En Eski Alexei Panshin Sözleri ve Alıntıları
En Eski Alexei Panshin sözleri ve alıntılarını, en eski Alexei Panshin kitap alıntılarını, etkileyici sözleri 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.Ergenlik Ayini
"21. yüzyılda milliyetçiliğin hiçbir anlamı olmadığı ve iyi bağlanmış bir kravatın gerçek sosyal değerlerle çok az ilgisi olduğunu görmek, din savaşlarının gereksizliği şimdiden bakınca kolay"
MetisKitabı okudu
Fantasy stories are not fully mythic because they cling to ancient images of transcendent possibility which no longer appear plausible. Although these may inspire us with reminders of the mysteriousness of transcendence, they are inconsistent with our best knowledge and so cannot guide us to action.
An appropriate date to mark the emergence of scientific rationalism as the leading mode of Western thought and culture is the year 1685. It is possible to argue that the old worldview still prevailed prior to that time. But after that year, we can say that the balance of opinion in Western society was in favor of rational materialism.
The year 1685 was when the last execution for witchcraft in England took place. Also in England in 1685, Isaac Newton arrived at the Universal Law of Gravitation.
Among that which was discarded when Western man set out on his special path was traditional myth with its spirit-based transcendent symbology. The appearance and development of SF can be understood as the gradual re-establishment of myth in the Western world, starting from first principles, and phrasing itself in a new, deliberately “non-spiritual” symbolic vocabulary.
Certain lines of literary descent from Walpole—the Gothic romance, the rational detective story, the historical novel—could not tolerate the implausible and so abandoned transcendence in favor of a strict adherence to “the facts”. These lines became mythically sterile.
Other forms that owe something to Walpole, like heroic fantasy and the supernatural horror story, could not give up the old spirit-based transcendence. But they were not effective myth, either. They were conservative. They looked backward. They ignored “the facts.” And so they have been reckoned implausible escapist fantasy.
While other Western literary forms have favored either mystery or plausibility, SF is the line that has striven to be complete myth.
Inasmuch as it is removed into the past and evokes horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the Gothic tradition. But it is far less Gothic than its popular adaptations. In the original story there is no castle, no baron, no hunchbacked assistant, no dungeons, no chains, and no peasants with torches and pitchforks.
It was only at the end of the Age of Reason, with the isolation of the unknown gas oxygen in 1774, the discovery of the unknown planet Uranus in 1781, the launching of the first balloon in 1783, and similar scientific news, that it became just barely possible to perceive science as mysterious.
Verne was able to do what the Romantics had not done. He treated science-beyond-science calmly and seriously, not as a joke or as an object of fear. He brought transcendent science out of the closet and into the world-at-large and allowed it to have influence on the policies of nations. And in a series of imaginary thrusts into the unknown, Verne was able to pass beyond those mental barriers which had baffled Poe, Verne’s master and model, and prevented him from entering the true region of novelty and wonder.
Science was no longer a hobby, as it had been in the Eighteenth Century, but a daily activity, even a profession. The word scientist was coined in 1840.
In the Age of Reason, science had chiefly consisted of the observation and classification of facts. In this new day, there was an increasing tendency to perceive science as the elaboration of general laws and the discovery of new truths.
At the same time, it was becoming easier to perceive the practical power of science. In 1859, the word technology first began to be used to describe the new products of applied science.
As a boy, Verne once stowed away aboard a ship, but he was pursued and caught before it reached the sea. He was whipped by his father and, so he later recalled, made to promise his mother, “From now on, I will travel only in my imagination.”
In 1851, in the course of setting down somewhat commonplace reflections on the subject of poetry, a writer named William Wilson made the suggestion of a new form of literature which he called “Science-Fiction.”
In almost Gernsbackian phrases, Wilson wrote: “the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true —thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of Life.”
In a masterpiece of timing, just after Five Weeks in a Balloon was published, John Speke emerged again from the jungle to say that he had found the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria the previous July—just one month after Verne’s fictional balloon was supposed to have made its passage. To use imaginary science to steal a march on the contemporary explorers of Africa, and be proven correct—how audacious!