The science fiction genre has its fans. But this genre is considered ambiguously by literary critics. Some of them tend to view science fiction as a literary genre.
The most famous world-class science fiction writer is Jules Verne. Interest in his work is also explained by the fact that most of his fantasies were eventually realized.
Interest in science fiction literature has not always been uniform. Since the end of the last century, interest in reading has plummeted. The genre of science fiction has also lost its relevance; it was replaced by the youth genre of fantasy.
The specificity of any fiction is the creation of a special virtual space of a specific reality.
Preconditions for the genre of science fiction
The desire to learn the unknown has always been characteristic of humanity. The first attempts to penetrate the border of understanding can be traced back to rock paintings and ancient myths.
Medieval utopias can already be considered a product of the imagination, which took on more concrete forms in the first works that have all the hallmarks of science fiction. The main prerequisite for the emergence of the genre was the industrial revolution, as a result of which scientific searches and discoveries began to influence the formation of the world outlook.
Classical literature came to some stagnation and was no longer able to fully satisfy the needs of both the readership and part of the writers looking for opportunities to realize their own potential.
Science fiction features
Any literary work creates a certain reality. The reality of a science fiction work is in a potential state in the form of a material structure and is perceived as an actual virtual reality.
The fanastic hypothesis proposed by the author becomes either the background on which the events take place, or the plot basis.
The basis of a classic science fiction work is a technical, social or scientific idea, the implementation of which has a chance in the future.
As the classic of the genre, Ray Bradbury, characterized the feature of science fiction: "All the achievements of science and technology that have brought benefit or harm to humanity over the past fifty years, long before that were born in the mind of a science fiction writer."
In the course of the formation of the genre, typical techniques appeared that were characteristic only of him. There is no need to explain to the reader what teleportation, light-speed travel, annihilation and contramotion, etc. are. The specificity of sci-fi cliches allows the author not to be distracted from the plot.
This is the fundamental difference between the genre of science fiction and simple fiction, which includes the fantastic images of Gogol and Bulgakov, works in the genre of fantasy and other literary genres.
