It has been around since humans began to speak. The earliest forms of speculative fiction were likely mythological tales told around the campfire. Speculative fiction deals with the "What if?" scenarios imagined by dreamers and thinkers worldwide. Journeys to other worlds through the vast reaches of distant space; magical quests to free worlds enslaved by terrible beings; malevolent supernatural powers seeking to increase their spheres of influence across multiple dimensions and times; all of these fall into the realm of speculative fiction.
Speculative fiction as a category ranges from ancient works to cutting edge, paradigm-changing, and neotraditional works of the 21st century. It can be recognized in works whose authors' intentions or the social contexts of the versions of stories they portrayed is now known. For example, Ancient Greekdramatists such as Euripides, whose play Medea (play) seemed to have offended Athenian audiences when he fictionally speculated that shamaness Medea killed her own children instead of their being killed by other Corinthians after her departure. The play Hippolytus, narratively introduced by Aphrodite, is suspected to have displeased contemporary audiences of the day because it portrayed Phaedra as too lusty.
James Oliver Rigney Jr. (October 17, 1948 – September 16, 2007), better known by his pen name Robert Jordan, was an American author of epic fantasy. He is known best for his series The Wheel of Time (finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death) which comprises 14 books and a prequel novel. He is one of several writers to have written original Conan the Barbarian novels; his are considered by fans to be some of the best of the non-Robert E. Howard efforts. Jordan also published historical fiction using the pseudonym Reagan O'Neal, a western as Jackson O'Reilly, and dance criticism as Chang Lung. Jordan claimed to have ghostwritten an "international thriller" that is still believed to have been written by someone else. (Full article...)
Made on a low budget of under £100,000, the film was produced by Tigon British Film Productions. In the United States, where it was distributed by American International Pictures (AIP), Witchfinder General was retitled The Conqueror Worm (titled onscreen as Matthew Hopkins: Conqueror Worm) by AIP to link it with their earlier series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations directed by Roger Corman and starring Price; because its narrative bears no relation to any of Poe's stories, American prints book-end the film with his poem "The Conqueror Worm" being read through Price's narration. (Full article...)
Science-fiction is the law-abiding citizen of imaginative literature, obeying the rules, be they physical, social, or psychological, keeping regular hours, eating punctual meals; predictable, certain, sure. Fantasy, on the other hand, is criminal. Each fantasy assaults and breaks a particular law; the crime being hidden by the author's felicitous thought and style which cover the body before blood is seen. Science-fiction works hand-in-glove with the universe. Fantasy cracks it down the middle, turns it wrong-side-out, dissolves it to invisibility, walks men through its walls, and fetches incredible circuses to town with sea-serpent, medusa, and chimera displacing zebra, ape, and armadillo. Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.
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—Ray Bradbury (1920–2012), "Introduction" in The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (1956).
Credit: Artist: Louis Huard; Restoration: Adam Cuerden
A 1900 illustration of the Norse godThor with the giant Útgarða-Loki. Giving his name as "Skrymir", the giant tricked Thor and his companions in several ways, such as challenging Thor's servant Þjálfi to a race against Thought, challenging Loki in an eating contest with Wildfire, and challenging Thor to a drinking contest where the drinking horn was connected to the ocean. In the end, Útgarða-Loki revealed his trickery and said that he had been truly afraid at their performance and would never again risk coming near the thunder god. Thor's dealings with giants make up most of the myths surrounding him. (POTD)
H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, depicting Martians invading Earth, is one of the most influential works of science fiction.
Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, has appeared as a setting in works of fiction since at least the mid-1600s. Trends in the planet's portrayal have largely been influenced by advances in planetary science. It became the most popular celestial object in fiction in the late 1800s, when it became clear that there was no life on the Moon. The predominant genre depicting Mars at the time was utopian fiction. Around the same time, the mistaken belief that there are canals on Mars emerged and made its way into fiction, popularized by Percival Lowell's speculations of an ancient civilization having constructed them. The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells's novel about an alien invasion of Earth by sinister Martians, was published in 1897 and went on to have a major influence on the science fiction genre.
Life on Mars appeared frequently in fiction throughout the first half of the 1900s. Apart from enlightened as in the utopian works from the turn of the century, or evil as in the works inspired by Wells, intelligent and human-like Martians began to be depicted as decadent, a portrayal that was popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the Barsoom series and adopted by Leigh Brackett among others. More exotic lifeforms appeared in stories like Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey". (Full article...)
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