Science, magic, and mythology each have something to say about the intersections and relationships between religion and popular culture. When science fiction is actually science, versus a superior type of magic? When is mythology mythology, and can mythology embody science fiction?
Science fiction is a genre of popular culture that involves complex actions, both currently possible and not, that are primarily explained by science. In scientific fiction, the scientific explanation for what is going on in the world is paramount; it’s what’s necessary to set it apart. Travel on the U.S.S. Enterprise needs to have Geordie say something about nuclear fusion generators to explain why the ship has stopped, and the crew is suddenly in a bit of a pickle. And it also needs Wes or data to use some reference to astrophysics or subatomic particles in some fissure as a way to solve the problem. What is notable about Star Trek: The Next Generation, as our example, is that science fiction’s explanations don’t always have to make sense. The science doesn’t have to be absolutely accurate to our understandings of contemporary science to exist as science fiction that involves space flight to alternate galaxies; we can’t exactly do that right now, but we can pretend that science will get us there eventually. Its. It is realism that makes science fiction what it is.
A lot of work that is classically defined as science fiction doesn’t exactly seem massively realistic, especially at the time of its original writing. Ray Bradbury, for example, wrote about dystopian futures which seem massively out of possibilities, and even references technique that seems absurd at the time of his writing. We have found a way to replicate some of these items in our contemporary time, but have managed to skip the burning of books. Likewise, the leaps and bounds of technical changes and social changes that are envisioned for the human future are a bit hopeful, to say the least.
Magic as an Answer...
When science is not answerable, it explains through magic. Magic becomes the catch-all for amazing actions and feats that are unexplainable. Where Picard succeeds due to the scientific explanations of Geordie and the thrusters, Gandalf succeeds because he has the wizard powers. The sun, under which there is nothing new, also rises, and what has happened will happen again. Tomorrow and over-morrow.Myths are everywhere. But especially in literature, and you’ll find those eternal champions skulking in the background of even the likeliest story, disguised as people with recognizable names like Adam, Oedipus, Ishtar, or Snow White. It is not the ingenuity of critics that accomplishes this, but simple human nature. We are species, alike not only in the morphology of the flesh but also in that of spirit, and limited in both. As myth makers, science fiction writers have a double mask, the first aspect of which is to make humanly literally, to humanize the formidable landscape of the atomic era.
In a sense, the science of science fiction has been outstripped by another process. In coming to terms with tomorrow's potentialities, the ideas of science fiction and technological progression has been swept up in the atrium of modern-day myth-making.
Hence, today, the rocket and the robot seem natural. They more closely resemble the technological society we live in than the Gothic supernatural. Yet like the supernatural, as said, the strange tomorrows have become broad concepts most of us are faintly familiar with. Codifying the science fiction, this idea has come up from the reading of Gary K.wolfe, professor of humanities at Roosevelt University, who wrote a book called Known and Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction, 1979. In the book, the professor. Wolfe talks about the lasting influence of certain features in science fiction that have become icons, figures of mythification that get replayed in order to tell a story, revealing a complex codification of many of the beliefs and values of an increasingly technological culture.
Ben Bova has stated something in an article called The Role of Science Fiction. Joseph Campbell, professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, has spent a good deal of his life studying humankind’s life, studying humankind’s mythology, and writing books on the subject, such as the four-volume 'The Masks of God and Hero with a Thousand Faces'. He has pointed out that modern man has no real mythology to turn to. The old myths are dead, and no new mythology has arisen to take their place. And a man needs mythology, Campbell insists, to give a sort of emotional meaning and stability to the world in which he lives. Myths are a sort of codification on an emotional level of man’s attitudes towards life, death, and the whole vast and sometimes frightening universe.
Goddess Sita Mutates Indian Mythology into Science Fiction
The incident of Sita’s Agni pareeksha finds another interpretation in Swapna Kishore’s regressions. However, this time, Sita happens to be a human female, though one with a difference; she can travel in time. Set in the near future. Regression paints a gender centred political conflict that has splintered India into many parts.
The largest and most prosperous of these is Nava Bharata, a patriarchal entity where women are, above all, supposed to serve their male masters. Scientists and industrialists, sick of gender suppression and thrilled that science could render men redundant. With rapid advances in genetic cloning and time travel, both these political entities are locked in perpetual temporal combat over exploiting gender trends in gender ratios in the past. They sent futurists who are time-travelling agents to the past to change the future as per the will of the political masters, whether patriarchal or matriarchal.
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