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The sci-fi style of scientific fantasy

According to Bendford, science fiction is a controllable way to think and dream about the future. According to bradbury, science fiction is a real sociological study of the future. Terry Carr believes that science fiction is literature about the future, telling the story of the miracle we hope to see-or what our descendants will see-tomorrow, maybe the next century, or the infinite extension of time.

Yes, they all speak very well. But they only mentioned one kind of science fiction-prediction science fiction. Most science fiction works have nothing to do with prophecy.

Science fiction based on some real frontier topics of science and technology belongs to prophetic science fiction. The main events of this kind of novels are completely based on the frontier topics of science and technology. Of all the science fiction works, they are only the least in number.

Grasping the key point of this concept is a "real frontier discipline". Verne is often called a great prophet by laymen. But according to the strict definition of predictive science fiction, only Wan Li Under the Sea and Robert the Conqueror can be regarded as predictive science fiction. I don't know how many articles are saying that Verne invented the submarine in this novel. In fact, submarines have long existed. Verne only investigated the current situation of submarine technology and oceanographic research at that time, and wrote his own novel based on this knowledge.

In "Robil the Conqueror", Verne specially investigated a frontier topic at that time-whether artificial objects with greater specific gravity than air could fly. At the beginning of the work, two opposing views were recorded. One thinks that the future of man-made aircraft is airship, and the other thinks that it will be an aircraft with greater specific gravity than air. Only the latter can overcome the resistance of airflow.

Wells' early works have nothing to do with prophecy, but his own ideas. Later, I began to write scientific research topics that exist in reality. In Days of Freedom, Wells described a nuclear war. At that time, nuclear physicists discovered the phenomenon of "half-life". So in this work, the nuclear bomb is imagined as a weapon that can explode continuously. It is essentially different from the real nuclear bomb later.

The Night Mail Boat is also a prophetic science fiction novel. When Kipling wrote this work, the airship had already invited Xiang in the sky. He synthesized practical scientific and technological knowledge and described the prospect of airship.

Some natural scientists and engineering experts also occasionally create personal works to expand their influence for their own research. For example, tsiolkovsky wrote his graded rocket principle into science fiction. Later, in the field of science fiction, works describing the development prospect of a specific technology appeared, such as solar sails and paradise fountains. There are also some examples, such as Walden II, a behavioral science fantasy novel written by Skinner, a pioneer psychologist in behavioral science, to illustrate his academic views.

During the Cold War, western scholars wrote some prophetic works, which accurately described disasters such as "nuclear winter". These works remind people's rationality again and again, firmly establish the concept that nuclear war is equal to the collective destruction of mankind in the minds of ordinary people, and establish a "firewall" in public opinion for mankind to bid farewell to the threat of nuclear war. Nowadays, science fiction works about population crisis and environmental crisis also ring new alarm bells for people from time to time. All these reflect the social value of the prophet's book.

In China, science fiction of prophecy is rarely contacted. Fog in the Ancient Gorge is regarded as the first science fiction novel in New China, and it is a prophetic science fiction novel. The author Tong is a professional archaeologist. Mist in the Ancient Gorge is based on a real archaeological topic: the mystery of the disappearance of Cubans. In the novel, the author assumes that the remnants of Ba people eventually disappear in the mountains. It can be compared with Tong's Journey to Stalagmites, and it is also an archaeological novel. One of the archaeological discoveries: a strange stone tablet called stalagmites, an alien rocket, was finally launched. It is obvious that the author believes in "ancient tribes who died in the mountains" and "rockets left with aliens in ancient times" rather than the latter. The latter is just a hypothesis when writing a story.

"Dead Light on Coral Island" made Tong Zheng Ensheng famous and spread widely outside the science fiction circle. This is also a prophetic science fiction. 1960, American scientist Mayman made the world's first ruby laser. Inspired by this, Tong wrote this masterpiece two years later. As for publishing more than ten years later, it is not the author's responsibility. Death of Coral Island is about the military application of laser technology. This was a frontier topic at that time.

Liu Xingshi's Columbus from America is also a prophetic science fiction novel. In ancient times, Indians once came to Europe by canoe, which is an inference of the author. This novel is about this inference. You can also compare Clouds in the North by the same author. Evaporating the water in Bohai Bay and sending it to Inner Mongolia, the author himself will not take it seriously, but only uses all kinds of knowledge in the novel to make a fake.

When Wang Jinkang wrote Balance between Life and Death, his material was a book called Balance Medicine. Discussion on some problems related to western modern medicine. Whether its viewpoint is correct or not, it really belongs to the real frontier topic. The crisis that defects will lead to. Liu's "Ground Fire" is a work that predicts the future of coal industry. Zheng Jun described the problem of negative population growth in the future in his short story Population Crisis. However, his novel Surging Times is based on some frontier topics in oceanography. Even some real Chinese and foreign oceanographers are interspersed in this work.

The premise of the existence of prophetic science fiction is the continuous progress of science itself. Many people who are not in contact with scientific work only receive subject education from school. Mistake the science teacher for a scientist. That science is a rigid and conservative system. In fact, the main body of scientific work is discovery and invention. The value of scientists lies not in inheriting old knowledge, but in discovering new knowledge. Driven by this basic motivation, the whole science and every field of it are constantly expanding the field of knowledge. This requires front-line scientists to have forward-looking ability. In the next volume, I will talk about the progress of science from futurology and scientific prediction.

Predictive science fiction, on the other hand, turns forward-looking research conducted by scientists into literary images to express it. Here, we must clarify a misunderstanding that science fiction has not made any predictions. It just shows the scientists' prediction.

Science fiction writers often have the reputation of "prophets" for the same reason as fortune tellers: "Science fiction writers often make wrong predictions, but their correct predictions occasionally attract public attention." (The Road to Science Fiction, Volume III, page 457). In fact, even these correct predictions, science fiction writers are not originators.

The author has not collected any sci-fi works so far, and the scientific prediction is completely completed by the author himself. The scientific predictions in all these works were put forward by scientists in advance, and science fiction writers just used them as materials. In fact, science fiction writers have never boasted that they have made such inventions. In modern society, if a person really has any invention, the first thing to do is not to write a novel, but to apply for a patent in the patent office. The patent office has a complicated procedure to determine that he is the initiator of this invention.

If someone refutes my point of view, I hope he can provide evidence to prove that there is indeed a new discovery with scientific and technological significance in a science fiction novel. Even an article will do. In the first volume, the author introduces the scientific themes in science fiction in detail. Now the author wants to emphasize that there are no scientific predictions, and they are all made independently by science fiction writers!

1999, the author formally put forward "predictive science fiction" in The Road to Science Fiction in China. At that time, although the number of "true predictions" was considered to be very small and insignificant, there were still several examples. At present, the author tends to think that there are no predictions with independent scientific value in science fiction. All prophetic science fiction draws on the existing achievements of the scientific community. By comparing the previous editions of Science Fiction Overview, readers can see the change of my view on this issue.

Science fiction is regarded as a prophecy, which leads to this mistake. One is to see only the predicted science fiction, and the other is to know nothing about the history of science and technology. After all, novels are much more influential than monographs. How many people have read Two Wan Li under the Sea? How many people know the development of submarine technology in19th century?

Taking predicting science fiction as a scientific research achievement or writing science fiction as a scientific research has brought considerable negative impact on the development of science fiction art. Mr. Song Tian, an expert in the history of science and technology in Beijing Normal University, has been tracking and studying the phenomenon of "folk science" for a long time: quite a few people in society have neither received systematic science education nor mastered the methods of scientific research. There is no normal contact with the scientific community. But he thinks he has made a great invention. Focus on the illusory "scientific research". His research can refer to the book Perpetual Motion and Goldbach Conjecture (published by Shanghai Science and Technology Publishing House). Unfortunately, based on the content of this book, there are quite a few "folk themes" in science fiction. Their basic starting point is not knowing that literary creation and scientific research are not the same thing. These "folk science" remarks about science fiction only give people a handle and create a negative impression of science fiction in public opinion. Lyrical science fiction is characterized by prose. Not good at subject matter, but characterized by beautiful writing and euphemistic feelings. Ray bradbury is a representative of lyric science fiction. Many of his works, such as Fog Corner and Chronicle of Mars, tend to be nostalgic. Lyric style is the true expression of this tendency.

James gunn's Girl in the Ice is also a typical lyric science fiction. With the arrival of the new ice age, human beings moved near the equator, and most parts of the north were uninhabitable. Reid, the hero, stayed in his hometown and watched the glacier approaching day by day. The body of a girl in the glacier became the spiritual sustenance of his life. There is nothing strange about the whole article. The main space is used to describe Reid's homesickness.

Terry balrog's Old Songs of the Earth has the same effect. It describes a foreign colonist's nostalgia for the earth. The plot was diluted to the extreme. Jiang even directly called it science fiction prose, not science fiction.

There are few lyrical works in China's sci-fi works. An example that can be cited is The Dove Flying over the Strait written by He Haijiang and Rao Jun. Absurdity is an important feature of western modernist literature. This kind of works reflects the absurdity of the real society itself in an anti-logical narrative way. In science fiction, absurd techniques are rarely used. Most sci-fi works have clear "self-design logic". And express it clearly in logical language.

James gunn is a representative of using absurd techniques. His gifts from other planets, green thumb, teddy bear and so on. It is complex and unpredictable in time and space. Put these novels together with his traditional narrative style science fiction works, such as "Immortality" and "The Voice of Man", we can clearly see the difference between them.

Among the science fiction writers in China, Han Song is a representative figure who uses absurd techniques. Almost all his short stories are difficult to sort out the logical context, and more are depicting a messy, grotesque and inexplicable atmosphere. Escape from the Mountain of Sorrow is a masterpiece of absurd science fiction. Others, such as the last subway, red illusion, beyond reality and so on. There is also a strong absurd color. At the same time, Han Song also created realistic sci-fi works, such as the novel Red Star over China 2066 and the short story The Rise and Fall of Youth. Comparing these two kinds of works together, we can see that the author's pursuit of absurd style is a kind of creative consciousness. It is not easy to give science fiction a relaxed and humorous style. But there are some good examples. Vonnegut wrote this report on the Barnhouse effect in a short space. A bitter satire was made on war maniacs. Shinichi Hoshino is good at miniature science fiction. Humorous brushwork is essential for making beautiful fist movements within one square inch. Zheng's Jin Meng is also a rare humorous science fiction. Its style is almost nonsense. Wang Jinkang's works are rich in style. Therefore, the relaxed and funny honey trap and the perfect earth standard are particularly prominent. Zheng Jun's "Insect Flying Ants Walk and Cry" is also a representative of humorous science fiction.

Although many sci-fi works have some relaxed dialogues and humorous plots. However, humorous science fiction writers have not yet appeared. This is also a small direction of the development of science fiction literature. Horror novels are regarded as a literary category. It even ranks with science fiction and fantasy as three categories of fantasy literature (The Art of Imagination-20th Century Science Fantasy, Horror and Fantasy Art, edited by Frank Robinson, USA). The author is quite puzzled about this. Because it confuses theme and style. Any theme, reality and surrealism, past and modern, can be regarded as horror style, or not. The relationship between horror and science fiction is "horizontal" and "vertical".

Whether a novel is scary or not depends on whether its main events have suspense. Suspense is different from suspense. Suspense is an unsolved mystery, and suspense is a plot that makes readers nervous. I don't know. For example, the typical horror-style sci-fi film Alien explains the background at the beginning: scientists receive genetic information from alien radio waves and use it to cultivate an alien. Men fled the base, looking for men everywhere in order to give birth to offspring through mating. And that man was killed by her after mating with him. There is no suspense in this movie, only suspense: how aliens harm mankind. Whether people in danger can escape her killing.

As mentioned earlier, most of the early science fiction works developed from Gothic novels are scary. Frankenstein, dr. jekyll and mr. hyde and Mr Hyde are all typical horror science fiction. After the twentieth century, they were adapted into many versions of horror science fiction movies. Neither Verne nor Wells is good at horror style. However, the former also created the horror science fiction novel Castle Moved from Karba, while the latter's Hollow Man and Dr. Moro Island also have obvious horror colors. In the fifth volume, the author will introduce American science fiction movies before the arrival of the "blockbuster" era. Because of the lack of special effects, most of the early American science fiction films chose horror themes to attract audiences by creating suspense. The "neo-Gothic science fiction" introduced in the previous chapter is almost all horror-style science fiction.

Speaking of horror science fiction, I have to mention a special case. Stephen King, known as the "horror novelist", has both fantasy and science fiction themes in his works. His The Lawcutter describes how human consciousness was transformed into a virtual computer program, which was later adapted into a sci-fi movie of the same name. His dead zone is also a typical science fiction. However, as far as I can see, this work published in China with the words "horror novel" printed on its cover is not scary in style at all, but a science fiction novel with a dramatic style.