Extracts from Definitions of words from the Oxford English Dictionary (CD-ROM version)__________________________________________________________________ ALLEGORY FANTASY MYTH SCIENCE FICTION FABLE LEGEND PARABLE
allegory 1.
Description
of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive
resemblance. 2.
An
instance of such description; a figurative sentence, discourse, or narrative,
in which properties and circumstances attributed to the apparent subject
really refer to the subject they are meant to suggest; an extended or
continued metaphor. fable
1b.
A
fictitious story relating to supernatural or extraordinary persons or
incidents, and more or less current in popular belief; a myth or legend. (Now rare.) Also, legendary or mythical stories in general; mythological
fiction. 2.
A
short story devised to convey some useful lesson; esp. one in which animals or inanimate things are the speakers or
actors; an apologue. Now the most prominent sense. fantasy The
senses of uamsar¬a
from which the senses of the word in the mod. langs. are developed are: 1.
appearance, in late Gr. esp. spectral apparition, phantom (so L. phantasia
in Vulg.); 2. the mental process or faculty of sensuous perception; 3. the
faculty of imagination. These senses passed through OF. into Eng., together
with others (as delusive fancy, false or unfounded notion, caprice, etc.)
which had been developed in late L., Romanic, or Fr. 3.
a. Delusive
imagination, hallucination; the fact or habit of deluding oneself by imaginary
perceptions or reminiscences. ? Obs. b.
A
day-dream arising from conscious or unconscious wishes or attitudes. 4.
a. Imagination;
the process or the faculty of forming mental representations of things not
actually present. (Cf. fancy
n.
4.) Also personified.
Now usually with sense influenced by association with fantastic or phantasm:
Extravagant or visionary fancy. In
early use not clearly distinguished from 3; an exercise of poetic imagination
being conventionally regarded as accompanied by belief in the reality of what
is imagined. b.
A
mental image. c.
A
product of imagination, fiction, figment. d.
An
ingenious, tasteful, or fantastic invention or design. f.
A
genre of literary compositions. legend
6.
a. An
unauthentic or non-historical story, esp. one handed down by tradition from
early times and popularly regarded as historical. myth
1.
a. A
purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions,
or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical
phenomena. parable a.
A
comparison, a similitude; any saying or narration in which something is
expressed in terms of something else; an allegory, an apologue. Also vaguely
extended (chiefly after Heb. or other oriental words so rendered) to any kind
of enigmatical, mystical, or dark saying, and to proverbs, maxims, or ancient
saws, capable of application to cases as they occur. arch. (exc. as in b.) b.
spec.
A fictitious narrative or allegory (usually something that might naturally
occur), by which moral or spiritual relations are typically figured or set
forth, as the parables of the New Testament. (Now the usual sense.) 'science'
fiction Imaginative
fiction based on postulated scientific discoveries or spectacular
environmental changes, freq. set in the future or on other planets and
involving space or time travel. Quot. 1851 shows an isolated use. The expression did not come into general use until the end of the 1920s. 1851
W. Wilson
Little Earnest Bk. upon Great Old Subject x. 137 (heading) Science-Fiction. Ibid.,
We hope it will not be long before we may have
other works of Science-Fiction, as we believe such works likely to fulfil a
good purpose, and create an interest, where, unhappily, science alone might
fail. Ibid.
139 Campbell
says that Fiction in Poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and
enchanting resemblance. Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in
which the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing
story which may itself be poetical and truethus circulating a knowledge of the
Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of Life. 1929
Science Wonder Stories June 89 The
editor of this publication [sc. H. Gernsback] addressed a number of letters to
science fiction lovers. The editor promised to pay $50.00 for the best letter
each month on the subject of What Science Fiction Means to Me. 1933 Astounding Stories Dec. 142/1 The..science-fiction fan does not care for stories of the supernatural... Intelligent people, as a rule, will read science fiction.
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Issues of Genre -- Working Definitions Cyberpunk Pastoral Dystopias possible worlds Fabulation Proto Science Fiction Fantasy Science Fantasy
Genre SF Gothic SF Sword and Sorcery Horror in SF Utopias Mythology Virtual Reality
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Sources John Clute & Peter Nicholls. Eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1993, 2nd edition, 1995. John Clute & John Grant. Eds. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1997. Peter Stockwell, The Poetics of Science Fiction. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Educational, 2000. Encarta 1999 Encylcopedia.
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Cyberpunk Clute & Nicholls: Term used to describe a school of sf writing that developed and became popular during the 1980s…. The “cyber” part of the word relates to Cybernetics: to a future where industrial and political blocs may be global … rather than national, and controlled through information networks; a future in which machine augmentations of the human body are commonplace, as are mind and body changes brought about by drugs and biological engineering. Central to cyberpunk fictions is the concept of Virtual reality…. Data networks are more than just a part of cyberpunk’s subject matter. Density of information … has from the outset strongly characterized cyberpunk’s actual style…. Cyberpunk is often seen as a variety of Postmodernist fiction…. |
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Dystopias Clute & Nicholls: … the class of hypothetical societies containing images of worlds worse than our own…. Dystopian images are almost invariably images of future society, pointing fearfully at the way the world is supposedly going in order to provide urgent propaganda for a change in direction. AS hope for a better future grows, the fear of disappointment inevitably grows with it, and when any vision of a future utopia incorporates a manifesto for political action or belief, opponents of that action or belief will inevitably attempt to show that its consequences are not utopian but horrible…. The single most prolific stimulus in the production of dystopian visions has been political polarization of capitalism and socialism… the central features of dystopia are…: the oppression of the majority by a ruling elite … and the regimentation of society as a whole…. Suspicion of technology … is surprisingly widespread in early Genre sf…. Revolution against a dystopian regime was to become a staple plot of Genre sf… The standard scenario involves an oppressive totalitarian state which maintains its dominance and stability by means of futuristic technology, but which is in the end toppled by newer technologies exploited by revolutionaries. |
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Fabulation Clute & Nicholls: … any story which challenges the two main assumptions of genre sf: that the world an be seen; and that it can be told…. The techniques employed by those writers who use sf devices to underline the double challenge, and whose work is thus at heart profoundly antipathetic to genre sf. A typical fabulation, then, is a tale whose telling is foregrounded in a way which emphasizes the inherent arbitariness of the words we use, the stories we tell…, the characters whose true nature we can never plumb, the worlds we can never step into. |
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Fantasy Clute
& Nicholls: … To cut the definition to an absolute
minimum: mimetic fiction is real, fantasy is unreal; sf is unreal but
natural, as opposed to the remainder of fantasy, which is unreal and
supernatural. (Or, simply still, sf could happen, fantasy couldn’t).
Several things follow from this sort of argument. The first is
that all sf is fantasy, but not all fantasy is sf. The second is that,
because natural law is something that we come to understand only
gradually … the sf of one period regularly becomes the fantasy of the
next…. We do not use the word “fantasy”
… as a supergenre which includes sf…. “fantasy”, as we
use the word … is fiction about the impossible…. The general thrust
of the European (though not UK) literary tradition is to regard fantasy
and sf as two aspects of the same phenomenon…. Supernatural fantasy
approaches the condition of science fiction when its narrative voice
implies a post-scientific consciousness. Conversely, sf … approaches
the condition of fantasy when its narrative voice implies a mystical or
even anti-scientific consciousness…. Authors who use fantasy elements
in sf regularly rationalize their fundamentally
Gothic motifs… Conversely, when writers of Hard sf … write
fantasy … they regard the marvelous and the magical with a rationalist
scrutiny, treating magic … as if it were a science…. Fantasy itself
is not homogeneous…. (Tymn &c, 1979, distinguish between) high
fantasy, set in a fully realized secondary world, and low fantasy, which
features supernatural intrusions into our own world. Most Horror fiction
takes the latter form; most Sword and Sorcery (or Heroic fantasy) takes
the former…. High fantasy and sf typically create imaginary worlds….
At the extreme fantasy end of the spectrum the imaginary worlds tend,
strongly, to be conceptually static; history is cyclical; the narrative
form is almost always the quest for an emblematic object or person; the
characters are emblematic too, most commonly of a dualistic (even
Manichean) system where good confronts evil; most fundamentally of all,
the protagonists are trapped in a pattern. They live in a deterministic
world, they fulfil destiny, they move through the steps of an ancient
dance. At the extreme sf end of the spectrum the stories are set in
kinetic venues that register the existence of change, history is
evolutionary and free will operates in a possible arbitrary universe,
whose patterns, if they exist at all, may be only those imposed upon it
… by its human observers. There is one final group of fantasists, the
fabulators, who create fantastic changes (often quite minor) in everyday
reality, often ironically or for purposes of Satire…
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fantasy SCIENCE FICTION can be distinguished from fantasy on several grounds; but in our terms the most significant difference is that sf tales are written and read on the presumption that they are possible - if perhaps not yet.... A fantasy text may be described as the story of an earned passage from BONDAGE - via central RECOGNITION of what has been revealed and of what is about to happen, and which may involve a profound METAMORPHOSIS of protagonist or world or both - into the EUCATASTROPHE, where marriages may occur, just governance fertilize the barren LAND, and there is a HEALING. |
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fantasy The Antiquity of Fantasy Origins of the Genre Modern Trends Fantasy Films |
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Genre
SF |
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Gothic SF Clute & Nicholls: … a … romantic novel which has a strong element of the mysterious or the supernatural and which usually features the persecution of a woman in an isolated locale…. The Gothic may be seen as a reaction to the emphasis on reason which prevailed in the Enlightenment, the intellectual world of the 18th century. In a world ruled by Order … some room needed to be left for mystery, the marvelous, the evil, the inexplicable…. In the 20th century, the Gothic mode was largely hived off into the genre of occult/horror, but it never lost its kinship with sf…. The Gothic idea of the Promethean or Faustian mad scientist … punished for assuming the creative powers belonging to the gods or God … was central to sf… Other sf variants of Gothic images are the renegade Robot (along with all ghost-in-the-machine stories), most Luddite stories, most stories of manipulation by beings who may be Gods and Demons, nearly all stories rationalizing Supernatural Creatures, most stories about ambiguous Alien artifacts; indeed, most stories in which the Universe proves unamenable to rational (or “cognitive”) understanding. |
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Horror in SF Clute
& Nicholls: Goya: the Sleep of Reason breeds
Monsters… |
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Mythology Clute & Nicholls: Traditional sf appears in mythology in two ways, its archetypes being either re-enacted or rationalized (or sometimes both). The re-enactment of myths is the more complex of the two cases. Behind the retelling of a myth in a modern context lies the feeling that, although particular myths grew out of a specific cultural background, the truths they express relate to our humanness and remain relevant to all our societies… (e.g. Prometheus, Faustus, the Messiah, Adam & Eve)…. Mythology in sf reflects a familiar truth, that in undergoing social and technological change we do not escape the old altogether…. Re-enactments of myth is sf take several forms. The simplest strive to deepen the emotional connotations of a story by permeating it with the reverberations of some great original…. More complex… are stories whose mythic components are seen with a degree of irony, stressing not only ancient continuities but also modernist discontinuities with the past…. Within both Genre sf and Fantasy a particularly popular variant on the mythology theme is to have humans encountering mythic figures… or conversely to have mythic survivals appearing in the modern world. |
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Pastoral Clute & Nicholls: … any work of fiction which depicts an apparently simple and natural way of life, and contrasts it with our complex, technological, anxiety-ridden urban world of the present…. The most obvious is the tale of country life…. A variant of this … is that in which the contrast between city and country is made quite explicit…. A second version … depicts the rise of agricultural and anti-technological societies after some sort of Holocaust. |
Possible Worlds and SFPeter Stockwell, pp. 139-140, 144-145, 146, 147, 166 resp.: The notion of possible world was developed in philosophical logic to resolve a number of problems to do with determining the truth or falsity of propositions. The basic premise of all possible worlds theories is that our world — the actual world — is only one of a multitude of possible worlds. To say that, ‘Former president of the United States Ronald Reagan was an alien’, is false in our everyday reality. The opposite (‘Reagan was not an alien’) is true. Our actual world is non-contradictory in this respect: only one of these statements (and not both at the same time) can be true. Correspondingly, in the actual world at least one or the other of these statements must be true: there can be no middle ground where both are false. In order to be possible, a world (like our actual world) must thus be made up of propositions that are non-contradictory and do not break the rule of the excluded middle (Ronen 1994). In the science fiction film Men in Black (1997), it is asserted on a video screen that Reagan was an alien. This film world is a possible but non-actual world since it does not break the rules of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, but in reversing the truth-value of the original statement above it is demonstrably not our world. Possible world theory is also a useful way of accounting for reference to things which do not exist… In the traditional ‘correspondence’ theory of truth, statements about fictional characters are either simply false (Russell 1957) or neither true nor false (Strawson 1963), since the state of affairs does not have any correspondence with the actual world. In more recent ‘pragmatic’ theories of truth, epistemology (knowledge about objects) does not depend on the ability to refer (Kripke 1972, Rorty 1982, Putnam 1990), so statements about non-existent entities can have a contextual truth-value in their own possible worlds…. The notion of possible worlds is highly relevant to science fictional reference.…. In traditional possible worlds theory, there is a reflexive problem in applying a logical model to science fiction. Imagine a science fictional universe in which a different local physics and mathematics operate … Such worlds might be beyond our understanding, mentionable but not constructable …. The problem is that the basis of traditional possible worlds theory — logic — is as amenable to alternativity as any other system … If a different form of logic and logical rules is allowed in a different universe, then any world is possible and is within the potential scope of science fiction. What is important for a poetics of science fiction, then, is not so much the logical status of the imagined universe, but the mechanics of its readerly construction and negotiation.... …possible worlds theory needs to be augmented with a cognitive dimension, if it is to have any usefulness in discussing how readers manage to construct worlds from texts.... …reference in literary reading is not to the base-reality (the ‘real world’) of the reader, but is to a discourse model.... ...adding a cognitive dimension brings in the reader’s judgement as an element of plausibility. I context, contradictories …can be placed into a conceivable universe and are thus possible. This means that anything that is expressible in language is possible…. The reader’s judgement of how close and accessible the fictional world is to the actual world will determine whether the fiction is plausible or implausible… |
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Proto Science
Fiction Clute
& Nicholls: … it seems inappropriate to
describe as “science fiction” anything published in the 18th
century or before… it would seem most sensible to begin our reckoning
of what might be labeled “science fiction” with the first
speculative work which is both a novel and manifests a clear awareness
of what is and is not “science” in the modern sense of the word.
(e.g. Frankenstein)…. The species of proto sf which has exerted
most influence on sf … is undoubtedly the imaginary voyage… |
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Science Fantasy Clute
& Nicholls: …
Science Fantasy does not necessarily contain MAGIC, GODS AND DEMONS,
HEROES, MYTHOLOGY or SUPERNATURAL CREATURES, though these may be
present, often in a
quasirationalized form. Science Fantasy is normally considered a bastard
genre blending elements of sf and fantasy; it is usually colourful and
often bizarre, sometimes with elements of HORROR although never
centrally in the horror genre. Certain sf themes are especially common
in Science Fantasy — ALTERNATE WORLDS, other DIMENSIONS, ESP,
MONSTERS, PARALLEL WORLDS, PSI POWERS and SUPERMEN — but no single one
of these ingredients is essential. Many Science Fantasies are also
PLANETARY ROMANCES…
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SCIENCE
FICTION Encarta 1999 Encyclopedia: ... the fictional treatment in print, films, television, or other media of the effects of science or future events on human beings. More precisely, science fiction deals with events that did not happen or have not yet happened; it considers these events rationally in terms both of explanation and of consequences; and it is concerned with the impact of change on people, often with its consequences for the human race. The most common subjects for science fiction are the future, travel through space or time, life on other planets, and crises created by technology or alien creatures and environments. Progenitors Science-Fiction Novels in English
Films Radio and Television Science Fiction and Science |
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Space Opera Clute & Nicholls: … space adventure stories which have a calculatedly romantic element… |
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Sword and
Sorcery Clute & Nicholls: … term describing a subgenre of Fantasy embracing adventures with swordplay and magic… |
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Utopias Clute
& Nicholls: The
concept of utopia or “Ideal State” is linked to religious ideas of
Heaven or the Promised Land and to folklorist ideas like the Isles of
the Blessed, but it is essentially a future-historical goal, to be
achieved by the efforts of human beings, not a transcendental goal
reserved as a reward for those who follow a particularly virtuous path
of life…. It can be argued that all utopias are sf, in that they are
exercises in hypothetical sociology and political science.
Alternatively, it might be argued that only those utopias which embody
some notion of scientific advancement qualify as sf… Frank Manuel
91966) argues that a significant shift in utopian thought took place
when writers changed from talking about a better place (eutopia) to
talking about a better time (euchronia), under the influence of notions
of historical and social progress. When this happened, utopias ceased to
be imaginary constructions with which contemporary society might be
compared, and began to be speculative statements about real future
possibilities. It seems sensible to regard this as the point at which
utopian literature acquired a character conceptually similar to that of
sf…. Utopian thought in the last half century has to a large extent
dissociated itself from the idea of progress; we most commonly encounter
it in connection with the idea of a “historical retreat” to a way of
simpler life…
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Virtual Reality Clute & Nicholls: In ordinary usage a virtual reality is a computer-generated scenario which seems real (or at least all-encompassing) to the person who “enters” it; one essential quality of virtual reality is that the person who enters it should be able to interact with it…. Broadly, a virtual reality can be defined as any secondary reality alternate to the character’s world of real experience … with which he or she can interact…. The idea of the virtual reality has often been linked with game-playing….A popular variant of the theme is the reality generated by one person’s godlike will…. A final variant is found in those stories in which … one person enters another’s mind and interacts with what he or she finds there… |
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Last Updated 18 July 2000 |
