zorka wrote:
"I do think the story needs to have a reasonably rational use of science to explain some of the actions of the plot or characters. This would rule out some of the earliest so-called science fiction such as Murtagh McDermot's 'A Trip to the Moon' which involves a character thrust into space circling the earth."
Ah, but which science are we talking about? Most of the arguments I've heard in favor of the nineteenth century being the start of SF have assumed that
modern science must form the basis of science fiction. If we accept pre-modern science as the basis, science fiction clearly goes much further back. I'm willing to compromise and call the earlier stuff proto science fiction.
So I agree with Neil Barron (as quoted by K. Riehl) when he says that "so long as something is thought to be scientific at the time the story is written, it should not be discarded subsequently as mere fantasy." However, I disagree with his dating of the first proto-SF. In the West, science first developed with the Ancient Greeks (though one could make the case that it was embryonic in earlier cultures). I think that anything written from Pythagoras onwards is fair game as proto-SF.
One of these days I'll get around to finishing an essay in which I trace the development of a proto-SF passage over two millennia. It started with Plato describing the solar system at the end of the
Republic, in a passage about a man's journey through the afterlife. Plato was sort of interested in science, but much more interested in using the natural world as a way to talk about ethics. So what you get in the Republic is the same sort of weird quasi-SF passage that turned up in children's books when I was growing up - a mixture of fantasy and scientific observation.
This passage was adapted by Cicero in
De Republica, in his version of a man going into the solar system in his afterlife. Again, the focus was on ethics, but Cicero tried to make his depiction of the solar system scientifically accurate.
Skipping over a late classical reference, we find Dante using this exact same image in
The Divine Comedy, a trilogy which, despite being about the afterlife (you notice the trend here), tried to be as scientifically accurate as possible; there are several passages in
The Divine Comedy that you really have to be grounded in the history of science to understand.
Skipping again over the plagiarism - *cough, cough*, I mean, respectful imitation of this passage by two Dante fans (Boccaccio and Chaucer) we come to the
Somnium, which is considered by some to be the first work of proto-SF, since it was written by a scientist, Johannes Kepler. But if you look at his introduction, all that Kepler has done is use the earlier "man visiting the solar system" image that was used by so many earlier authors. In fact - the real giveaway - the novel begins with the protagonist reading the portion of
De Republica that contained the solar system journey:
Somnium Scipium.
*Ahem*. I seem to have written that essay.