La carte de l'histoire de la Science Fiction

[jerome]

Ward Shelley a crée une drôle de carte de la science fiction dans le cadre d'une exposition. Les infos



Elle est ici en très grand

Quelques explications :
DESCRIPTION

“History of Science Fiction” is a graphic chronology that maps the literary genre from its nascent roots in mythology and fantastic stories to the somewhat calcified post-Star Wars space opera epics of today. The movement of years is from left to right, tracing the figure of a tentacled beast, derived from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds Martians. Science Fiction is seen as the offspring of the collision of the Enlightenment (providing science) and Romanticism, which birthed gothic fiction, source of not only SciFi, but crime novels, horror, westerns, and fantasy (all of which can be seen exiting through wormholes to their own diagrams, elsewhere). Science fiction progressed through a number of distinct periods, which are charted, citing hundreds of the most important works and authors. Film and television are covered as well.

The original is hand drawn and painted on Mylar. It has been exhibited at Teapot Gallery in Cologne and is part of an ongoing series. Other examples may be seen at: http://www.wardshelley.com This piece has not been published or reviewed but others in the series have been reviewed (links available on website) and have been placed in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, among others.

[Lensman]

Très beau!
Je vois un ou deux trucs fort contestables, mais ça reste de l'Art...
Oncle Joe

[Chaos Prayer]

Sympa ! Toujours pensé que cette histoire était un vrai méandre

[Patrice]

Salut,

Je ne voudrais pas être le type qui a une vésicule biliaire comme ça...

A+

Patrice

[marc]

Il y a trop d'informations dedans. Je parle en tant qu'analyste habitué à faire des schémas complexes. Ici, ça l'est trop. Mais il faut reconnaitre qu'il a fait un beau travail.
L'idéal, ce serait de trouver un outil qui permette de dessiner un graphe en trois dimensions, qu'on peut faire pivoter dans tous les sens. Cela fait longtemps que j'en rêve, mais je ne veux pas m'y lancer avec Visio.

[Maëlig]

Y'a pas à dire, ça en jette!
Par contre c'est sur la fin de la timeline que je trouve que ça devient assez confus (en même temps c'est toujours plus facile de catégoriser le passé que le présent).

[jerome]

Le bonhomme est en interview ici.

Extrait :

What was your research process like?
Ward Shelley :First, there are Web sites made by fans that provide incredible amounts of information. I didn't come up with any new, original research: These guys did. What I do is I digest it, I edit it, I put in a form you can see all at once. That's what my charts do: They put things in relation to one another, so you can get a kind of topology of time. That's the only contribution I'm making. And I'm throwing away information to keep things simple enough. I do some kind of quantification and I rely a little bit on my subjectivity, how I feel about things. I tend to privilege the things I care about.

It would be easier to do this on a computer than by hand. But the reason I do it by hand is that one of the important ethical points to make here is that, in the end, this is one person's point of view. It has no real authority. So I wanted to make it look like it was just one guy scribbling on paper, and then painting it. I think that books have a kind of authority given to them just because of their machine-made quality. It's like it's coming from something larger than one person. But ultimately you always have to interject the subject, so I always want to keep it so that point is clear to me.

There was a book or two I relied on. Brian Aldiss wrote a book called Billion Year Spree. Every science fiction reader will know him. And also a guy called Barry Malzberg. He's very passionate. He's kind of disappointed in the science fiction genre; he feels like it's decayed, so he has a really strong point of view. And then there's Asimov. He wrote a lot about dividing the genre up in a cladistic way. A cladogram is a kind of genealogical chart, most often of species. It tends to branch things out into discrete categories. Asimov did this not so much by genre but by period. He's the guy who ID's that this is the period of social and psychological interest, this is the period of interest in form, this is the period of interest in action. And other people come up with the genre: This is the action-adventure part, this is the space opera.

[bormandg]

Deux remarques quand même, l'une venue d'Argentine, sur la sous-représentation des SFs non anglo-saxonnes (et encore, Borges est cité, si Bioy Casares est omis). Et moi je remarque que, pour la SFF, seuls les auteurs anciens ("proto-SF") sont cités, pas du tout ceux qui ont publié après 1950 sous l'étiquette SF. Et l'autre: il aurait FALLU laisser ouverte la droite du dessin, tel qu'il est il donne l'impression que la SF est une affaire close.