Although some scholars find the roots of science fiction in ancient myths and fantastic poems such as A True Story by Lucian of Samosata, the fact is that science fiction depends on science which did not exist before the Enlightenment of the 18th century. The word “scientist” was invented by William Whewell in a moment of argument with Samuel Taylor Coleridge at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science on 24 June 1833. Coleridge insisted that these people did not deserve the title “natural philosophers” and Whewell replied with a parallel to art and artists: “We are scientists.” The first issue of Scientific American was published on 28 August 1845.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often cited but any reading of her own three versions reveals its roots in medieval paradigms and the narrator is emphatic in not revealing his methods, lest they be duplicated with inevitably horrible consequences. Against that, Steven Weinberg insisted in To Understand the World, that science depends on experiments which are purposefully unnatural arrangements to isolate the essential distinguishing actions of objects. The first scientists were electricians and chemists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Jules Verne and H. G. Wells are commonly credited as the first narrators of adventures based on new scientific theories and their applications. Prior to them, John Leonard Riddell, chief melter at the New Orleans Mint, and a professor of chemistry at the New Orleans Medical College (which became Tulane University), published Orrin Lindsey's Plan of Aerial Navigation in 1847. Presaging the “golden age” of science fiction before the 1960s, the trip to the Moon is supported by laborious footnotes providing calculations, even for recycling breathable air by the same chemical methods used today. Riddell’s explanation of anti-gravity drive is necessarily sketchy though no more so than our faster-than-light warp drives. At a lecture at Michigan State University about 1976 or so, Gene Roddenberry said that when they need gravity on board a starship, they flip the gravity switch to On.
In the book and movie, The Right Stuff, a news reporter first asks, “Do you know what makes these birds fly?” and an Air Force pilot starts to say, “Why the aerodynamics alone would take…” and he is cut off. “Funding,” is the reply. “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” Every pilot at Pancho’s cantina knew exactly what was said. Later, the line is repeated by an astronaut arguing with a NASA administrator: “… and to the American people, we’re Buck Rogers.”
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This Island Earth is a 1955 American science fiction film
produced by William Alland, directed by Joseph M. Newman
and Jack Arnold, and starring Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue, and Rex Reason.
The 1952 novel by [Raymond F.] Jones was originally serialized
in the science fiction magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories as three
related novelettes: "The Alien Machine" (June 1949),
"The Shroud of Secrecy" (December 1949), and "The Greater Conflict"
(February 1950). Jones had taken the novel title from a line
in Robert Graves' poem "Darien":
It is a poet's privilege and fate -Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Island_Earth |
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| This Island Earth (NASA) one of hundreds of science and engineering titles de-acquisitioned by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. |
"This Island Earth. Edited by Oran W. Nicks. NASA SP-250. Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Division, Office of Technology Utilization, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1970. x+182 pages. For sale by Superintendent of Documents, $6.00 (Library of Congress Catalog Card no. 73-608969). Reviewed by Julian R. Goldsmith, University of Chicago, The Journal of Geology, Volume 80 Number 3, May 1972. Also reviewed in Science News, Vol.117, P. 348, 1980, among other citations.
Previously on Necessary Facts
From Texas to the Moon with John Leonard Riddell
Fantastic Voyages: Teaching Science with Science Fiction
Psychohistory from Asimov’s Foundation to Big Data
