, more satisfying work.

• Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy is a feminist science fiction novel in which the protagonist must act to win the utopian future over an alternative, dystopian, one.

• Ecotopia (novel) (1975) by Ernest Callenbach

• The Three Californias Trilogy (especially The Pacific Edge (1990)) and the Red / Green / Blue Mars (1990s) trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

• The Giver (1993), novel by Lois Lowry, depicts a "perfect" society of the far future whose elimination of war, disease, fear, &c. comes at the inherent price of the repression of human emotions, individuality, and free will.

• most of the stories in Future Primitive - The New Ecotopias (1994), edited by Kim Stanley Robinson

• The Hedonistic Imperative (1996), an online manifesto by David Pearce, outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.

• The Matrix (1999), a film by the Wachowski brothers, describes a virtual reality controlled by artificial intelligence such as Agent Smith. Smith says that the first Matrix was a utopia, but humans disbelieved and rejected it because they "define their reality through misery and suffering." Therefore, the Matrix was redesigned to simulate human civilization with all its suffering.

Comic science fiction

Comic science fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that exploits the genre's conventions for comic effect. Early pulp science fiction contained few comic stories. A notable exception was the Pete Manx series by Henry Kuttner and Arthur K. Barnes (sometimes writing together and sometimes separately, under the house pen-name of Kelvin Kent). Published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the series featured a time-traveling carnival barker who uses his con-man abilities to get out of trouble. Two later series cemented Kuttner's ruputation as one of the most popular, early writers of comic science fiction: the Gallegher series (about a drunken inventor and his narcissistic robot) and the Hogben series (about a family of mutant hillbillies). The former appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1943 and 1948 and was collected in hardcover as Robots Have No Tails (Gnome, 1952), and the latter appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories in the late 1940s.

Additional examples:

• Robert Asprin's Phule series

• Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan novels

• Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

• Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat novels

• Most of Ron Goulart's work

• Science fiction sitcoms

Science fiction sitcom

The science fiction sitcom genre is a relatively new one having started significant growth only during the last few decades of the twentieth century. Most of the comic science fiction in this genre is considered lightweight compared to the mainstream.

List of science fiction sitcoms

• ALF -- An alien (played by a puppet) living with a family on Earth

• Astronauts -- The misadventures of a group of astronauts on a space station; Despite being written by two of The Goodies it flopped

• Come Back Mrs Noah -- Housewife gets stranded on a space station

• Futurama -- Cartoon space comedy

• Goodnight Sweetheart -- Man finds portal to the past, falls in love, starts leading a double life

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams' wildly inventive science fiction farce, on radio, television, computer games, LPs, a towel, and possibly a movie someday

• It's About Time -- an early example of the genre, involving astronauts who travel back in time to meet a tribe of cavemen

• The Jetsons -- a Hanna-Barbera cartoon about George, Jane, Judy, and Elroy Jetson, family of the future

• Kinvig -- a UFO fanatic becomes convinced that the woman who continually rejects him is an alien queen; written by Nigel Kneale of Quatermass fame, but not very funny

• Luna -- A synthetically produced family in a futuristic urban habitat.

• Meego -- kids' show in which a shape-shifting alien lives with a family.

• Metal Mickey -- kids' show in which a wise-cracking robot lives with a family

• Mork and Mindy -- spinoff of Happy Days starring Robin Williams and Pam Dawber

• My Favorite Martian -- Oldest SF comedy based around an alien living on Earth

• Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- A man and two robots are trapped in orbit and are forced to watch bad movies

• Quark -- Show about space garbage collectors starring Richard Benjamin

• Red Dwarf -- Space based comedy, includes many science fiction concepts

• -- Former superhero hosts a late-night talk show

• The Strangerers -- Two highly eccentric alien agents on an equally eccentric alternative Earth; ends on an unresolved cliffhanger

• 3rd Rock from the Sun -- Modern comedy similar in principle to Mork and Mindy

• Tripping the Rift -- Animated space opera satire.

Sex in science fiction

Modern science fiction frequently involves themes of sex, gender and sexuality. This was not always so. During the 1930s and 40s "golden age" of science fiction it was unusual to find males and females mentioned in the same paragraph, let alone having sex.

In spite of this, book covers for pulp science fiction often featured scantily clad women, often with guns or being menaced by aliens. In some ways, little has changed: many science fiction book covers still feature images of sexy women by artists such as Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta, although the images are perhaps somewhat less exploitative than before.

The New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s reflected its times by attempting to break earlier taboos about what could and could not be the subject of science fiction. The men's magazine Playboy published regular serious science fiction stories throughout this period, by both male and female authors, offering them significantly more scope than some other publications.

Two different themes emerged: one trying to explore the boundaries of what "sex" could mean in a world of altered humanity and reality, and another of exploring the position of women in science fiction and feminist issues in what had been traditionally a form of fiction written primarily by and for men.

Significant uses of sexual themes in serious science fiction include:

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

• Several stories in Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

• A number of works by Philip Jose Farmer;: The Lovers, Flesh, his collection of stories on this theme, Strange Relations, plus two science fiction pornographic novels, Image of the Beast and Blown.

• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Dhalgren, ''Trouble on Triton', and several other works by Samuel Delany

• Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg

• 334 by Thomas M. Disch

• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

• Titan and other novels by John Varley, set in a future where sex changes and other body modifications are commonplace

• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

• The Female Man by Joanna Russ

• The Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, where humans can change sex at will

• The Jerry Cornelius stories of Michael Moorcock and others

• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (various forms of group marriage, professional host-mothers)

• Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold

• The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

• Strangers by Gardner Dozois

• The Dune series of novels by Frank Herbert

• A number of works by Theodore Sturgeon, including The World Well Lost (alien homosexuality) and Godbody (religious sexuality).

• The Primal Urge by Brian Aldiss

• The Tales of the Velvet Comet trilogy by Mike Resnick

• Several books by Spider Robinson, including Callahan's Lady

• Jurgen by James Branch Cabell

• The Bachelor Machine by M. Christian

• The various Wreaththu novels by Storm Constantine

Some of the themes explored include:

• Sex with aliens, machines and robots

• Reproductive technology including cloning, artificial wombs and genetic engineering

• Sexual equality of men and women

• Male- and female-dominated societies, including single-sex societies

• Polyamory

• Changing sex roles

• Homosexuality and lesbianism

• Androgyny and sex changes

• Sex in virtual reality

• Asexuality

• Sexual bonding and politics

• Sex in zero gravity

• Sex in an alien zoo

A number of works of mainstream erotica, including the Gor novels by John Norman, have also used the science fiction format. There is now a separate sub-genre of science fiction erotica that aims to integrate the two genres: writers in this genre include Cecilia Tan, whose small press Circlet Press caters especially to adult science fiction fans.

Science fiction erotica is frequently associated with Lesbian science fiction or S/M (Sado/Masochism) Erotica.

Examples of science fiction erotica include:

• VESTA - Painworld by Jennifer Jane Pope

In recent years there has been a growing BDSM awareness in the science fiction and fan community.

Numerous science fiction television series and science fiction films have used science fiction plots as an excuse to fit in gratuitous sexual or fetishistic content: one of the conventions of much filmed science fiction appears to be that the future will be peopled exclusively by attractive people wearing skin-tight clothing in shiny materials. Nevertheless, some science fiction-themed TV shows, such as Farscape, have been acclaimed for their handling of such themes. The series Lexx features sexual themes in almost every episode.

The canonical movie in this genre is Barbarella.

Steampunk

Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction, typically with dystopian and noir themes, usually set in an anachronistic Victorian or quasi-Victorian alternate history setting. Various secret societies and conspiracy theories are often featured, and some steampunk includes significant fantasy elements.

The origin of the term Steampunk is uncertain, though it is probably a tongue in cheek variant of "cyberpunk": rather than emphasising the computer, robotic, and nanotechnology focus of cyberpunk fiction, steampunk fiction focuses more intently on Victorian-era technology, including steam engines.

|Table of contents [pic] |

|1 Origins of Steampunk |

|2 Other Forms |

|3 Steampunk as a Culture |

|4 Bibliography |

|4.1 Steampunk |

|4.2 Quasi-Victorian science fiction |

|4.3 Influential Victorian science fiction |

|4.4 Comics / graphic novels |

|4.5 Steampunk role-playing game material |

|5 Filmography |

|5.6 Movies |

|5.7 Television |

|5.8 Games |

|6 External Links |

Origins of Steampunk

Though there are precedents as old as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, in the Scientific Romances, Voyages Extraordinaires and Edisonaides of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Steampunk as a genre developed in the 1980's as an offshoot of Cyberpunk. K.W. Jeter's 1979 novel Morlock Night is sometimes cited as crystalizing the genre: It incorporates elements of Wells' The Time Machine, which Jeter expands with his own ideas.

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1992 novel The Difference Engine is credited with the genesis of term "Steampunk". This novel applies the principles of Gibson and Sterling's Cyberpunk writings to an alternate Victorian era where Charles Babbage's mechanical computer was actually built. However, the earliest citation for the term belongs to Jeter. [1]

Some cite the origin of the Steampunk concept going back as far as Walt Disney's 1954 adaptation of Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The film was a benchmark in its conscious choice to maintain a Victorian look and feel rather than updating the story (as was the case with the 1953 adaptation of Wells' War of the Worlds).

The present and growing popularity of Steampunk is likely due in large part to Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic series. Moore's concept and writing made the series popular, but reviews attaching the term "Steampunk" to it became many peoples' first exposure to the term.

Other Forms

There are two main themes within Steampunk: "Historical Steampunk" and "Fantasy Steampunk". [1] Historical steampunk tends to be more science fiction-oriented: presenting an alternate history, presenting real locales and persons from history with different technology. Fantasy steampunk, on the other hand, tends to present steampunk in a completely imaginary world, often populated by fantastic creatures coexisting with steampunk technology.

The most common Historical Steampunk settings are the Victorian and Edwardian eras, though some in this "Victorian Steampunk" catagory can go as early as the Industrial Revolution. Some examples of this type include the comic League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the novel The Difference Engine and the Dinotopia book series. The next most common setting is "Western Steampunk", being a science fictionalized American Western, as seen in the television shows The Wild Wild West and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr and films ''Wild Wild West and Back to the Future Part III'.

As a continuing play on the cyber/steam-punk naming convention, there have been a handful of novels published, self-described as "sandal-punk" which posit a world in which ancient civilization never collapsed into the Dark Ages and instead saw rapid technological advancement after a few key discoveries are made or developed into industrial technologies (eg: Hero of Alexandria's steam engine, built around 130 BC). There are also Historical Steampunk stories set in the Middle Ages, in which steam and industrial technology is developed in or brought to the Mediaeval era (thus dubbed "Mediaeval Steampunk"). Mark Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a good example of this type.

Some examples of Fantasy Steampunk include the Castle Falkenstein role-playing game and The Vision of Escaflowne anime series. Inbetween Historical and Fantasy Steampunk is a type which takes place in a hypothetical future or a fantasy equivalent of our future where some variety of Steampunk-style technology and aesthetics dominate. Examples include the Neotopia comic and even Disney's Treasure Planet film. This could also be considered a type of Retro-futurism.

See also Alternate history, Clockpunk.

Steampunk as a Culture

Because of the popularity of Steampunk with people in the Goth, Punk and Rivet cultures, there is a growing movement towards establishing Steampunk as a culture and lifestyle.

The most immediate form of Steampunk culture is the community of fans surrounding the genre. Others move beyond this, attempting to adopt a "Steampunk" aesthetic through fashion, home decor and even music. This movement may also be (more accurately) described as "Neo-Victorianism, which is the amalgamation of Victorian aesthetic principles with modern sensibilities and technologies.

"Steampunk" fashion has no set guidelines, but tends towards solving the hypothetical questions of "what if Punks, Goths and Rivets lived in the Victorian era?" This may include Mohawks and extensive peircings with corsets and tattered petticoats, Victorian suits with goggles and boots with large soles and buckles or straps, and the Elegant Gothic Lolita and Elegant Gothic Aristocrat styles.

"Steampunk" music is even less defined, and tends to apply to any modern musicians who's music evokes a feeling of the Victorian era or Steampunk. This may include such diverse artists as Rasputina, Thomas Dolby, Paul Roland and Sarah Brightman.

Bibliography

Steampunk

• The Steampunk Trilogy by Paul Di Filippo

• The Difference Engine by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling -- the designs of Charles Babbage led to the wide usage of mechanical computers in Victorian England. (See difference engine)

• Morlock Night by K. W. Jeter

• The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod

• The Grand Ellipse by Paula Volsky

• Pasquale's Angel by Paul McAuley

• Jack Faust by Michael Swanwick

• '\'Perdido Street Station'' by China Miéville

• Age of Unreason Trilogy by Gregory Keyes

• by Mike Pondsmith

• A Nomad of the Time Streams by Michael Moorcock

• Infernal Devices by K. W. Jeter

• The Sundowners Series by James Swallow

• Homunculus by James Blaylock

• L'équilibre des paradoxes by Michel Pagel

• Lord Kelvin's Machine by James Blaylock

• Anti-Ice by Stephen Baxter

• Greatwinter trilogy, by Sean McMullen

• ''The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

• Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time and The World Beneath by James Gurney

Quasi-Victorian science fiction

• A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah by Harry Harrison -- an alternate history novel written and set in the 1970s in a world where the American Revolution failed and the British Empire is still going strong. It has a nice mix of technologies advanced or behind ours, with high powered lasers used for drilling, while Babbage engines are used to do calculations for sub-orbital flights.

• Queen Victoria's Bomb by Ronald Clark -- in the mid 19th century; a physicist gets the idea of isotopic separation after seeing pebbles graded by size on a pebble beach, and makes an atomic bomb. He intends to use it to end the Crimean War, but it never gets used, and no difference is made to history.

• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson -- A cyberpunk adventure in a nanotechnological future, with much of the action in a neo-Victorian society

• The Peshawar Lancers by S.M. Stirling -- Meteors devastate Europe and America in the 19th century, causing much of the British upper class to flee to India. The story is set in 2025 in a thoroughly Indianized Angrezi Raj (British Empire), with its capital in Delhi.

Influential Victorian science fiction

• From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

• The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

• Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

• Robur the Conqueror by Jules Verne

• Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

• War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

• The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells

• The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

• The Ablest Man in the World by Edward Page Mitchell

• The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• King Solomon's Mines by Sir H. Rider Haggard

• Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Comics / graphic novels

• Daisy Kutter by Kazu Kibuishi

• Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio

• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1898 by Alan Moore

• Steam Detectives manga by Kia Asamiya

• Steampunk by Joe Kelly and Chris Bachalo

• Texas Steampunk series by Lea Hernandez: Cathedral Child and Clockwork Angels

• Les Cités Obscures by Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten

• (DC Comics Elseworlds) by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola

• (DC Comics Elseworlds) by Adisakdi Tantimedh and Galen Showman

• Justice Riders (DC Comics Elseworlds) by Chuck Dixon and J. H. Williams III

• (DC Comics Elseworlds) by Mike Mignola and Troy Nixey

• The Amazing Screw-On Head by Mike Mignola

• ''Neotopia by Rod Espinosa

• The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Heart of Empire, or The Legacy of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot

Steampunk role-playing game material

• Castle Falkenstein (RPG) by Mike Pondsmith

• GURPS Steampunk by William H. Stoddard

• Iron Kingdoms by Privateer Press

• Sorcery & Steam; by Fantasy Flight Games

• Space: 1889

• Forgotten Futures

• Brassy's Men by Interactivities Ink (Live action roleplaying game)

• Steam Trek online RPG group [1]

Filmography

Movies

• A Trip to the Moon (1902)

• The Adventures of Mark Twain (1982 claymation)

• Around the World in 80 Days (2004)

• The Asphyx (1972)

• (2001)

• Back to the Future Part III (1990)

• Bram Stoker's Dracula (1994)

• Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

• The City of Lost Children (1995)

• Conquest of the Pole (1912)

• Dark City (1998)

• The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958)

• First Men in the Moon (1964)

• Greystoke, the Legend of Tarzan (1983)

• The Impossible Voyage (1904)

• The Invisible Man (1933)

• Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)

• Master of the World (1961)

• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

• Steamboy (2004 anime)

• The Time Machine (1960, 2002)

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)

• Van Helsing (2004)

• Wild Wild West (1998)

Television

• The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr, FOX series

• Doctor Who: "Pyramids of Mars", "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", "Ghost Light"

• Firefly, neo-Western space opera, FOX series

• Gormenghast BBC series

• Jack of All Trades, syndicated series

• Last Exile, 2003 26-episode anime TV series

• Legend, series

• '', anime TV series

• Read or Die, short anime series

• Sakura Wars, anime TV series

• The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, Sci Fi Channel series

• Steam Detectives, anime series

• Trigun, anime series

• The Wild Wild West, ABC series

• The Vision of Escaflowne, anime TV series

Games

•

• Final Fantasy

• The Chaos Engine

• Chrono Trigger

• Chrono Cross (aka Chrono Trigger 2)

• Shining Force Series

• Syberia

• Thief

Xenofiction

Xenofiction is a subgenre of science fiction encompassing stories set among species or cultures dramatically different from humanity or human society.

Examples of this kind of work include Richard Adams' Watership Down, set in the warrens of rabbits in the English countryside, and the second part of Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves, which describes an alien culture with three sexes, the rational, the emotional, and the parental.

Another good example is The Faded Sun Trilogy: Kesrith/Shon'jir/Kutath by C.J. Cherryh. This story is about the Mri (meaning the people) -tall, secretive, bound by honor and the rigid dictates of their society. One human helps the last two survivors escape to retrace the journey of the ancestors. But he is Tsi-mri (not people), and nothing not of the people can touch that world. He must learn to become one of them -- or die at the hands of someone who has become his friend.

This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by [ expanding it].

[pic][pic]Time travel

Time travel is a concept that has long fascinated humanity – whether it is Merlin experiencing time backwards, or the religious traditions of Jesus Christ, descended from the Kingdom of God, which exists out-of-time-and-space, and Mohammed's trip to Jerusalem and ascent to heaven, returning before a glass knocked over had spilt its contents.

A discussion of time travel should begin with a statement that humans are in fact always traveling in time – in a linear fashion, from the present to the immediate future, inexorably, until death. Time travel in fiction and thought experiments is usually meant to describe a different sort of time travel, forward at greatly accelerated rate, forward far beyond reasonable human life span, backwards to a previous time, or any back to the present after a time trip.

Often nowadays it is a plot device used in science fiction to set a character in a particular time not his/her own, and explore the possible ramifications of the character's interaction with the people and technology of that time - a spin on the "country bumpkin comes to the big city" plot (or vice versa). It evolved to explore ideas of change, and reactions to it, and also to explore the ideas of a parallel universes or alternate history where some little event took place or didn't take place, but causes large changes in the future.

Famous fictional time machines include the TARDIS and H. G. Wells' time machine. Wells' novel is meant to predict the likely future of humanity itself, starting with world wars and ending with humans reverting back to a Garden of Eden existence - with a terrifying twist.

In physics, the "thought experiment" of time travel has been often used to examine the consequences of physical theories such as special relativity, general relativity and quantum mechanics. There is no experimental evidence of time travel, and it is not even well understood whether (let alone how) the current physical theories permit any kind of time travel.

|Table of contents [pic] |

|1 Physics |

|1.1 The equivalence of time travel and faster-than-light travel |

|1.2 Using wormholes |

|1.3 Using massive spinning cylinders |

|1.4 Using spooky action at a distance |

|1.5 The possibility of paradoxes |

|1.6 Time travel and the anthropic principle |

|2 Time travel in science fiction |

|2.7 Types of time travel |

|2.7.1 Immutable timelines |

|2.7.2 Mutable timelines |

|2.8 Other approaches to and examples of time travel |

|3 Time travel, or spacetime travel? |

|4 "Distance" of time travel |

|5 References |

|5.9 Scientific references |

|5.10 Literary references |

|6 See also |

|7 External links |

Physics

It should be noted that Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (and, by extension, the General Theory) very explicitly permits a kind of time dilation that would ordinarily be called time travel. The theory holds that, relative to a stationary observer, time appears to pass more slowly for faster-moving bodies: for example, a moving clock will appear to run slow; as a clock approaches the speed of light its hands will appear to nearly stop moving. However, this effect allows "time travel" only toward the future: only forward, never backward. It is not the most interesting kind, nor the kind typical of science fiction: hereafter "time travel" will refer to travel with some degree of freedom into the past or future.

Many in the scientific community believe that time travel is highly unlikely. This belief is largely due to Occam's Razor. Any theory which would allow time travel would require that issues of causality be resolved. What happens if you try to go back in time and kill your grandfather? – see grandfather paradox. Also, in the absence of any experimental evidence that time travel exists, it is theoretically simpler to assume that it does not happen. Indeed, Stephen Hawking once suggested that the absence of tourists from the future constitutes a strong argument against the existence of time travel – a variant of the Fermi paradox, with time travelers instead of alien visitors. However assuming that time travel cannot happen is also interesting to physicists because it opens up the question of why and what physical laws exist to prevent time travel from occurring.

The equivalence of time travel and faster-than-light travel

First of all, if one is able to move information from one point to another faster than light, then according to special relativity, there will be an observer who sees this information transfer as allowing information to travel into the past.

The General Theory of Relativity extends the Special Theory to cover gravity. It does this by postulating that matter "curves" the space in its vicinity. But under relativity, properties of space are fairly interchangeable with properties of time, depending on one's perspective, so that a curved path through space can wind up being a curved path through time. In moderate degrees, this allows two straight lines of different length to connect the same points in space; in extreme degrees, theoretically, it could allow timelines to curve around in a circle and reconnect with their own past. General relativity describes the universe under a complex sytem of "field equations," and there exist solutions to these equations that permit what are called "closed time-like curves," and hence time travel into the past. The first and most famous of these was proposed by Kurt Gödel, but all known current examples require the universe to have physical characteristics that it does not appear to have. Whether general relativity forbids closed time-like curves for all realistic conditions is unknown. Most physicists believe that it does, largely because assuming some principle against time travel prevents paradoxical situations from occurring.

Using wormholes

A proposed time-travel machine using a wormhole would (hypothetically) work something like this: A wormhole is created somehow. One end of the wormhole is accelerated to nearly the speed of light, perhaps with an advanced spaceship, and then brought back to the point of origin. Due to time dilation, the accelerated end of the wormhole has now experienced less subjective passage of time than the stationary end. An object that goes into the stationary end would come out of the other end in the past relative to the time when it enters. One significant limitation of such a time machine is that it is only possible to go as far back in time as the initial creation of the machine; in essence, it is more of a path through time than it is a device that itself moves through time, and it would not allow the technology itself to be moved backwards in time. This could provide an alternative explanation for Hawking's observation: a time machine will be built someday, but hasn't been built yet, so the tourists from the future can't reach this far back in time.

Creating a wormhole of a size useful for macroscopic spacecraft, keeping it stable, and moving one end of it around would require significant energy, many orders of magnitude more than the Sun can produce in its lifetime. Construction of a wormhole would also require the existence of a substance known as 'exotic matter', or 'negative matter', which, while not known to be impossible, is also not known to exist in forms useful for wormhole construction (but see for example the Casimir effect). Therefore it is unlikely such a device will be ever constructed, even with highly advanced technology. On the other hand, microscopic wormholes could still be useful for sending information back in time.

Using massive spinning cylinders

Another approach, developed by Frank Tipler, involves a spinning cylinder. If a cylinder is long, and dense, and spins fast enough about its long axis, then a spaceship flying around the cylinder on a spiral path could travel back in time (or forward, depending on the direction of its spiral). However, the density and speed required is so great that ordinary matter is not strong enough to construct it. A similar device might be built from a cosmic string, but none are known to exist, and it doesn't seem to be possible to create a new cosmic string.

Physicist Robert Forward noted that a naive application of general relativity to quantum mechanics suggests another way to build a time machine. A heavy atomic nucleus in a strong magnetic field would elongate into a cylinder, whose density and "spin" are enough to build a time machine. Gamma rays projected at it might allow information (not matter) to be sent back in time. However, he pointed out that until we have a single theory combining relativity and quantum mechanics, we will have no idea whether such speculations are nonsense.

Using spooky action at a distance

Quantum mechanical phenomena such as quantum teleportation, the EPR paradox, or quantum entanglement might appear to create a mechanism that allows for faster-than-light (FTL) communication or time travel, and in fact some interpretations of quantum mechanics such as the Bohm interpretation presumes that some information is being exchanged between particles instantaneously in order to maintain correlations between particles. This effect was referred to as "spooky action at a distance" by Einstein.

Nevertheless, the rules of quantum mechanics curiously appear to prevent an outsider from using these methods to actually transmit useful information, and therefore do not appear to allow for time travel or FTL communication. This misunderstanding seems to be widespread in popular press coverage of quantum teleportation experiments. The assumption that time travel or superluminal communications is impossible allows one to derive interesting results such as the no cloning theorem, and how the rules of quantum mechanics work to preserve causality is an active area of research.

The possibility of paradoxes

The Novikov self-consistency principle and recent calculations by Kip S. Thorne indicate that simple masses passing through time travel wormholes could never engender paradoxes–there are no initial conditions that lead to paradox once time travel is introduced. If his results can be generalized they would suggest, curiously, that none of the supposed paradoxes formulated in time travel stories can actually be formulated at a precise physical level: that is, that any situation you can set up in a time travel story turns out to permit of many consistent solutions. Things might, however, turn out to be almost unbelievably strange.

Time travel and the anthropic principle

It has been suggested by physicists such as Max Tegmark that the absence of time travel and the existence of causality may be due to the anthropic principle. The argument is that a universe which allows for time travel and closed time-like loops is one in which intelligence could not evolve because it would be impossible for a being to sort events into a past and future or to make predictions or comprehend the world around them.

Time travel in science fiction

H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" is considered the literary masterpiece of the genre. Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is another early time travel classic. Probably the most elaborate demonstrations of supposed time travel paradoxes are in Robert A. Heinlein's "All You Zombies" and "By His Bootstraps."

Types of time travel

Time travel themes in science fiction can generally be grouped into two types (based on effect – methods are extremely varied and numerous), each of which is further subdivided.

1. The time line is consistent and can never be changed.

1.1 One does not have full control of the time travel. One example of this is The Morphail Effect.

1.2 The Novikov self-consistency principle applies (named after Dr. Igor Dmitrievich Novikov, Professor of Astrophysics at Copenhagen University).

1.3 Any event that appears to have changed a time line has instead created a new one.

2. The time line is flexible and is subject to change.

2.1 The time line is extremely change resistant and requires great effort to change it.

2.2 The time line is easily changed.

Immutable timelines

Time Travel in a type 1 universe does not allow any paradoxes, although in 1.3, events can appear to be paradoxical.

In 1.1, Time travel is constrained to prevent paradox. If one attempts to make a paradox, one undergoes involuntary or uncontrolled time travel. Michael Moorcock uses a form of this principle and calls it The Morphail Effect.

In 1.2, The Novikov Self-consistency Principle asserts that the existence of a method of time travel constrains events to remain self-consistent (i.e. no paradoxes). This will cause any attempt to violate such consistency to fail, even if extremely improbable events are required.

Example: You have a device that can send a single bit of information back to itself at a precise moment in time. You receive a bit at 10:00:00 PM, then no bits for thirty seconds after that. If you send a bit back to 10:00:00 PM, everything works fine. However, if you try to send a bit to 10:00:15 PM (a time at which no bit was received), your transmitter will mysteriously fail. Or your dog will distract you for fifteen seconds. Or your transmitter will appear to work, but as it turns out your receiver failed at exactly 10:00:15 PM. Etc, etc. An excellent example of this kind of universe is found in "Timemaster," a novel by Dr. Robert Forward.

In a universe that allows retrograde time travel but no paradoxes, any present moment is the past for a future observer, thus all history/events are fixed. History can be thought of as a filmstrip where everything is already fixed. See block time for a detailed examination of this way of considering the nature of time.

In 1.3, any event that appears to have caused a paradox has instead created a new time line. The old time line remains unchanged, with the time traveler or information sent simply having vanished, never to return. A difficulty with this explanation, however, is that conservation of mass-energy would be violated for the origin timeline and the destination timeline. A possible solution to this is to have the mechanics of time travel required that mass-energy be exchanged in precise balance between past and future at the moment of travel, or to simply expand the scope of the conservation law to encompass all timelines. An example of this kind of time travel can be found in David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself.

Mutable timelines

Time Travel in a type 2 universe is much more difficult to explain. The biggest problem is how to explain changes in the past. One method of explanation is that once the past changes so do all memories of all observers. This would mean that no observer would ever observe the changing of the past (because they will not remember changing the past.) This would make it hard to tell whether you are in a type 1 universe or a type 2 universe. However, you could infer that you were by knowing that a) communication with the past was possible and b) it appeared that the time line had never been changed as a result of an action someone remembers taking, although evidence exists that other people are changing their time lines fairly often. An example of this kind of universe is presented in Thrice Upon a Time, a novel by James P. Hogan.

Larry Niven suggests that in a type 2.1 universe, the most efficient way for the universe to "correct" a change is for time travel to never be discovered, and that in a type 2.2 universe, the very large (or infinite) number of time travelers from the endless future will cause the timeline to change wildly until it reaches a history in which time travel is never discovered. However, many other "stable" situations may also exist in which time travel occurs but no paradoxes are created; if the changeable-timeline universe finds itself in such a state no further changes will occur, and to the inhabitants of the universe it will appear identical to the type 1.2 scenario.

Other approaches to and examples of time travel

In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Douglas Adams does not see a big problem in becoming his own father, since this is nothing a well-adjusted family can't deal with. The big problem is grammar – the tense formation for time travellers. Another issue in the book is that time travel was so complex that in order to understand all the math involved one had to live a dozen lives. As that was possible only after time travel was invented, no one ever knew who was able to invent it.

Robert Heinlein's story "All You Zombies..." shows the possible results of taking this concept to its logical conclusion ad absurdum: the time travelling protagonist is/was/becomes his/her own father, son, mother and daughter.

In many science fiction books about time travel, there is a physical machine for transporting people through time but there is a minority which involve time travel through mental disciplines. Jack Finney's Time And Again is one such book. Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time portrays time travel as an ability some are born with. The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber) displays time travel as an inherited talent, where one's mind and/or spirit travels back into its past, able to change its current present when it returns. Some people affiliated with the UFO movement say that the ability to time-travel lies latent in everybody's brain, and that that ability is "turned on" in the minds of the Greys, who supposedly have the ability to unlock it in human brains too. Other people believe that both time travel and teleportation can be learned through practice in a similar manner.

In 1992 Harry Turtledove published the novel The Guns of the South, which became popular with its story about South African white supremacists using a time travel machine to go back to the days of the American Civil War and equip the dispirited rebel army with 20th century weapons such as the AK-47. They soon win every battle and gleefully march into Washington, D.C. to capture Lincoln. The limits of his time travel machine are ludicrous, however, because it can only take people back a set number of years. This allows him to prevent the white supremacists from making another trip to cure the ills of the first, which goes wrong at the end.

It can be argued that the Book of Revelation, describes a form of "spiritual time travel." In contrast to most science fiction conceptualizations of time travel, the Revelation states that John (while on the Greek island of Patmos) had a vision that took him, in spirit, to the future end times in world history and that future events were revealed to him by an angel sent by Jesus Christ.

Time travel, or spacetime travel?

The classic problem with the concept of "time travel ships" in science fiction is that it invariably treats Earth as if it is stationary in absolute space. The idea that you can go into a machine that sends you to "1865 A.D.", and you exit from a door that leaves you in the same spot in Poughkeepsie that the time machine was when you entered it ignores the issue that Earth is moving through space around the Sun, which is moving in the galaxy, etc. So, if you think of spacetime as 4 dimensions, and "time travel" is just "moving" along one of them, you couldn't stay in the same place with respect to the surface of Earth, because Earth is a moving platform with a highly complicated trajectory! If you only moved "ahead" 5 seconds, you might materialize in the air, or inside solid rock, depending on where Earth was "before" and "after." If you moved "behind" one year, you'd end up in cold outer space, where Earth was a year earlier - in the same part of the Sun's orbit, yes, but where has the sun gone over that year? So, to really do what they make look so easy in films like Back to the Future and The Time Machine, your time machine might have to be a very powerful spaceship that could move you large distances and that kept track of Earth's motion through space as part of the solar system, galaxy, etc.

But how can you decouple the ship from momentum? If you try to move forward in time, is your ship automatically going to be propelled by the momentum gained by riding Earth? Or does it decouple? But doesn't that bring back the idea of an absolute reference frame? Again, even to move one millisecond forward or backward in time, the ship would have to be far beyond anything humans can build, not to mention the acceleration-deceleration problems and what that might do to your blood pressure. You might even use this to argue, Zeno-style, for the impossibility of time machines. In 1980 Robert Heinlein published an amusing novel The Number of the Beast about a ship that lets you dial in the 6 (not 4!) coordinates of space and time and it instantly moves you there – without explaining how such a device might work.

"Distance" of time travel

According to special relativity, the physical laws may be invariant over Lorentz transformations. This mixes time and space dimensions as time can be compared to a distance times the speed of light. So, the second is comparable to a unit of distance equal to 299,792.458 kilometres. Conversely, the distance of 1 metre is comparable to about 3.34 nanoseconds. You can also compare a "year" to a "light-year" (since the square of a distance has the opposite sign to the square of a time, time and space aren't actually identical).

Now, if we suppose that the same distances in space and time present the same level of technical difficulty, then moving in time for just one second, forward or backward, would be like flying to the Moon. Moving for a few years would be like flying to some of the nearest stars. And if you want to go visiting dinosaurs, perhaps it would be like flying to a far-off galaxy. On the basis of the above argument, some people think that time travel will require a lot of energy (unless we use something like teleportation).

One may even say that the past is not accessible to us simply because it is too far away.

References

Scientific references

• Paul Davies, About Time

• Paul J. Nahin, Time Machines

• Clifford A. Pickover, Time: A Traveler's Guide

Literary references

• The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells

• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain

Related topics

• Science fiction themes

• French science fiction

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• Women in science fiction

• List of science fiction authors

• List of science fiction novels

• List of science fiction short stories

• Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

• Science fiction film

• Science fiction television

• List of science fiction television

• List of science fiction visual artists

• Planets in science fiction

• Sex in science fiction

• Fictional technology

• Computers in fiction

• Science fiction conventions

• Science fiction fandom

• List of science fiction awards

• Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase

• Baen Free Library

• The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

• Fantasy

• Horror

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