What is Science fiction?
Science fiction is a literary genre, with manifestations in comics, film and television, which deals with the hypothetical scientific and technological achievements of humanity and its consequences.
As such, it is a fundamentally speculative genre, the likelihood of which is subject to the scientific knowledge on which its arguments are based.In this sense, it differs from fantasy literature, which is based on merely imaginary facts and arguments, while science Fiction is about science or science related issues.
Science fiction became very popular during the 20th century due to the great interest that rapid scientific and technological advances aroused around the future. Today, the genre continues to enjoy great relevance.
Some of the characteristics of science fiction are its themes: trips to space, space conquest, consequences of a catastrophe, nuclear apocalypse, mutations, evolution of robots, virtual reality, alien civilizations, and utopias and dystopias.
Actions can take place in the past, present or future, and events can even take place at times alternative to ours or uchronic.
The scenarios are very varied: they can be terrestrial or extraterrestrial, or they can even be found inside the mind.
The characters, meanwhile, are anthropomorphic, that is, they have many characteristics of human beings. They are usually artificial intelligence entities, such as robots, androids, or cyborgs, as well as organic creatures endowed with a certain intelligence.
There are two aspects in science fiction: science fiction hard or hard and science fiction soft or soft. The first, the hard one, is the one that constructs its arguments with great scientific rigor, while the soft or soft one is the one that is most interested in the literary possibilities of science fiction, so that its scientific rigor is rather lax. .
Likewise, there are also other sub-genres of science fiction with specific characteristics, such as cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk or retrofuturism.
Science fiction, although it seems to be speaking apparently of imaginary and distant realities, in reality preserves in itself elemental references of our cultural, social, religious and political imaginary. Consider, for example, the parallels between the Matrix saga and the Christian Bible: a chosen one is sent to save humanity from its destruction; or from Star Wars with medieval chivalric literature; or from the film Avatar with the conquest of space and the history of humanity, the successive processes of conquest and colonization that we have suffered.
Likewise, science fiction also warns about the dangers of human development in certain areas of technology and the control of societies. Consider, for example, Isaac Asimov’s Yo, robot, where robots get out of control, or Aldous Huxley’s A Happy World, where human beings are conditioned to be permanently happy.
Some authors considered classics of science fiction are Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Karel Čapek, Philip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut. Currently, the genre has regained much vigor in Latin America, with writers such as Rodrigo Fresán or Edmundo Paz Soldán.
