The Science Fiction Effect 210
Harperdog writes "Laura Kahn has a lovely essay about the history of science fiction, and how science fiction can help explain concepts that are otherwise difficult for many...or perhaps, don't hold their interest. Interesting that Frankenstein is arguably the first time that science fiction appears. From Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, authors have been writing about 'mad scientists' messing around with life. Science fiction can be a powerful tool to influence society's views — one scientists should embrace."
Re:Frankenstein explains what .... (Score:5, Informative)
Frankenstein actually has a very interesting history. Mary Shelly wrote the book as a sort of contest among her friends and acquainteces to write the scariest story she could think of. She was inspired by a recent experiment which featured a frog's muscles being stimulated by electricity. It was widely believed at that time that the "esscence of life" was in fact electricity, and that it might be possible to resurrect the dead with large amounts of electrical current. Of course, they were wrong, but Mary Shelly's novel was written primarily to explore the "what-if" of whether a scientist could resurrect a corpse using electricity. It's actually an incredibly important book in that regard, since it was one of the first instances of speculative fiction that wasn't purely religious in nature, and not to mention it is very very well written.
Re:Why I like science fiction. (Score:4, Informative)
I just looked through a list of the top 50 movies since the 90's and 20 percent of them were scifi. And this is after counting Back to the Future, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Close Encounters, 2001, etc. Pretty broad variety, actually.
Back to the Future, 1985, 1989, 1990 (one in the 90s)
Star Trek, some in the 90s
Ghostbusters, 1984
Close Encounters,1977
2001, that 1968 not 1998
Re:Science fiction is not about the future... (Score:5, Informative)
Most science-fiction authors, from my experience, have a poor understanding of actual scientific knowledge and, instead, rely on omission of fact to glaze over scientific points of interest. Frankenstein, for example, never exactly explains in concrete terms exactly how the monster was brought to life, or how it survived, or what it ate, or actual and exact process undertaken to reproduce the experiment.
Actually, Frankenstein was quite scientifically sophisticated and pro-science for its day. As TFA explains, Galvani was all the rage at the time. They knew that electricity would cause a frog's legs to twitch; they just didn't know why. How could they -- they had just discovered it. Camillo Golgi hadn't been born. They had a tentative working theory that the electricity caused animism. They even thought, reasonably, that electricity might re-animate dead bodies back to life as a medical treatment. Electric shocks were a frequently-attempted treatment for drowning. When Mary's child with Percy was stillborn, they attempted to revive it with electric shocks. It wasn't so far-fetched -- in 1928, doctors succeeded http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cardiac_pacemaker#History [wikipedia.org]
Dr. Victor Frankenstein was actually modeled on Shelley's informal tutor, Dr. James Lind. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279684/ [nih.gov] In the actual novel, in contrast to the popular image, Frankenstein was a serious scientist, and the monster himself was a sympathetic intellectual rejected by society (much as Shelley was in his schooldays).
Mary Shelley understood the science of her day pretty well, and Frankenstein captured it reasonably well -- better than a lot of science fiction writers today.
Re:Science fiction is not about the future... (Score:4, Informative)
almost no sci-fi predicted the internet almost no sci-fi predicted the internet
Almost but not none. Read "the machine stops". It also predicted successfully not only the internet, but that people would blather at each other vapidly and continuously. Kind of like this post.