Fantasy concept in literature. Science fiction - genres, subgenres, brief descriptions of them

This is fantastic a type of fiction in which the author's fiction extends from the depiction of strangely unusual, implausible phenomena to the creation of a special - fictional, unreal, “wonderful world”. Science fiction has its own fantastic type of imagery with its inherent high degree of conventionality, a frank violation of real logical connections and patterns, natural proportions and forms of the depicted object.

Fantasy as a field of literary creativity

Fantasy as a special area of literary creativity maximizes the artist’s creative imagination, and at the same time the reader’s imagination; at the same time, this is not an arbitrary “realm of imagination”: in a fantastic picture of the world, the reader guesses the transformed forms of real - social and spiritual - human existence. Fantastic imagery is inherent in such folklore and literary genres as fairy tale, epic, allegory, legend, grotesque, utopia, satire. The artistic effect of a fantastic image is achieved due to a sharp repulsion from empirical reality, therefore the basis of any fantastic work is the opposition of the fantastic - the real. The poetics of the fantastic is associated with the doubling of the world: the artist either models his own incredible world, existing according to its own laws (in this case, the real “reference point” is present hidden, remaining outside the text: “Gulliver’s Travels”, 1726, J. Swift, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” ", 1877, F.M. Dostoevsky), or in parallel recreates two streams - real and supernatural, unreal being. In the fantastic literature of this series, mystical, irrational motives are strong; the bearer of fantasy here acts as an otherworldly force, intervening in the fate of the central character, influencing his behavior and the course of events of the entire work (works of medieval literature, Renaissance literature, romanticism).

With the destruction of mythological consciousness and the growing desire in the art of the New Age to seek the driving forces of being in being itself, already in the literature of romanticism there appears a need for fantastic motivation, which in one way or another could be combined with a general attitude towards a natural depiction of characters and situations. The most consistent techniques of such motivated fiction are dreams, rumors, hallucinations, madness, and plot mystery. A new type of veiled, implicit fiction is being created, leaving the possibility of double interpretation, double motivation of fantastic incidents - empirically or psychologically plausible and inexplicably surreal (“Cosmorama”, 1840, V.F. Odoevsky; “Shtoss”, 1841, M.Yu. Lermontov ; “The Sandman”, 1817, E.T. Hoffman). Such conscious instability of motivation often leads to the fact that the subject of the fantastic disappears (“The Queen of Spades”, 1833, A.S. Pushkin; “The Nose”, 1836, N.V. Gogol), and in many cases its irrationality is completely removed, finding prose explanation as the story develops. The latter is characteristic of realistic literature, where fantasy is narrowed down to the development of individual motives and episodes or performs the function of an emphatically conventional, naked device that does not pretend to create in the reader the illusion of trust in the special reality of fantastic fiction, without which fantasy in its purest form cannot exist.

Origins of fiction - in the myth-making folk-poetic consciousness, expressed in fairy tales and heroic epics. Fantasy in its essence is predetermined by the centuries-old activity of the collective imagination and represents a continuation of this activity, using (and updating) constant mythical images, motifs, plots in combination with vital material from history and modernity. Science fiction evolves along with the development of literature, freely combining with various methods of depicting ideas, passions and events. It stands out as a special type of artistic creativity as folklore forms move away from the practical tasks of mythological comprehension of reality and ritual and magical influence on it. The primitive worldview, becoming historically untenable, is perceived as fantastic. A characteristic feature of the emergence of fantasy is the development of an aesthetics of the miraculous, which is not characteristic of primitive folklore. A stratification occurs: the heroic tale and tales about the cultural hero are transformed into a heroic epic (folk allegory and generalization of history), in which the elements of the miraculous are auxiliary; the fabulously magical element is recognized as such and serves as a natural environment for a story about travel and adventure, taken beyond the historical framework. Thus, Homer’s “Iliad” is essentially a realistic description of an episode of the Trojan War (which is not hampered by the participation of celestial heroes in the action); Homer’s “Odyssey” is, first of all, a fantastic story about all sorts of incredible adventures (not related to the epic plot) of one of the heroes of the same war. The plot, images and incidents of the Odyssey are the beginning of all literary European fiction. In approximately the same way as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Irish heroic sagas and the Voyage of Bran, son of Phebal (7th century) correlate. The prototype of many future fantastic travels was the parody “True History” (2nd century) by Lucian, where the author, to enhance the comic effect, sought to pile up as much incredible and absurd as possible and at the same time enriched the flora and fauna of the “wonderful country” with many tenacious inventions. Thus, even in antiquity, the main directions of fiction emerged: fantastic wanderings-adventures and a fantastic search-pilgrimage (a typical plot is a descent into hell). Ovid in “Metamorphoses” directed the original mythological plots of transformations (transformations of people into animals, constellations, stones) into the mainstream of fantasy and laid the foundation for a fantastic-symbolic allegory - a genre more didactic than adventure: “teaching in miracles.” Fantastic transformations become a form of awareness of the vicissitudes and unreliability of human fate in a world subject only to the arbitrariness of chance or the mysterious higher will. A rich body of literary-processed fairy-tale fiction is provided by the tales of the Arabian Nights; the influence of their exotic imagery was reflected in European pre-romanticism and romanticism; Indian literature from Kalidasa to R. Tagore is saturated with fantastic images and echoes of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. A unique literary blend of folk tales, legends and beliefs are represented by many works of Japanese (for example, the genre of “story of the terrible and extraordinary” - “Konjakumonogatari”) and Chinese fiction (“Stories of Miracles from the Liao Cabinet” by Pu Songling, 1640-1715).

Fantastic fiction under the sign of the “aesthetics of the miraculous” was the basis of the medieval knightly epic - from “Beowulf” (8th century) to “Perceval” (about 1182) by Chrétien de Troyes and “Le Morte d’Arthur” (1469) by T. Malory. The fantastic plots were framed by the legend of the court of King Arthur, which was subsequently superimposed on the imaginative chronicle of the Crusades. Further transformation of these plots is demonstrated by the monumentally fantastic, almost completely lost historical epic basis, Renaissance poems “Roland in Love” by Boiardo, “Furious Roland” (1516) by L. Ariosto, “Jerusalem Liberated” (1580) by T. Tasso, “The Fairy Queen” (1590) -96) E. Spencer. Together with numerous chivalric romances of the 14th-16th centuries, they constitute a special era in the development of fantasy. A milestone in the development of the fantastic allegory created by Ovid was “The Romance of the Rose” (13th century) by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The development of Fantasy during the Renaissance is completed by “Don Quixote” (1605-15) by M. Cervantes - a parody of the fantasy of knightly adventures, and “Gargantua and Pantagruel” (1533-64) by F. Rabelais - a comic epic on a fantastic basis, both traditional and arbitrary rethought. In Rabelais we find (chapter “The Abbey of Thélem”) one of the first examples of the fantastic development of the utopian genre.

To a lesser extent than ancient mythology and folklore, the religious and mythological images of the Bible stimulated fantasy. The largest works of Christian fiction, “Paradise Lost” (1667) and “Paradise Regained” (1671) by J. Milton, are based not on canonical biblical texts, but on apocrypha. This, however, does not detract from the fact that works of European fantasy of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as a rule, have an ethical Christian overtones or represent a play of fantastic images and the spirit of Christian apocryphal demonology. Outside of fantasy are the lives of saints, where miracles are fundamentally highlighted as extraordinary, but real incidents. Nevertheless, Christian-mythological consciousness contributes to the flourishing of a special genre - visions. Starting with the “Apocalypse” of John the Evangelist, “visions” or “revelation” become a full-fledged literary genre: various aspects of it are represented by “The Vision of Peter the Plowman” (1362) by W. Langland and “The Divine Comedy” (1307-21) by Dante. (The poetics of religious “revelations” defines W. Blake’s visionary fiction: his grandiose “prophetic” images are the last peak of the genre). By the end of the 17th century. Mannerism and Baroque, for which fantasy was a constant background, an additional artistic plane (at the same time, there was an aestheticization of the perception of fantasy, a loss of a living sense of the miraculous, characteristic of the fantastic literature of subsequent centuries), was replaced by classicism, which is inherently alien to fantasy: its appeal to myth is completely rationalistic . In novels of the 17th and 18th centuries, motifs and images of fantasy are casually used to complicate the intrigue. The fantastic quest is interpreted as erotic adventures (“fairy tales”, for example “Akazhu and Zirfila”, 1744, C. Duclos). Fantasy, without having independent meaning, turns out to be a support for the picaresque novel (“The Lame Demon,” 1707, A.R. Lesage; “The Devil in Love,” 1772, J. Cazot), a philosophical treatise (“Micromegas,” 1752, Voltaire). The reaction to the dominance of Enlightenment rationalism is characteristic of the second half of the 18th century; the Englishman R. Hurd calls for a heartfelt study of Fantasy (“Letters on Chivalry and Medieval Romances”, 1762); in The Adventures of Count Ferdinand Fathom (1753); T. Smollett anticipates the beginning of the development of science fiction in the 1920s. Gothic novel by H. Walpole, A. Radcliffe, M. Lewis. By supplying accessories to romantic plots, fantasy remains in an auxiliary role: with its help, the duality of images and events becomes the pictorial principle of pre-romanticism.

In modern times, the combination of fantasy and romanticism turned out to be especially fruitful. “Refuge in the realm of fantasy” (Yu.A. Kerner) was sought by all romantics: among the “Jenians” fantasy, i.e. the aspiration of the imagination into the transcendental world of myths and legends was put forward as a way of becoming familiar with higher insight, as a life program - relatively prosperous (due to romantic irony) in L. Tieck, pathetic and tragic in Novalis, whose “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” is an example of an updated fantastic an allegory, interpreted in the spirit of the search for an unattainable, incomprehensible ideal world. The Heidelberg romantics used Fantasy as a source of plots that gave additional interest to earthly events (“Isabella of Egypt”, 1812, L. Arnima is a fantastic arrangement of a love episode from the life of Charles V). This approach to fiction has proven particularly promising. In an effort to enrich its resources, German romantics turned to its primary sources - they collected and processed fairy tales and legends (“Folk Tales of Peter Lebrecht”, 1797, adapted by Tieck; “Children’s and Family Tales”, 1812-14 and “German Legends”, 1816 -18 brothers J. and V. Grimm). This contributed to the establishment of the genre of literary fairy tales in all European literatures, which remains the leading one in children's fiction to this day. Its classic example is the fairy tale of H. C. Andersen. Romantic fiction is synthesized by Hoffmann's work: here is a Gothic novel (The Devil's Elixir, 1815-16), a literary fairy tale (The Lord of the Fleas, 1822, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, 1816), and an enchanting phantasmagoria (Princess Brambilla) , 1820), and a realistic story with a fantastic background (“The Bride’s Choice,” 1819, “The Golden Pot, 1814”). An attempt to improve the attraction to fantasy as the “abyss of the otherworldly” is represented by “Faust” (1808-31) by I. V. Goethe: using the traditional fantastic motive of selling the soul to the devil, the poet reveals the futility of the spirit’s wanderings in the realms of the fantastic and affirms earthly value as the final value life activity that transforms the world (i.e. the utopian ideal is excluded from the realm of fantasy and projected into the future).

In Russia, romantic fiction is represented in the works of V.A. Zhukovsky, V.F. Odoevsky, A. Pogorelsky, A.F. Veltman. A.S. Pushkin (“Ruslan and Lyudmila”, 1820, where the epic-fairy-tale flavor of fantasy is especially important) and N.V. Gogol turned to fantasy, whose fantastic images are organically fused into the folk-poetic ideal picture of Ukraine (“Terrible Revenge” , 1832; “Viy”, 1835). His St. Petersburg fiction (“The Nose”, 1836; “Portrait”, “Nevsky Prospekt”, both 1835) is no longer associated with folklore and fairy-tale motifs and is otherwise determined by the general picture of “escheated” reality, the condensed image of which, as it were, in itself gives rise to fantastic images.

With the establishment of realism, fiction again found itself on the periphery of literature, although it was often involved as a kind of narrative context, giving a symbolic character to real images (“Portrait of Dorian Gray, 1891, O. Wilde; “Shagreen Skin,” 1830-31 by O. Balzac; works by M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrin, S. Bronte, N. Hawthorne, Yu. A. Strindberg). The Gothic tradition of fiction is developed by E.A. Poe, who depicts or implies a transcendental, otherworldly world as a kingdom of ghosts and nightmares that dominate the earthly destinies of people. However, he also anticipated (“The History of Arthur Gordon Pym”, 1838, “Descent into the Maelstrom”, 1841) the emergence of a new branch of Science Fiction - scientific, which (starting with J. Verne and H. Wells) is fundamentally isolated from the general fantastic tradition; she paints a real world, albeit fantastically transformed by science (for better or worse), that opens up anew to the researcher’s gaze. Interest in f. as such was revived towards the end of the 19th century. among the neo-romantics (R.L. Stevenson), decadents (M. Schwob, F. Sologub), symbolists (M. Maeterlinck, prose of A. Bely, dramaturgy of A. A. Blok), expressionists (G. Meyrink), surrealists (G .Kazak, E.Kroyder). The development of children's literature gives rise to a new image of the fantasy world - the toy world: in L. Carroll, C. Collodi, A. Milne; in domestic literature - by A.N. Tolstoy (“The Golden Key”, 1936), N.N. Nosov, K.I. Chukovsky. An imaginary, partly fairy-tale world is created by A. Green.

In the second half of the 20th century. The fantastic principle is realized mainly in the field of science fiction, but sometimes it gives rise to qualitatively new artistic phenomena, for example, the trilogy of the Englishman J.R. Tolkien “The Lord of the Rings” (1954-55), written in line with epic fantasy (see), novels and dramas of the Japanese Abe Kobo, works of Spanish and Latin American writers (G. Garcia Marquez, J. Cortazar). Modernity is characterized by the above-mentioned contextual use of fantasy, when an outwardly realistic narrative has a symbolic and allegorical connotation and will give a more or less encrypted reference to a mythological plot (“Centaur”, 1963, J. Updike; “Ship of Fools”, 1962, K.A. Porter). A combination of various possibilities of fiction is the novel by M.A. Bulgakov “The Master and Margarita” (1929-40). The fantastic-allegorical genre is represented in Russian literature by the cycle of “natural-philosophical” poems by N.A. Zabolotsky (“The Triumph of Agriculture”, 1929-30), folk-fairytale fiction by the works of P.P. Bazhov, literary fairy-tale fiction by the plays of E.L. Schwartz. Fantasy has become a traditional auxiliary means of Russian grotesque satire: from Saltykov-Shchedrin (“The History of a City,” 1869-70) to V.V. Mayakovsky (“The Bedbug,” 1929 and “Bathhouse,” 1930).

The word fantasy comes from Greek phantastike, what does it mean in translation- the art of imagining.

In V. I. Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary we read: “Fantastic - unrealistic, dreamy; or intricate, whimsical, special and excellent in its invention.” In other words, two meanings are implied: 1) something unreal, impossible and unimaginable; 2) something rare, exaggerated, unusual. In relation to literature, the main sign becomes: when we say “fantastic novel” (story, short story, etc.), we mean not so much that it describes rare events, but rather that these events are completely or partially - completely impossible in real life. We define the fantastic in literature by its opposition to the real and existing.

This contrast is both obvious and extremely variable. Animals or birds endowed with a human psyche and speaking human speech; forces of nature, personified in anthropomorphic (i.e., human-looking) images of gods (for example, ancient gods); living creatures of an unnatural hybrid form (in ancient Greek mythology, half-humans-half-horses - centaurs, half-birds-half-lions - griffins); unnatural actions or properties (for example, in East Slavic fairy tales, the death of Koshchei, hidden in several magical objects and animals nested within each other) - all this is easily perceived by us as fantastic. However, much depends on the historical position of the observer: what seems fantastic today, for the creators of ancient mythology or ancient fairy tales, was not yet fundamentally opposed to reality. Therefore, in art there are constant processes of rethinking, the transition of the real into the fanatical and the fantastic into the real. The first process associated with the weakening of the position of ancient mythology was noted by K. Marx: “...Greek mythology constituted not only the arsenal of Greek art, but also its soil. Is that view of nature and social relations, which lies at the basis of Greek fantasy, and therefore Greek art, possible in the presence of self-employed factories, railways, locomotives and the electric telegraph? The reverse process of the transition of the fantastic into the real is demonstrated by science fiction literature: scientific discoveries and achievements that seemed fantastic against the backdrop of their time, as technological progress develops, become quite possible and feasible, and sometimes even look too elementary and naive.

Thus, the perception of the fantastic depends on our attitude to its essence, that is, to the degree of reality or unreality of the events depicted. However, for a modern person, this is a very complex feeling, which determines all the complexity and versatility of the experience of the fantastic. A modern child believes in fairy tales, but from adults, from educational programs on radio and television, he already knows or guesses that “everything in life is not like that.” Therefore, a share of disbelief is mixed with his faith and he is able to perceive incredible events either as real, or as fantastic, or on the verge of the real and the fantastic. An adult “does not believe” in the miraculous, but sometimes he tends to resurrect his previous, naive “childish” point of view in order to plunge into the imaginary world with all the fullness of his experiences, in a word, a share of “faith” is mixed with his disbelief; and in the obviously fantastic, the real and genuine begins to “flicker.” Even if we are firmly convinced of the impossibility of fantasy, this does not deprive it of interest and aesthetic appeal in our eyes, for fantasticality in this case becomes, as it were, a hint at other, not yet known spheres of life, an indication of its eternal renewal and inexhaustibility. In B. Shaw’s play “Back to Methuselah,” one of the characters (Snake) says: “A miracle is something that is impossible and yet possible. What cannot happen and yet happens.” And indeed, no matter how our scientific information deepens and multiplies, the appearance of, say, a new living creature will always be perceived as a “miracle” - impossible and at the same time quite real. It is the complexity of the experience of fantasy that allows it to be easily combined with irony and laughter; create a special genre of ironic fairy tale (H. C. Andersen, O. Wilde, E. L. Schwartz). The unexpected happens: irony, it would seem, should kill or at least weaken fantasy, but in fact it strengthens and strengthens the fantastic principle, since it encourages us not to take it literally, to think about the hidden meaning of the fantastic situation.

The history of world literature, especially of modern and recent times, starting with romanticism (late 18th - early 19th centuries), has accumulated a huge wealth of artistic fiction arsenal. Its main types are determined by the degree of clarity and prominence of the fantastic principle: obvious fantasy; fantasy is implicit (veiled); fiction that receives a natural-real explanation, etc.

In the first case (obvious fantasy), supernatural forces openly come into play: Mephistopheles in “Faust” by J. V. Goethe, the Demon in the poem of the same name by M. Yu. Lermontov, devils and witches in “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” by N. V. Gogol, Woland and company in “The Master and Margarita” by M. A. Bulgakov. Fantastic characters enter into direct relationships with people, trying to influence their feelings, thoughts, behavior, and these relationships often take on the character of a criminal conspiracy with the devil. So, for example, Faust in the tragedy of J. V. Goethe or Petro Bezrodny in “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” by N. V. Gogol sells their soul to the devil to fulfill their desires.

In works with implicit (veiled) fiction, instead of the direct participation of supernatural forces, strange coincidences, accidents, etc. occur. Thus, in “Lafertovskaya Poppy” by A. A. Pogorelsky-Perovsky it is not directly stated that the titular adviser Aristarkh Faleleich Murlykin wooing Masha none other than the cat of the old woman of the poppy tree, reputed to be a witch. However, many coincidences make one believe this: Aristarkh Faleleich appears precisely when the old woman dies and the cat disappears to no one knows where; There is something cat-like in the behavior of the official: he “pleasantly” arches his “round back”, walks, “smoothly speaking”, grumbles something “under his breath”; his very name - Murlykin - evokes very specific associations. The fantastic principle also appears in a veiled form in many other works, for example, in “The Sandman” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Queen of Spades” by A. S. Pushkin.

Finally, there is a type of fantasy that is based on the most complete and completely natural motivations. Such, for example, are the fantastic stories of E. Poe. F. M. Dostoevsky noted that E. Poe “only admits the external possibility of an unnatural event (proving, however, its possibility and sometimes even extremely cunningly) and, having allowed this event, in all other respects he is completely faithful to reality.” “In Poe’s stories you see so vividly all the details of the image or event presented to you that you finally seem to be convinced of its possibility, its reality...” Such thoroughness and “reliability” of descriptions is also characteristic of other types of fantastic; it creates a deliberate contrast between the clearly unrealistic basis (plot, plot, some characters) and its extremely accurate “processing”. This contrast is often used by J. Swift in Gulliver's Travels. For example, when describing fantastic creatures - Lilliputians, all the details of their actions are recorded, right down to giving exact figures: in order to move the captive Gulliver, “they drove in eighty pillars, each one foot high, then the workers tied ... the neck, arms, torso and legs with countless bandages with hooks... Nine hundred of the strongest workers began to pull the ropes...".

Fiction performs various functions, especially often a satirical, accusatory function (Swift, Voltaire, M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, V.V. Mayakovsky). Often this role is combined with another - affirming, positive. Being an expressive, emphatically vivid way of expressing artistic thought, fiction often captures in social life what is just emerging and emerging. The moment of anticipation is a common property of science fiction. However, there are also types of it that are specifically devoted to foreseeing and forecasting the future. This is the science fiction literature already mentioned above (J. Verne, A. N. Tolstoy, K. Chapek, S. Lem, I. A. Efremov, A. N. and B. N. Strugatsky), which is often not limited to foresight future scientific and technical processes, but strives to capture the entire social and social structure of the future. Here she comes into close contact with the genres of utopia and dystopia (“Utopia” by T. More, “City of the Sun” by T. Campanella, “City without a Name” by V. F. Odoevsky, “What is to be done?” by N. G. Chernyshevsky).

Science fiction is one of the genres of modern literature that “grew” out of romanticism. The forerunners of this direction are called Hoffman, Swift and even Gogol. We will talk about this amazing and magical type of literature in this article. We will also consider the most famous writers of the movement and their works.

Definition of genre

Fantasy is a term that has ancient Greek origins and literally translates as “the art of imagining.” In literature, it is usually called a direction based on a fantastic assumption in the description of the artistic world and heroes. This genre tells about universes and creatures that do not exist in reality. Often these images are borrowed from folklore and mythology.

Science fiction is not only a literary genre. This is a whole separate movement in art, the main difference of which is the unrealistic assumption underlying the plot. Usually another world is depicted, which exists in a time other than ours, living according to the laws of physics different from those on earth.

Subspecies

Science fiction books on bookshelves today can confuse any reader with their variety of themes and plots. Therefore, they have long been divided into types. There are many classifications, but we will try to reflect the most complete one here.

Books of this genre can be divided according to plot features:

Science fiction, we’ll talk about it in more detail below.
Dystopian - this includes “Fahrenheit 451” by R. Bradbury, “Immortality Corporation” by R. Sheckley, “The Doomed City” by the Strugatskys.
Alternative: “The Transatlantic Tunnel” by G. Garrison, “Let the Darkness Never Fall” by L.S. de Campa, “Island of Crimea” by V. Aksenov.
Fantasy is the most numerous subspecies. Writers working in the genre: J.R.R. Tolkien, A. Belyanin, A. Pekhov, O. Gromyko, R. Salvatore, etc.
Thriller and horror: H. Lovecraft, S. King, E. Rice.
Steampunk, steampunk and cyberpunk: “War of the Worlds” by H. Wells, “The Golden Compass” by F. Pullman, “Mockingbird” by A. Pekhov, “Steampunk” by P.D. Filippo.

Genres often mix and new varieties of works appear. For example, love fantasy, detective, adventure, etc. Let us note that fantasy, as one of the most popular types of literature, continues to develop, more and more of its directions appear every year, and it is almost impossible to somehow systematize them.

Foreign books of the fantasy genre

The most popular and famous series of this subtype of literature is “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien. The work was written in the middle of the last century, but is still in great demand among fans of the genre. The story tells of the Great War against Evil, which lasted for centuries until the dark lord Sauron was defeated. Centuries of quiet life have passed, and the world is again in danger. Only the hobbit Frodo, who must destroy the One Ring, can save Middle-earth from a new war.

Another excellent example of fantasy is “A Song of Ice and Fire” by J. Martin. To date, the cycle includes 5 parts, but is considered unfinished. The novels take place in the Seven Kingdoms, where long summers give way to equal winters. Several families are fighting for power in the state, trying to seize the throne. The series is far from the usual magical worlds, where good always defeats evil, and knights are noble and fair. Intrigue, betrayal and death reign here.

The Hunger Games series by S. Collins is also worthy of mention. These books, which quickly became bestsellers, are classified as teenage fiction. The plot tells about the struggle for freedom and the price that the heroes have to pay to get it.

Science fiction is (in literature) a separate world that lives by its own laws. And it appeared not at the end of the 20th century, as many people think, but much earlier. It’s just that in those years such works were classified as other genres. For example, these are books by E. Hoffman (“The Sandman”), Jules Verne (“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, “Around the Moon”, etc.), H. Wells, etc.

Russian writers

Domestic science fiction authors have also written many books in recent years. Russian writers are not much inferior to their foreign colleagues. We list here the most famous of them:

Sergei Lukyanenko. A very popular cycle is “Watches”. Now not only its creator, but also many others are writing about this series around the world. He is also the author of the following wonderful books and series: “The Boy and the Darkness”, “No Time for Dragons”, “Working on Mistakes”, “Deeptown”, “Sky Seekers”, etc.
The Strugatsky brothers. They have novels of various types of fiction: “Ugly Swans”, “Monday Begins on Saturday”, “Roadside Picnic”, “It’s Hard to Be a God”, etc.
Alexey Pekhov, whose books are popular today not only in his homeland, but also in Europe. Let us list the main cycles: “Chronicles of Siala”, “Spark and Wind”, “Kindrat”, “Guardian”.
Pavel Kornev: “Borderland”, “All-Good Electricity”, “Autumn City”, “Radiant”.

Foreign writers

Famous foreign science fiction writers:

Isaac Asimov is a famous American author who has written more than 500 books.
Ray Bradbury is a recognized classic not only of science fiction, but also of world literature.
Stanislaw Lem is a very famous Polish writer in our country.
Clifford Simak is considered the founder of American science fiction.
Robert Heinlein is an author of books for teenagers.

What is science fiction?

Science fiction is a movement in fantastic literature that takes as its plot the rational assumption that unusual things happen due to the incredible development of technical and scientific thought. One of the most popular genres today. But it is often difficult to separate it from related ones, since authors can combine several directions.

Science fiction is (in literature) a great opportunity to imagine what would happen to our civilization if technological progress accelerated or science chose a different path of development. Typically, such works do not violate the generally accepted laws of nature and physics.

The first books of this genre began to appear in the 18th century, when the formation of modern science took place. But science fiction emerged as an independent literary movement only in the 20th century. J. Verne is considered one of the first writers to work in this genre.

Science fiction: books

Let us list the most famous works of this direction:

“Master of Torture” (J. Wolfe);
"Rise from the Dust" (F.H. Farmer);
"Ender's Game" (O.S. Card);
“The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” (D. Adams);
"Dune" (F. Herbert);
“Sirens of Titan” (K. Vonnegut).

Science fiction is quite diverse. The books presented here are only the most famous and popular examples of it. It is almost impossible to list all the writers of this type of literature, since several hundred of them have appeared over the past decades.

Science fiction is one of the genres of literature, cinema and fine arts. It originates in the deep past. Even at the dawn of his appearance, man assumed the presence of mysterious and powerful forces in the world around him. The first science fiction is folklore, fairy tales, myths and legends. This genre is based on some incredible, supernatural assumption, an element of something unusual or impossible, a violation of the boundaries of human reality.

The beginning of the development of science fiction in cinema

From literature, the genre moved to cinema almost immediately after its inception. The first science fiction films appeared in France in the 19th century. In those years, the best director in this genre was Georges Méliès. His fantastic film “A Trip to the Moon” entered the golden fund of world cinema masterpieces and became the first film about space travel. At this time, science fiction is an opportunity to show on the screen the achievements of human progress: amazing mechanisms and machines, vehicles.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, science fiction films have begun to gain increasing popularity, and audience interest in them is growing.

Types of fiction

In cinema, science fiction is a genre whose boundaries are difficult to define. Usually it is a mixture of different styles and forms of cinema. There is a division into types of film fiction, but it is largely arbitrary.

Science fiction is a story about incredible technical and other discoveries of traveling through time, crossing outer space, and using artificial intelligence to create.

The film “Prometheus” is an interesting picture with a philosophical meaning about man’s search for an answer to the main question: who are we and where did we come from? As a result, scientists received evidence that humanity was created by a highly developed humanoid race. A scientific expedition sets off to the edge of the solar system in search of its creators. Each team member has his own interest: some want an answer to why humanity was created, some are driven by curiosity, and some pursue selfish goals. But the creators also turn out to be not at all what people imagined them to be.

Space fiction

This view is very closely intertwined with science fiction. A striking example is the recently released film Interstellar, which received rave reviews from critics, about the possibility of traveling through black holes and the space-time paradoxes that arise from this. Like Prometheus, this picture is filled with deep philosophical meaning.

Fantasy is science fiction that is closely related to mysticism and fairy tales. The most striking example of a fantasy film is Peter Jackson's famous epic saga The Lord of the Rings. Among the most recent interesting works in this genre, we can note the “Hobbit” trilogy and the latest work of Sergei Bodrov “The Seventh Son”.

Horror - oddly enough, this genre is also closely related to fantasy. A classic example is the Alien film series.

Science fiction: films that have become classics of cinema

In addition to the films already mentioned, there are also a large number of magnificent films included in the list of the best works in the science fiction genre:

Space saga "Star Wars".
The Terminator film series.
Fantasy series "The Chronicles of Narnia".
The Iron Man trilogy.
Series "Highlander".
"Inception" with Leonardo DiCaprio.
Fantastic comedy "Back to the Future".
"Dune".
The Matrix trilogy with Keanu Reeves.
Post-apocalyptic film “I am Legend.”
Fantastic comedy "Men in Black".
"War of the Worlds" with Tom Cruise.
Combat space science fiction "Starship Troopers".
"The Fifth Element" with Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich.
The Transformers film series.
The Spider-Man series.
Batman film series.

Development of the genre today

Modern science fiction - films and animated films - continues to be interesting to viewers today.

Several large-scale and spectacular science fiction films have been announced for 2015 alone. Among the most anticipated films are the final film from the Hunger Games series, the second part of The Maze Runner, Star Wars Episode 7 - The Force Awakens, Terminator 5, Tomorrowland, the sequel to Divergent, a new a film from the Avengers series and the long-awaited Jurassic World.

Conclusion

Science fiction is what gives a person the opportunity to dream. Here you can be a superhero saving the world, admit the possibility of the existence of other worlds and fly into the depths of space. This is why audiences love science fiction films - they make dreams come true.

Greek phantastike - the art of imagining) is a form of reflection of the world in which, based on real ideas, a logically incompatible picture of the Universe is created. Widespread in mythology, folklore, art, social utopia. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Science fiction is developing.

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FANTASTIC

Greek phantastike - the art of imagining), a type of fiction where artistic fiction receives the greatest freedom: the boundaries of fiction extend from the depiction of strange, unusual, fictional phenomena to the creation of one’s own world with special patterns and possibilities. Fiction has a special type of imagery, which is characterized by a violation of real connections and proportions: for example, the severed nose of Major Kovalev in N.V. Gogol’s story “The Nose” itself moves around St. Petersburg, has a rank higher than its owner, and then miraculously finds itself back on its own place. At the same time, the fantastic picture of the world is not pure fiction: it transforms and raises to a symbolic level the events of real reality. Science fiction in a grotesque, exaggerated, transformed form reveals to the reader the problems of reality and reflects on their solution. Fantastic imagery is inherent in fairy tales, epics, allegories, legends, utopias, and satire. A special subtype of fantasy is science fiction, in which imagery is created by depicting fictitious or actual scientific and technological achievements of man. The artistic originality of fiction lies in the opposition of the fantastic and real worlds, therefore each work of fiction exists, as it were, on two levels: the world created by the author’s imagination is somehow correlated with reality. The real world is either taken outside the text (“Gulliver’s Travels” by J. Swift) or present in it (in “Faust” by J. V. Goethe, the events in which Faust and Mephistopheles participate are contrasted with the lives of the rest of the townspeople).

Initially, fantasy was associated with the embodiment of mythological images in literature: thus, ancient fantasy with the participation of gods seemed to authors and readers to be quite reliable (“Iliad”, “Odyssey” by Homer, “Works and Days” by Hesiod, plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides and etc.). Examples of ancient fiction can be considered Homer's "Odyssey", which describes many amazing and fantastic adventures of Odysseus, and Ovid's "Metamorphoses" - the story of the transformation of living beings into trees, stones, people into animals, etc. In the works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this trend continued: in the knightly epic (from Beowulf, written in the 8th century, to the novels of Chrétien de Troyes in the 14th century) images of dragons and wizards, fairies, trolls, elves and other fantastic creatures appeared. A separate tradition in the Middle Ages was Christian fiction, describing miracles of saints, visions, etc. Christianity recognizes evidence of this kind as authentic, but this does not prevent them from remaining part of the fantastic literary tradition, since extraordinary phenomena are described that are not typical for the usual course of events. The richest fantasy is also represented in Eastern culture: tales of the Arabian Nights, Indian and Chinese literature. During the Renaissance, the fantasy of chivalric novels was parodied in “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by F. Rabelais and in “Don Quixote” by M. Cervantes: Rabelais presents a fantastic epic that rethinks the traditional cliches of fantasy, while Cervantes parodies the passion for fantasy, his hero sees fantastic creatures everywhere, which do not exist, falls into absurd situations because of this. Christian fiction in the Renaissance is expressed in the poems of J. Milton "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained".

The literature of the Enlightenment and classicism is alien to fantasy, and its images are used only to give an exotic flavor to the action. A new flowering of fantasy began in the 19th century, during the era of romanticism. Genres based entirely on fantasy emerge, such as the Gothic novel. The forms of fantasy in German romanticism are diverse; in particular, E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote fairy tales (“The Lord of the Fleas”, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”), Gothic novels (“The Devil’s Elixir”), enchanting phantasmagoria (“Princess Brambilla”), realistic stories with a fantastic background (“ The Golden Pot”, “The Bride’s Choice”), philosophical fairy tales-parables (“Little Tsakhes”, “The Sandman”). Fiction in the literature of realism is also common: “The Queen of Spades” by A. S. Pushkin, “Shtoss” by M. Yu. Lermontov, “Mirgorod” and “Petersburg stories” by N. V. Gogol, “The Dream of a Funny Man” by F. M. Dostoevsky etc. The problem arises of combining fantasy with the real world in the text; often the introduction of fantastic images requires motivation (Tatyana's dream in Eugene Onegin). However, the establishment of realism pushed fiction to the periphery of literature. They turned to it to give a symbolic character to images (“The Portrait of Dorian Gray” by O. Wilde, “Shagreen Skin” by O. de Balzac). The Gothic tradition of fiction is developed by E. Poe, whose stories present unmotivated fantastic images and collisions. A synthesis of various types of fiction is presented by M. A. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita.”

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Incomplete definition ↓