The Industrial Revolution’s Role in the Development of SF

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In The Road to Science Fiction: From Gilgamesh to Wells, James Gunn put forth the idea that the Industrial Revolution sparked the change that needed to happen before science fiction could become a true genre. He wrote that people

“had to adopt an open mind about the nature of the universe — its beginning and its end — and the fate of man …. People also had to discover the future. As long as the future was merely the place where today’s activities went on in some eternal cycle, perhaps even spiraling downward from some earlier golden age, a fiction about the future was meaningless.” (pg. 3)

Basically humankind had to “think in unaccustomed ways.” They had to

• “think of themselves as a race — not as a tribe or a people or even a nation,” and
• realize that the world their children would live in would be different from the world they lived in, that the future would be different from the present.

Basically, he wrote, “science and technology created social change, and the awareness of social change created science fiction.” (pg. 4) Once humans began to recognize and experience the change around them, science fiction was able to evolve as an artistic response to that change.

When I first read this, I had one of those “ah-hah!” moments. Suddenly, something about the history of science fiction made so much sense. Although there were fantasies that had science fiction elements well before the Industrial Revolution, there weren’t many and they weren’t all that scientific. Stories with science fictional elements started to proliferate around the time that the pace of world change excelerated due to the Industrial Revolution.

According to John Campbell, “no science fiction was written prior to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein in 1818, and perhaps not until Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864.” (Modern Science Fiction, 1953, pg. 13-14) According to several resources, The Industrial Revolution began in England around 1733 with the first cotton mill. (Which, I guess, explains why so many of the earliest science fiction writer hailed from that county — and yes, I know that Verne was French.)

For information on the Industrial Revolution:
IRWeb: Information Page
library.thinkquest.org/4132/info.htm

Industrial Revolution From Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

For information on the origin of science fiction:
The Origins of Science Fiction Criticism: From Kepler to Wells
www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/78/evans78art.htm

History of science fiction From Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction

Discovery Channel Online: The Origins of Science Fiction
www.discoverychannel.co.uk/sci-files/proto-sci-fi/index.shtml