Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

My topic here is firmly located in the time and place of the final decade of the twentieth century as it, in turn, has been reflexive of the long century of hard science fiction that reaches from high point to high point back to the original scientific romances of H.G. Wells. To be more accurate, I might label the historical moments as low points since I see the literature often as reaction or response to historical stress points. In other words, this topic deals with “renewal” of elements and effects in a long generic tradition. Scholars of the British Enlightenment, the group that nurtured my academic work originally and who are, I think, an appropriate set of ancestors for modern science fiction, like to refer to the “long eighteenth century” that extended from the Restoration to the French Revolution. I borrow the notion here in order to evoke hard science fiction from 1895 when Wells published his first scientific romance, The Time Machine , to our historical present or, at least, to that awful moment of September 2001. This focus, then, on renewal and reflexiveness clearly falls short of a Utopian or revolutionary reading of hard science fiction. In his major review of the anthology that may have suggested in the first place the need to identify hard science fiction in the 1990s, Russell Blackford praises the highest, most philosophic fictions of this category that appeared ... log in or subscribe to read full text