Science Fiction's Metaphor Ursula K. Le Guin's definitions for science fiction are interesting and compelling. She mentions that science fiction is a “metaphor […] drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook”. In this sense, it’s like any other form of [...]
Friedrich Nietzsche used to call a balance between Apollonian and Dionysiosian culture in his early work The Birth of Tragedy, which was a representative work of his early life. If our traditional literature including poems and prose should be called an Apollonian culture, then Science Fiction should be the Dionysiosian side. In The left hand [...]
Science fiction presents contemporary concerns through surrealist and fantastical metaphors. Stories of aliens and warfare, of technology and advancement, of utopia and fallibility hardly describe visions of pure fantasy. Instead, these plots reconcile existing strife, or at the very least, anticipate the pains that lay in the future if current trajectories are left unencumbered. The [...]
When I think of the physical and biological sciences, I assume they adhere to rigid protocols. Which, to an extent, is true. However, many of science’s biggest discoveries were produced by people questioning and pushing the boundaries, creating a new paradigm. I view science fiction as a way for everyone to exercise that same imaginative [...]
As Ursula Le Guin asserts in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1980), science fiction is metaphor. She writes, “What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants in our contemporary life—science, all of the sciences, and technology, and the [...]
What is science fiction? Science fiction, from both an academic and escapist perspective, exists as a sort of catharsis. By blurring the lines between present and future, science fiction and the creation of science fiction narratives pacifies our need to know what comes next. Through film, comics, novels, cartoons, and everything in between, science fiction [...]
For a long time in my life, science fiction was simply a genre of movies and books to me. I did not take a particular interest in it, but it represented fun, wonder, imagination. I knew that it often presented a fictional world in the future with technological advancements and drastic shifts in lifestyle, but [...]
Science fiction is a picnic basket and a pair of glasses, holding and looking at technology.It is a narrative mode in which technology plays some significant role in the universe of the story, if not in the story itself. Here I refer to technology by its broadest definition: as the application of research to social [...]
When I think of the question “what is science fiction,” I try to approach it first from a literal perspective. Science fiction – a fictional creation that is based on the knowledge of science; or to phrase it without using the word “science” or “fiction,” a fabricated composition rooted in the systematic study of behaviors [...]
What is Science Fiction? Science Fiction is a genre of fictional art that comes in the forms of books, movies, etc... It often incorporates underlying larger themes in its portrayals. Science fiction resembles the stories that were passed on like fables, myths or even perhaps superstitions, like "The boy who cried wolf". This fable has moral purpose to its story. It resembles Science [...]
