“Sci-fi has ancestors which go back to the time which is difficult to be classified as history or mythology.”
Science fiction…. An imaginative science…..the science of concepts such as aliens, clones, future societies, nanotechnology, alternate earth, parallel universe, human-like robots, superheroes, time travel, virtual reality, parapsychology, high fantasy, magical realism and the list never ends. Science fiction basically explores the consequences of innovations and ideas, like “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. And therefore it is also known as the “literature of ideas”.
Science fiction is difficult to be defined as it is not confined to some topics, but includes thousands of imaginations and themes. Even a devoted aficionado or a fan of sci-fi will have a hard time explaining what it actually is and that reason being that there are no precisely definable boundaries of science fiction.
Sir Robert Scholes calls the origin of sci-fi as “the history of humanity’s changing attitudes toward space and time…. the history of our growing understanding of the universe and the position of our species in the universe.” As a way of making people understand through speculations and storytelling, sci-fi has ancestors which go back to the time which is difficult to be classified as history or mythology.
Hindu mythological epic ‘Mahabharata’ include the story of a king who travels to heaven to meet the creator Brahma and is shocked to learn that 276 years have passed when he returned to earth from some mysterious world, hence anticipating the concept of ‘time and space travel’. There are also some descriptions of mythological creatures like ‘garuda’, ‘airavata’, ‘rakshasas’, ‘naagins’ etc in the epic which give rise to ‘fantasy’ science fiction.
The Japanese tale of ‘Urashima-Taro’ involves travelling forward in distant future. The tale is about a young fisherman Urashimataro who visits an undersea palace on a turtle ship and stays there for three days. After returning home to his village, he finds himself three hundred years in the future, where he is long forgotten, his house is in ruins and his family long dead. The story portrays ‘time travelling’ which is seen by the protagonist as underwater travelling and the time machine as a turtle ship.
The tale of the bamboo cutter may also be considered as a work of science fiction. The protagonist of the story, Kaguya hime, is a princess from the Moon who is sent to the earth for her safety during a celestial war. She found inside a bamboo by the bamboo cutter who raises her as her own daughter. She is later taken back to the moon by her ‘extra-terrestrial’ family. The story also depicts a round ‘flying saucer’ with shining gems (probably lights) which is similar to a UFO.
Several stories within the Arabian nights also feature some sci-fi elements like the protagonist’s visit to the ‘Garden of Eden’ and across the cosmos to different worlds and his encounters with ‘jinns’, ‘mermaids’, talking ‘serpents’, talking ‘trees’, and other forms of life. Other Arabian night stories deal with lost ancient technologies, advanced ancient civilizations etc.
John Clute wrote that science fiction around the start of 21st century can be understood as “a vision of triumph as a genre and as a series of outstanding texts which figured to gaze the significant futures that, during those years, came to pass or indecipherable from the world during those years, fatally indistinguishable from the world it attempted to adumbrate, to signify.” Nothing is new… everything has its roots in the past. Everything we see has its roots in the unseen world. The forms may change, but the essence remains the same.
