Science fiction

Abstract

Science fiction first emerged as a subgenre of the novel in the Victorian period, manifesting a cluster of formal and thematic characteristics that would come to define a novelistic form that both differed significantly from and employed the techniques of Victorian realism. The critical mass of novels that shared these characteristics includes works by,Edward Bulwer‐Lytton, H. G. Wells,, and Arthur Conan Doyle Additionally, because science fiction was an international phenomenon, works by Jules Verne such as20,000 Leagues under the Sea(1870) andFrom the Earth to the Moon(1865) share characteristics with British science fiction, as does American Charlotte Perkins Gilman'sHerland(1915). While the common themes of Victorian science fiction reflect contemporaneous scientific and technological developments, science fiction novels manifested a pattern of generic features, because they performed a particular cultural role in a particular cultural moment. As science emerged as a discipline, science fiction played the role of mediating what would later be called “the two cultures” – the sciences and the humanities. The empiricism that underlies the formal techniques of Victorian science fiction novels overlaps with hallmarks of the realist novel, but also offers a masculinist reaction to what was perceived as an increasingly feminized world of Victorian realist fiction.