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When we speak of the impact of science and/or technology upon society or individuals within the context of imaginative fiction there are a few variables.
It is possible to apply the creative imagination to different areas of the above idea, for example:
etc. etc.
Therefore a story could describe an extremely unusual society (such as an extraterrestrial civilisation or a parallel or alternate dimension of spacetime) and their unusual reactions to a scientific discovery which, to us, is fairly simple, straightforward knowledge. An example of this type of story would be Nightfall by Isaac Asimov.
Alternatively, the society might be fairly ordinary and human but the individual might be a highly unusual person (such as a physical mutant or a telepath) who responds in an exceptional way to otherwise ordinary events.
The "individual" might be an artificial intelligence and the story might be partly concerned with the Turing test.
The society and individual characters in the story might be perfectly ordinary but faced with bizarre circumstances such as the invention of teleportationTeleportation or teletransportation is the process of moving objects (or more likely with present techniques, fundamental particles) from one place to another by encoding information about the object, transmitting the information to another place, such as or the scientific discovery of a new chemical element with unusual properties (such as Cavorite in The First Men In The Moon).
If the society, the individual, the technology and the scientific knowledge base in the story are all standard and realistic, drawn from observation of the real world without much extrapolation of any of these literary components the story would be classed as mainstream contemporary fiction rather than science fiction but if the characters' psychological feelings about the laws of the universe, time, reality and human inventions are unusual and tending toward an existentialExistentialism is a philosophical movement characterized by an emphasis on individualism, individual freedom, and subjectivity. Existentialism emphasises the idea that existence precedes essence, i. that one must be alive in order to create meaning, and t re-interpretation of the meaning of life in relation to the technological world then it would be classed a modernist work of literatureLiterature is literally "an acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary; the term has, however, generally come to identify a collection of texts. The word "literature" spelled with a lower-case "l" can refer to which overlaps with the themes of science fiction.
Some fiction sits fair and square on the borderline between science fiction and other categories and some writing defies categorisation. In some cases the term "science fiction" is more generally used to refer to any literary fantasy that includes a scientific factor as an essential orienting component. It is sometimes applied more generally to any fantasyFor other definitions of fantasy see Fantasy (psychology). In literature, fantasy is a form of fiction, usually novels or short stories, though fantasy role-playing games comic books and movies are also popular. In its broadest sense, "Fantasy Fiction" co at all, but the larger category of speculative fiction is more inclusive in that case. Such literature may consist of a careful and informed extrapolation of scientific facts and principles, or it may range into far-fetched areas flatly contradictory of such facts and principles. In the former case, plausibility based on science is a requisite, while in the latter the requirement is less to do with plausibility and more to do with a love of scientific ideas.
Precursors of the genre, such as Mary Shelley's Gothic novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus ( 1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ( 1886) are plainly science fiction, whereas Bram Stoker's Dracula ( 1897), based purely on the supernatural, is not. In fact Mary Shelley's and R. L. Stevenson's books are both early examples of a science fiction standard theme: The obsessed scientist whose discoveries lead from bad to worse. Science fiction has always been concerned not only with the great hopes people place in science but also with our fears concerning the downside of technological development.
One type of science fiction which has developed into a large subgenre is the alternative history tale, in which a change is imagined at some crucial point in history, causing events to take a different turn and, eventually, a different world to result. Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee has the Confederacy winning the American Civil War and then extrapolates what sort of 20th century would result from that. Phillip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle has the allies losing World War II. Kingsley Amis' The Alteration has the Roman Catholics keeping control of Europe (no protestantism). The broader category of speculative fiction includes both science fiction and alternative histories (which often have no particular scientific or futuristic component).
Sometimes utopic and dystopic literature is also regarded as science fiction, which is accurate insofar as sociology also is a science. In this sense many satirical novels would qualify if they include some speculative component that distinguishes the "scene" from the present or the past in some way.
Fiction which is concerned with science has been repeatedly diluted and dumbed down for the mass audience of radio and television. Ironically, this dumbing down process has been so effective that the television version of sci-fi has come to be used as a format for dumbing down other scripts which would have been tossed out as "too cerebral". This happened with the satirical dystopian novel It Can't Happen Here which was transformed into the science fiction series V in order to dilute it down to a level the TV company considered appropriate for a television audience.