It's Lit!

NARRATOR: Man, modern day to day life sure is dull.

Here I am sitting, in traffic during my commute.

And I'm like, where's my flying car.

I was promised flying cars and food that comes in pill forms and robot servants.

And all I got was Twitter.

Where's my robot?

But with the question of where's my robot, there also comes follow up questions, like what if my robot develops consciousness.

Will the robots have feelings about Twitter?

What if the robot starts tweeting their feelings?

Such hopes and anxieties inspire the wide and wonderful world of science fiction, a genre that is just as much worried about the future as it is easier for the hurry up already.

We need to colonize Mars, stat.

In the words of sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, "science fiction writers foresee the inevitable.

And although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."

[MUSIC PLAYING] Stories, tales, and myths from all around the world posing speculative questions about technologies have existed long before Ray Bradbury and Frank Herbert.

From the time-traveling Japanese fairytale "Urashima Taro" to some of the speculative elements of "1001 Arabian Nights."

But there are a few eras that began to shape what we've come to know as science fiction today.

First, the Age of Enlightenment, an 18th century philosophical movement that elevated reason and empirical observation as the nexus for human knowledge rather than, say, religious doctrine or monarchy.

Then there was the Industrial Revolution, a period of innovation that brought so many watershed technological changes to the world, like steam engines and smog.

Throw in a dash of the hot new romantic subgenre of Gothic fiction, add in a few still popular philosophical ideas like the concept of utopia and mankind's great fall, and you've got the scene for the birth of a new modern genre with what is widely considered its first prominent work, Mary Shelley's 1918 novel "Frankenstein."

Shelley was partially inspired to write this from the Prometheus myth in which a Greek deity steals the forbidden knowledge of fire from the gods and gives it to mankind.

And while a Victorian novel might not be the first thing that springs to mind when we think of science fiction, we see a lot of somatic hallmarks of sci-fi within the text, such as science being limited only by humankind's imagination, i.e.

Victor Frankenstein wish to end mortality, the moral and ethical considerations in the advent of new technologies, and the rubric for science fiction as an exploration of our anxieties of the present and the future.

By the mid to late 19th century, we see the emergence of two of science-fiction's seminal authors, HG Wells and Jules Verne.

Jules Verne pioneered the adventure-driven romantic sci-fi opera.

His most famous works are dashing adventures that send us beyond the reach of the known world before actual science had yet to catch up.

Meanwhile, HG Wells' novels are over here taking a much more moralizing tone.

In "The Time Machine," humankind has devolved into either childlike, naive beings or complete monsters.

And eventually, Earth ends up as a dried out seasonless husk.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, HG.

By the mid-1920s, pulp magazines and novels are en vogue.

And it's here where science fiction really begins to go mainstream, for better or worse.

Authors are paid by the word and rewarded for quantity over quality, so science fiction is pretty much grouped with other so-called low art, like comic books and serialized romances.

But then World War II comes along, and the United States falls into a decades-long conflict with the USSR.

And the atomic bomb comes with all sorts of horrifying existential implications.

Oh, and also we flew to the moon, NBD.

All of this coincides with the so-called golden age of science fiction and its prominent authors, Robert Heinlein, author of "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land," Ray Bradbury, author of "Fahrenheit 451" and the "Martian Chronicles" and a genuine cool dude, Isaac Asimov, who focuses on artificial intelligence and the ethical questions that come with that, and George Orwell, whose "1984" is very worried about the future, particularly the idea of big brother using technology to keep us all in line.

From these inspirations follows the next generation of writers, with Philip K Dick popularizing the nascent subgenre of cyberpunk in which technology continues to advance, but societal inequities continue to exist or even get worse.

Ursula K LeGuin pens one of the first mainstream sci-fi books to explore a genderless society.

And frank Herbert gave us "Dune" and memes, so many memes.

The rise of personal computers, video games, and the very beginnings of the internet inspires Orson Scott Card, who's "Ender's Game" series, which is one of my favorites, even though the author of those books isn't, predicted all sorts of fun things like how the internet would shape the discourse and the gamification of warfare.

Then there's Michael Crichton, a commercial sci-fi writer who often reads like a modern day Mary Shelley, in that it warns of the dangers of irresponsible science, except swap that creature out for dinosaurs.

And then there's Octavia E Butler, the grande dame of this genre.

Her works like "Parable of the Sower," "Lilith's Brood," and the Patternist series all featured women of color as protagonists, hitherto grossly under-represented in the genre.

But Butler was seminal to the development of the Afrofuturism subgenre.

Afrofuturism is, well, exactly what it sounds like.

Think the concept albums of Janelle Monae or Ryan Coogler's "Black Panther."

Women and people of color have always been writing science fiction, ahem.

But now they're getting more and more mainstream attention.

And more diverse worldviews just makes for a more interesting, more dynamic fiction scape.

Science fiction may have its roots in reactionary motifs and worries about the myriad ways civilization might fall.

But there exists also a more nuanced exploration of the human condition and its relationship to technology.

Technologies in fiction can just as often be a tool to effect social change as it is a scary thing destined to destroy traditional societies as we know them.

Here's looking at you, HG Wells.

So what is your favorite sci-fi book?

What themes do you wish were more explored in science fiction?

Be sure to leave us a comment.

The Great American Read is a new series on PBS about why we love to read leading up to a nationwide vote on America's favorite novel.

Who decides America's favorite novel, you ask?

Well, that would be you.

So head to PBS.org/GreatAmericanRead to vote on your favorite book.

Check the link in the description for more details.

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