Tardy Technology: The Curious Case of Science Fiction’s Slow Birth
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
By Brad C. Anderson
We have told tales since we developed language to speak. Our early stories were sagas of heroism, mythology, and bawdy chronicles of sordid affairs. Modern-day librarians could easily categorize these ancient tales under the genres of adventure, fantasy, romance, etc. Yet, one modern-day genre seems conspicuously absent among the stories shared through most of human history: science fiction.
The first glimpse of something resembling science fiction appeared in True History by Lucien of Samosata in the second century AD. But the genre didn’t stick. It was fourteen hundred years before Johannes Kepler wrote Somnium in 1634, describing a fantastical journey to the moon. Still, the genre failed to take hold until 1818, when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, after which science fiction took off.
Why was science fiction such a latecomer? Did ancient people not dream of the future? To answer this, let’s look at why we tell stories.
As described in A Narrative Approach to Organization Studies, through stories, we process complexity, helping us understand war, relationships, and an array of other overwhelming topics. Importantly, stories help a society vicariously process its hopes.
What’s this got to do with science fiction’s tardiness? I suspect that, for most of human history, technological advancement was so slow that it rarely intruded on people’s lives. The technological world you were born into was the same as the one you died in, and that world was probably recognizable to your parents and children. When ancient people imagined the future, they likely imagined a world much like their present. When advancement takes generations, science fiction is simply fiction. and fears over scary issues of the day.
The Enlightenment changed all that. Technology’s speed increased. The world you died in looked very different from the one in which you were born. The future became something with which we must contend. And thus, science fiction was born to help us process these bewildering changes.
From the optimism of Star Trek to the despair of Warhammer 40K, science fiction primes us to engage with technological advancement. Science fiction was late to the party because, for most of human history, we did not need it.
But today, as we live through multiple world-changing technological revolutions, science fiction has never been more important.
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