La définition de la science fiction par Hal Duncan

[jerome]

La définition de la science fiction par Hal Duncan. C'est ici et en anglais.

Extrait :
A Basic Definition of Science Fiction

The first problem with the closed definition? There’s more than one. There are many definitions of Science Fiction. They are all right… for someone. They are all wrong… for someone. Here’s a rather basic one as an example:

Science Fiction is a pulp genre which combines Romantic character types, plot structures and settings with a Rationalist focus on scientific theories and conjectures, requiring a degree of rigour in the extrapolation of its hypothetical conceits. Science Fiction is scientific romance or Hugo Gernsback’s scientifiction, taken to its logical conclusion:

“By ‘scientifiction’… I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story — a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”
Hugo Gernsback

This is science fiction as fantasia (fabrication, necessarily strange and necessarily affecting) bound firmly to futurology (speculation, necessarily scientific and necessarily plausible). Old Man Campbell was pretty strict about what was on the menu at the SF Café.

“To be science fiction, not fantasy, an honest effort at prophetic extrapolation of the known must be made. Ghosts can enter science fiction, if they’re logically explained, but not if they are simply the ghosts of fantasy. Prophetic extrapolation can derive from a number of different sources, and apply in a number of fields. Sociology, psychology, and para-psychology are, today, not true sciences; therefore, instead of forecasting future results of application of sociological science of today, we must forecast the development of a science of sociology. From there the story can take off.”
John W. Campbell

Note the use of the term prophetic by both, with its complex of connotations quite at odds with the grounding in science — religion and rapture, voices and visions, the conjuring otherwise known as fantasy (defined, for the moment, not in terms of literature but in terms of psychology: the sustained fancy; the ludic or oneiric imagining; from the Greek phantasia; a making visible). The relationship of sf and fantasy will be a theme here. More than a few readers will doubtless bristle at my use of the f-word. (To be fair, I’m not that fond of it myself, its meaning similarly confused by a mixture of empty, open and closed definitions.) But until we can get stuck into it, we are unfortunately stuck with it.

Anyway, the point is this: up to and during the Golden Age, born of the simple fact that futurology resulted in arguable fantasias, there was a tight-knit relationship between Rationalism and Romanticism which kept the form aesthetically coherent and commercially viable. Atom bombs and satellites, microwaves and mechanisation — the future looked exciting, rich with the all-important sense-of-wonder. So this new Genre emerged for the Rocket Age, a popular form which, like the other pulp forms, had its own set of rules, its clear boundaries, a form which was delineated in steel and formica, bakelite and plastic, in Old Man Campbell’s Science Fiction Café and Bar, in the world of nuclear power and space flight just around the corner.

That bold new Science Fiction didn’t come from nowhere, of course, but as long as we’re talking in closed definitions, let’s not pretend that it’s existed from the dawn of time.