The Hollywood science fiction film "Dune" will be released on Friday, October 22.
Adapted from Frank Herbert's novel of the same name, the film tells the story of the Ertridi family, who controlled the precious resources, after being betrayed, the heir of the family, Paul, decided to accept the guidance of fate to defend his family and people.
Frank Herbert is an American science fiction writer and writer. As one of the most influential science fiction giants in the United States, Herbert's position in science fiction literature is the same as Tolkien's position in fantasy literature, and no one can shake it. Herbert wrote twenty-three novels and five collections of short stories during his lifetime, the most successful of which was the Dune series. Dune was born in the 1960s, what was going on in the sci-fi world at that time?
Good book and recommended
The real world and the science fiction world create each other. Today, when science and technology turn human imagination into reality every day, the world has finally caught up with the pace of science fiction!
From Frankenstein to the whimsical "three-body world", science fiction embodies the ultimate in the human imagination. Beginning with the earliest imaginative oral stories, Staggered World traces the development of science fiction through a variety of living stories created by generations of authors, and how scientific and technological innovations of different eras have changed humanity's understanding of their role in the universe and changed science fiction. Author James Gunn, as a recognized authority in the contemporary world science fiction community, has discussed the authors and representative works that have influenced the entire science fiction genre and played a role in the development of science fiction, outlining a clear context for the ever-changing science fiction.
The future world of the 1960s and 1970s
The end result of New Wave science fiction is actually an increase in the number of science fiction readers. Another effect was to enable people to experiment more freely within the realm of science fiction, using less common techniques and unusual themes; in other words, New Wave science fiction further liberated this self-proclaimed freest form of fiction.
Earth photographed on the Moon (NASA)
For science fiction, it is foreseeable that many traditional science fiction writers who do not pay attention to the writing skills and lead to a decline in the quality of their works will pay more attention to the language, characters, and subjective reality of the novel, while many authors of imaginary novels will also pay more attention to the content and objective reality of the work, although some will continue to rush to the forefront of the experiment. People will be more tolerant and even encouraged science fiction novels with different themes, different writing methods, and different styles, and there will be more and more writers who are difficult to classify, or even cannot be classified. This is also the ideal goal of mainstream literature: every writer has a personal vision and a personal voice.
What about the relationship between science fiction and mainstream literature?
Mainstream literature seems to be a backwater, not moving, even if it is a little moving, it is a ripple in a small ditch, without any obvious trend. It has nowhere to go.
Mainstream writers increasingly adopted science fiction themes and concepts: Bath, Borges, Bullers, Burroughs, Burrard, Goldin, Hussey, Lessing, Nabokov, Percy, Thomas Pynchon, Rand, John Williams, Colin Wilson, Hermann Walker, Vergaux, Vonnegut, Andrei Watschensky... What they discover is not just an unexplored territory (i.e., territory that has not yet been discovered by mainstream writers), but also a number of important themes that are closely related to the problems of our time and have not yet been explored by mainstream literature, and the fresh metaphors they bring have the power to evoke emotional resonance. ......
Kurt Vonnegut and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Among the aforementioned writers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was first recognized by science fiction magazines and paperbacks, although he later insisted that he was not a science fiction writer and insisted that he had gained a reputation in mainstream literature.
There are a number of other science fiction writers who have also gained wide read outside the circle, and although mainstream critics and writers have not really welcomed them into mainstream literary circles, their impact is indisputable. In a sense, the entry of science fiction books into mainstream literature is considered to be the embodiment of the merits and vitality of science fiction itself.
Dune (2021)
The widespread appeal of Heinlein's Stranger and Frank Herbert's Dunes has gained notice, as Time magazine wrote, as "a perfect example of how public concern and fascination have caught up with the science fiction imagination." Not only these two, but Asimov's Al Qaeda trilogy and Bohr and Cohenbrus's Space Merchant have almost never been out of print since they appeared in single-book form in the early 1950s, while Arthur Clarke's The End of Childhood has been reprinted as many as 18 times. "Walter Jr. M. Miller's "The Hymn to Leibovitz" has been a bestseller by word of mouth for more than a decade," Time magazine noted, "and it is an outstanding novel even by the standards of mainstream literature." In addition, there is Daniel Case's Bouquet of Flowers for Algino, Ursula Berger. K. Le Guin's The Dark Left Hand, Robert Silverberg's The Glass Tower, and most of Ray Bradbury's work— Bradbury was also one of the first science fiction authors to be recognized as a literary scholar, along with Samuel Delaney, Roger Zerazni, and Harlan Ellison, as well as possible future stars.
Science fiction writers pay more and more attention to character building, language, and writing skills, and will be better accepted by non-science fiction readers and critics. Kingsley Amis once wrote:
Those dull astronauts are not enough,
And the hastily sketched alien monsters,
Characters are what matters.
But science fiction writers should be careful not to sell their birthright for a bowl of soup, not to abandon ideas that make science fiction different and important (their innate right is the message conveyed in the work), but to further develop these ideas, as Amis put it in the poem Science Fiction:
We wandered down the starry corridor
Out of an inner impulse
Face our evil and stupidity
From this to ourselves...
Herbert's Dunes
Heinlein's Stranger
Miller's Hymn to Leibovitz
Le Guin," The Left Hand of Darkness
Silverberg's "Glass Tower"
At the same time, mainstream writers will continue to explore the future, exploring other uncharted territories that were previously exclusive to science fiction writers, and they will approach these topics in increasingly complex ways.
The boundaries of mainstream literature and science fiction will be intertwined and indistinguishable.
I believe that the literary genre of science fiction will continue to exist, although the magazines that publish science fiction works will no longer exist. What about John Campbell, who died on July 11, 1971, about "Analogy" hosted by his successor Ben Bowa? (As I wrote the book, the circulation of Analogy began to grow, and it still kept alive.) For emotional and realistic reasons, I want Analogy and other magazines to thrive. Science fiction will certainly survive somehow, maybe magazines, but there will certainly be paperbacks and hardcovers, and other forms that are not yet foreseeable. However, without magazines as a center, science fiction would no longer be a unity, and New Wave science fiction would be a symptom. When science fiction breaks down into hundreds of different markets, into thousands of unique and different perspectives, the unanimous views of the future and philosophical stances on which it depends will also collapse.
After that, the future will be uncertain, and the long journey of science fiction—the long journey from Homer to Hamilton, Heinlein, Herbert to Harlan Ellison—has reached a resting place, a time to sit down and think, if not to the end. Tomorrow, this endless journey will begin again...
These are people's outlook for the future in 1975.
This article is excerpted from "The Intersecting World: A History of World Science Fiction Maps", published by Shanghai People's Publishing House Wenjing in August 2020, slightly edited, subject to the original text, some of the pictures come from the Internet, invaded and deleted.
Source: New Book Season
Editor: Duan Pengcheng