>feminist in class tried to argue today that modern science-fiction

>>9991958
>
Because the other option for most sci-fi is Lucian wrote it, it's been here since the Greeks.

Shelley's a valuable marker because romanticism and electricity are modern obsessions.

Bergerac's Voyage for instance draws heavily on Lucian, and Kepler draws on similar classics and also wrote in Latin.


They're not the new mass market trend that Shelley was because that didn't exist before Byron, and she shifted non-scientific myths into being scientific, instead of drawing on works that talked mostly about philosophers/scientists or were written by them.

The electricity really is the big thing though because making frogs legs twitch with galvanism was just becoming a thing the year she wrote it. The science wasn't sciencey enough to write science fiction like that before her either.

Gothic as a genre has been viewed as some form of early proto-sci-fi, it deals with similar themes.

>>9992018
Gothic is more Proto-Fantasy than anything else

>>9991958
>I didn't speak up to argue with her
What is this FUCKING pussy doing in my board? Pathetic brainlet. I bet you're shorter than 1.70m, can't grow a beard AND stutter when you talk to girls. Not to mention that you couldn't be more wrong, regardless of these hideous characteristics of yours. And not only were you wrong, but you're this much of a bitch-ass that you didn't even TRY to express an opinion, scared that you'd get schooled by the feminist. Can we have one (1) FUCKING thread with actual, real men posting, instead of insecure kissless manlets? If I wanted to read this kind of bitching from a sperg that can't stand up for his wrong, biased and uninformed opinion I would go to tumblr or plebddit.

But I don't want to read this shit. So you'd better behave or get banished to the Shadow Realm.

>>9992075
But sci fi is fantasy, only one that pretends to be more realistic by pointing at muh science instead of muh magic.

>>9992447
>sci-fi is fantasy

Wow, I thought I just heard something stupid!

>>9992447
agreed. the distinction is really tenuous at times.

>>9992447
That's why you need the term "science fantasy". Sci-fi can mean anything from the philosophical works of Lem, Strugatsky and such, to the soapest space operas.

Brian Aldiss makes this point about Frankenstein in Trillion Year Spree, but I can't remember what his exact evidence was. Something to the effect that Frankenstein was the first work that existed in the context of a nascent scientific worldview, and was inspired by new scientific developments (galvanism).