ABSTRACT
The identification of a point of origin for science fiction is as fiercely contested a business as defining the form. Different critics have their own favourite jumping-off points: some go back no further than a hundred years, to H G Wells and Jules Verne, giving SF as a genre a youthfulness to fit its supposedly juvenile, forward-fixated profile. Others insist on searching out ‘fantastic’ or ‘science-fictional’ elements in literature as ancient as literature is itself. There are journeys to the Moon or heroic protagonists seeking out new worlds and strange new civilisations in the oldest epics of human culture, from the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (written perhaps in 2000 BC) onwards. This presents us with two broad approaches to the question of origins, and the difference between these two approaches focuses different ways of understanding the nature of SF. Stress the relative youth of the mode, and you are arguing that SF is a specific artistic response to a very particular set of historical and cultural phenomena: for
instance, that SF could only have arisen in a culture experiencing the Industrial Revolution, or one undergoing the metaphysical anxieties of what nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘the Death of God’. Stress the antiquity of SF, and you are arguing instead that SF is a common factor across a wide range of different histories and cultures, that it speaks to something more durable, perhaps something fundamental in the human make-up, some human desire to imagine worlds other than the one we actually inhabit.
