Reviews for The Road to science fiction

The average rating for The Road to science fiction based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-04-05 00:00:00 Serena Odle A selection of exceprts of stories from before 1900 that somewhat resemble and possibly influenced the development of the Science Fiction genre. Gunn does not claim that these all are science fiction, just that they are relevant to tracing the history of ideas leading to it. Each excerpt is preceded by a little introductory essay which also talks about other works not included in the book. From A True Story; Lucian of Samosata. People point to this story and say "Look! A Sci Fi from way back when! (around AD 170)" But it isn't. It is a silly satire of tall tales, not meant to be taken in any way seriously. The moon is populated only by men. "Moonmen have artificial penises, generally of ivory but, in the case of the poor, of wood; these enable them to have intercourse when they mount their mates. ... They have no rectal orifice so, instead of the anus, boys offer for intercourse the hollow of the knee above the calf, since there's an opening there. ... Above the rump grows a cabbage which hangs down like a tail; it's always ripe and doesn't break off even when they fall on their backs." From The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville; Anonymous. A travel to a strange land with strange inhabitants. (Some of the least interesting Science Fiction stories are like that.) From Utopia; Thomas More. Some dude imagines how to build a perfect society. Yay! Finally we have the secret! From The City of the Sun; Tommaso Campanella. A description of another perfect society. Told as a dialog of the form: "What did you see?". "I saw xxx". "Fascinating! What else did you see." "I saw yyy". "Wow! What else did you see?". Repeat ad nauseum. From The New Atlantis; Francis Bacon. Starts as an adventure story on a ship. When it lands on an uncharted island, the rest is Bacon's description of the society there which is basically what would later be called a modern research university, where scientists are given freedom to study all topics just for the sake of knowledge. Very similar to real universities that came later, but with more focus on Jesus and absolutely non man-on-man love. From Somnium, or Lunar Astronomy; Johannes Kepler. Describes in detail what the motion of the sun and planets would look like from the moon. Interesting if you care about that sort of thing. The framing device where this is a second hand story told to Kepler in a dream seems to be there just in case Kepler needed to say to the inquisition that of course he didn't really believe any of this heresy. From A Voyage to the Moon; Cyrano de Bergerac. Another trip to the moon. This time with more emphasis on the adventure, though no more plausible in how the voyage takes place. (Bone marrow is involved. The moon sucks up bone marrow.) From A Voyage to Laputa, from Gulliver's Travels; Jonathon Swift. Basically a satire on how scientists were beginning to study things which seemed pointless to ordinary people. Perhaps the first use of the trope of absent-minded scientists. Mildly funny, but dry at the same time. From The Journey to the World Underground; Ludvig Holberg. An example of a journey into a world inside the Earth. This was almost still scientifically plausible when written. From Frankenstein; Mary Shelley. Shelley's story questions whether scientists maybe are going too far in investigating living things. Rappacini's Daughter; Nathaniel Hawthorne. Basically the story of a mad scientist causing problems. Mellonta Tauta; Edgar Allan Poe. Among Poe's final writings. Short and funny story of someone in the year 2848 looking back at 1848 and totally misunderstanding what 1848 was like. Partly mocking the Communist Manifesto, it imagines that individual humans no longer matter, only the people as a whole, so wars and pestilence are seen as good things for keeping the population down. The Diamond Lens; Fitz-James O'Brien. An evil, mad scientist discovers a tiny world beneath his microscope. From 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, and Around the Moon; Jules Verne. Adventure stories involving new scientific instruments and vehicles, and discoveries of new lands and creatures. From She; H. Rider Haggard. An example of a "lost world" story. Central Africa was even more unknown to Europe then as Mars is to us today. Maybe it could hide a 2000 year old super-woman. "She" was an immensely popular book; still among the best-sellers of all time. From Looking Backward; Edward Bellamy. The main character is cryogenically frozen and wakes up in a far future Utopia. Ok, not cryogenically frozen, but suspended in a trance by "animal magnetism". Same difference. The first few chapters are pretty enjoyable, making me think I'd like to read more. But Gunn tells us that after the beginning, it is mostly just exposition of Bellamy's ideal society. Basically Socialism, but not called that. The Damned Thing; Ambrose Bierce. A story of a supernatural creature, but given a scientific explanation at the end. With the Night Mail; Rudyard Kipling. An adventure story where a routine air-mail mission encounters danger. Kipling, like Wells later, imagines that the creation of air ships would lead to world peace because who could fight back against air ships? The Star; H.G. Wells. Finally a story that is truly Science Fiction as we know it. A rogue star passes nearby and causes Neptune to plunge into the sun. It passes near Earth causing much destruction. Worth your time if you are interested in the roots of Science Fiction. Not so much if you are just interested in fun stories.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-13 00:00:00 Paul Niermann Having been disappointed by Kingsley Amis' New Maps of Hell, I looked for a more organized and comprehensive history of science fiction and started reading Adam Roberts' History of Science Fiction on Christmas Eve. Roberts begins with "Science Fiction and the Ancient Novel" and includes chapters on the 17th and 18th century. I decided that I needed to supplement his book with some primary texts, and so began reading Gunn's historical anthology. Though Gunn quotes from Gilgamesh in his introduction, the first excerpt proper is from Lucian's True History, concerning a trip to the moon via sailing ship, and a battle between the armies of the moon and the sun. This is an amusing piece, but I imagine that the SF classification is due entirely to its nominally lunar setting; it could with equal or greater justification be considered an early example of fantasy writing. The following excerpts take us through the centuries fairly rapidly with passages from Mandeville's Travels, More's Utopia, Kepler's Sommnium, Tommaso Campanella, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Francis Bacon. Most of these pieces are fairly dry and, though I usually avoid collections of excerpts, I have to admit that I would probably read few if any of these works in their entirety. Adam Roberts refers to many of these works unequivocally as "science fiction", whereas Gunn offers them as precursors of the genre but not necessarily the thing itself. For me Kepler shows the most rigorous example of what I am coming to think of as the "SF imagination". He describes a trip to the moon accomplished with the aid of "demons", which, like most of the earlier examples of space flight, seems pure fantasy rather than SF; but once his protagonist is on the moon, he carefully considers how things would appear and what the experience of an actual lunar occupant would be, based on contemporary scientific knowledge. Once the eighteenth century is reached, with excerpts from Swift and Holberg, the reading becomes considerably more pleasurable, as writers take pains not just to flesh out their visions in prose, but also to entertain the reader. At this point an Anglophone bias becomes evident in the collection; after Holberg's Niels Klim's Journey Underground, the only author presented in translation is "the essential Frenchman" Jules Verne. The other authors included are Mary Shelley, Hawthorne, Poe, Fitz-James O'Brien (a new writer to me, represented by the interesting tale, "The Diamond Lens"), Bellamy, Bierce, Kipling, and, of course, Wells. A strange inclusion to me was a 20 page extract from H. Rider Haggard's She, which I don't consider SF, though it is a possible precursor to The Lost World, which is SF; I think the space should have been devoted to more relevant works, such as Samuel Butler's Erewhon or something from E. T. A. Hoffmann. One thing that amused me in the various Utopias portrayed here, from More through Bellamy, is how nicely things work out on paper once private property is eliminated. It is almost enough to make one want to write an ironic Utopia in which everything is abolished except private property, if only Ayn Rand hadn't already written it, without, alas, the irony.