GetWiki

{{Short description|Old Literary Genre}}File:Aerial house3.jpg|right|thumb|250px|"Maison tournante aérienne" (aerial rotating house). This drawing, by French science fiction writer Albert Robida for his book Le Vingtième Siècle, a nineteenth-century conception of life in the twentieth century, depicts a dwelling that can rotate on a post, with an airshipairshipScientific romance is an archaic, mainly British term for the genre of fiction now commonly known as science fiction. The term originated in the 1850s to describe both fiction and elements of scientific writing, but it has since come to refer to the science fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily that of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. In recent years the term has come to be applied to science fiction written in a deliberately anachronistic style as a homage to or pastiche of the original scientific romances.

History

Early usages

The earliest use of the term "scientific romance" is thought to have been in 1845, when critics applied it to Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a speculative natural history published in 1844. It was used again in 1851 by the Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal and Literary Review in reference to Thoman Hunt's Panthea, or the Spirit of Nature.Before Science Fiction: Romances of Science and Scientific Romances, io9, accessed March 22, 2012 In 1859 the Southern Literary Messenger referred to Balzac's Ursule Mirouët as "a scientific romance of mesmerism".Southern Literary Messenger: A Magazine Devoted to Literature, Science and Art, "Balzac", H.T. Tuckerman, Making of America, accessed March 22, 2012 In addition, the term was sometimes used to dismiss a scientific principle considered by the writer to be fanciful, as in The Principles of Metaphysical and Ethical Science (1855), which stated that "Milton's conception of inorganic matter left to itself, without an indwelling soul, is not merely more poetical, but more philosophical and just, than the scientific romance, now generally repudiated by all rational inquirers, which represents it as necessarily imbued with the seminal principles of organization and life, and waking up by its own force from eternal quietude to eternal motion." Bowen, Francis (1855), The Principles of Metaphysical and Ethical Science: Applied to the Evidences of Religion, Brewer and Tileston, p.150, Google Books, accessed March 23, 2012 Then, in 1884, Charles Howard Hinton published a series of scientific and philosophical essays under the title Scientific Romances.Hinton, Charles (1884), Scientific Romances, W. Swan Sonnenschein & Co. OpenLibrary.org, accessed March 24, 2012

20th century

"Scientific romance" is now commonly used to refer to science fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as in the anthologies Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912–1920Moskowitz, Sam (1970) Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912–1920, Holt Rinehart Winston, 978-0030818585 and Scientific Romance in Britain: 1890–1950.Stableford, Brian (1985), Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890–1950 Palgrave Macmillan, 978-0312703059 One of the earliest writers to be described in this way was the French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion, whose Recits de l'infini and La fin du monde have both been described as scientific romances.The Encyclopedia of Science, Flammarion, (Nicolas) Camille (1842–1925), accessed March 24, 2012 The term is most widely applied to Jules Verne, as in the 1879 edition of the American Cyclopædia,BOOK, The American Cyclopædia, 1879, D. Appleton and Company, New York, 407,weblink Vol. VII, 2nd, 25 January 2013, and H. G. Wells, whose historical society continues to refer to his work as "scientific romances" today.The H.G. Wells Society, accessed March 23, 2012. Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars (1912) is also sometimes seen as a major work of scientific romance,Voyages Extraordinaire, "1912: Zenith of the Scientific Romances", accessed March 22, 2012 and Sam Moskowitz referred to him in 1958 as "the acknowledged master of the scientific romance,"EdgarRiceBurroughs.ca, "Tributes to Edgar Rice Burroughs", accessed March 22, 2012. though the scholar E. F. Bleiler views Burroughs as a writer involved in the "new development" of pulp science fiction that arose in the early 20th century.E. F. Bleiler, Science Fiction: The Early Years (1990). The Kent State University Press: Kent, Ohio. Pg. xxii. The same year as A Princess of Mars, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published The Lost World,Doyle, Arthur Conan, (1912), The Lost World, Hodder & Stoughton which is also commonly referred to as a scientific romance.The Lost World 100th Anniversary, accessed March 24, 20121902 saw the cinematic release of Georges Méliès's film Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon); the time period and the fact that it is based partially on works by Verne and Wells has led to its being labelled as a scientific romance as well.Spectacular Attractions - A Trip to the Moon / Le Voyage dans la Lune, accessed March 24, 2012.

Modern revival

In recent years the term "scientific romance" has seen a revival, being self-applied in works of science fiction that deliberately ape previous styles. Examples include Christopher Priest's (The_Space_Machine|The Space Machine: A Scientific Romance),Priest, Christopher (1976), The Space Machine: A Scientific Romance, Harper & Row published in 1976, Ronald Wright's Wells pastiche A Scientific Romance: A Novel, published in 1998, and the 1993 tabletop roleplaying game Forgotten Futures.Forgotten Futures: The Scientific Romance Roleplaying Game, accessed March 24, 2012 Though it uses the term, Dennis Overbye's novel Einstein in Love: A Scientific RomanceOverbye, Dennis (2000), Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance, Viking Adult does not imitate science fiction of the past in the manner of the other novels mentioned.

Definitions

Brian Stableford has argued, in Scientific Romance in Britain: 1890–1950, that early British science-fiction writers who used the term "scientific romance" differed in several significant ways from American science fiction writers of the time. Most notably, the British writers tended to minimise the role of individual "heroes", took an "evolutionary perspective", held a bleak view of the future, and had little interest in space as a new frontier. Regarding "heroes", several novels by H. G. Wells have the protagonist as nameless, and often powerless, in the face of natural forces. The evolutionary perspective can be seen in tales involving long time periods, such as The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine by Wells, or Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Even in scientific romances that did not involve vast stretches of time, the issue of whether mankind was just another species subject to evolutionary pressures often arose, as can be seen in parts of The Hampdenshire Wonder by J. D. Beresford and several works by S. Fowler Wright. Regarding space, C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy took the position that "as long as humanity remains flawed and sinful, our exploration of other planets will tend to do them more harm than good"; and most scientific romance authors had not even that much interest in the topic. As for bleakness, it can be seen in many of the works by all the authors already cited, who deemed humanity flawed — either by original sin or, much more often, by biological factors inherited from our ape ancestors. Stableford also notes that some of the British scientific romances were saved from "being entirely gloomy" by their philosophical speculation (calling them works of "modest armchair philosophizing"). He cites E. V. Odle's The Clockwork Man, John Gloag's Tomorrow's Yesterday and Murray Constantine's Proud Man as examples of this type of scientific romance.Brian Stableford, Creators of Science Fiction, Wildside Press LLC, 2009. {{ISBN|1434457591}} (p. 57-58)Nonetheless, not all British science fiction from that period comports with Stableford's thesis. Some, for example, revelled in adventures in space and took an optimistic view of the future. By the 1930s there were British authors such as Eric Frank Russell who were intentionally writing "science fiction" for American publication. At that point British writers who used the term "scientific romance" did so either because they were unaware of science fiction or because they chose not to be associated with it.{{Clarify|date=March 2008}}{{Citation needed|date=January 2008}}After the Second World War the influence of American science fiction caused the term "scientific romance" to lose favour, a process accelerated by the fact that few writers of scientific romance considered themselves "scientific romance" writers, instead viewing themselves as just writers who occasionally happened to write scientific romances. Even so, the influence of the scientific romance era persisted in British science fiction. John Wyndham's work has been cited as providing "a bridge between traditional British scientific romance and the more varied science fiction which has replaced it".Ian Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, Cambridge University Press, 1993 (p. 1046) Some commentators believe scientific romance had some impact on the American variety.

See also

• Planetary romance
• Edisonade
• Romanticism in science
• Voyages Extraordinaires

References

{{reflist|2}}

Bibliography

{{div col|colwidth=22em}}

• Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott (more of a fantasy, but see its subtitle)
• The Hampdenshire Wonder by J. D. Beresford
• The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson
• The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel
• Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
• Last Men in London by Olaf Stapledon
• ''Odd John by Olaf Stapledon
• Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
• Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
• ''From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne
• ''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
• The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
• The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
• The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells
• The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

{{div col end}}

External links

• weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20070329035517weblink">"The Victorian Bookshelf: The First Century of the Scientific Romance and other Related Works"

{{Science fiction}}