Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Literature

2014; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-07878-6_7

2199-3890

William Sims Bainbridge,

Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies

For better or worse, a key influence on real spaceflight development has been a science fiction literature, a genre that emerged over a century ago in the works of authors like Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Kurd Lasswitz, Garrett P. Serviss, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The launch of the first science fiction magazine in 1926 established an SF subculture, and the complex multidimensional set of genres that had consolidated half a century later, each with its own distinctive appraisal of spaceflight. One questionnaire study of attendees at a world science fiction convention found four main ideological dimensions: Hard-Science SF that was closest to real physics and engineering, New-Wave SF with affinities to the social sciences and artistic literature, a Fantasy Cluster with supernatural and horror components, and the Classical Tradition of Verne, Wells, and Burroughs. Another survey of college students found that these dimensions of SF do reflect alternative meanings of spaceflight that exist in the wider culture.