by Sarah Murray

Created on: November 30, 2008

Science fiction began in the late nineteenth century with the emergences of H.G Wells and Jules Verne who are often referred to as the fathers of science fiction. The novels written were based on scientific fact. Authors saw science as an integral part of science fiction and used it in order to educate their audiences. However Verne and Wells each saw that their writing was different to each other. Verne sees Wells work as invention.

I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannon-ball, discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a material which does away with the laws of gravitation. Ca c'est trs joli
[that's all very well]but show me this metal. Let him produce it.' (Verne, quoted in Parrinder 1980:7)

Wells is often referred to as the English Verne, a reference that he did not appreciate. He retaliated by stating that Verne wrote about accurate science which was slightly extrapolated. He referred to his own works as fantasy, scientific romances, and that he did not pretend to deal with real, possible things.

His work dealt almost always with actual possibilities of invention and discovery and he made some remarkable forecastsMost of his inventions have come true.' But these stories of minedo not pretend to deal with possible things, they are exercises of the imagination in a quite different field.'

Darko Suvin later talked about knowledge and cognition minimizing the science in science fiction in his book Metamorphis of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of A Literary Genre (1979). This text influenced everybody who studied science fiction later on. Suvin referred to Science Fiction as the literature of Cognitive Estrangement.' (Suvin: Pg 4) The idea of estrangement refers to the element of science fiction that the reader recognizes as strange and unfamiliar. The world that is presented in forms of science fiction is alternate. It is different to the world as the reader knows it. There are other forms such as myth and fantasy, these are also alternate but what makes these forms different to science fiction is the idea of cognition. Cognition is similar to and related to but it is not the same as science. It refers to the idea that knowledge is acting and thinking of reality. Therefore, for Suvin, the world of science fiction must be a plausible world because it reflects the knowledge of our own world. The idea of faster than light travel, an idea that seems to be a staple

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