In honor of the forthcoming Hugo awards, can you imagine a situation in which speculative fiction, as a genre, takes off in the Hellenistic and/or Roman age?
The obvious objection is "they didn't have science," but I'm not sure the scientific method, as such, is a necessary precursor to science fiction in the broad sense. An idea of material progress could be enough to inspire stories of a future that is different from the present, in which marvelous new inventions exist and new frontiers are explored. Whether the Hellenistic and Roman worlds had the idea of material progress is debatable, but they at least had the fact of it: inventions with practical impact, at least for the upper class (e.g., structural concrete, the rediscovery of the hypocaust, commercial farming of oysters); expanding horizons and knowledge of the world; increasing wealth; tourism; technical and architectural progress. And they also had, for lack of a better word, science fantasy, such as the satire by Lucian (I think) in which people journeyed to the moon in a chariot drawn by swans.
So, let's say a first-century Alexandrian tinkerer writes an early novel entitled "2000 AUC, or the New Archimedes" (yeah, it wouldn't be called that) detailing all the wondrous inventions that exist in the future and even making a stab, albeit a necessarily parochial and short-sighted one, at how they might change society. What would it take for such a work to kick off a genre? (Also, given that a connection between material progress and moral decline was common in Roman literature, would any of these works involve a future of even more material progress and moral decline, and would we face a genre of Latin young-adult dystopias?)
The obvious objection is "they didn't have science," but I'm not sure the scientific method, as such, is a necessary precursor to science fiction in the broad sense. An idea of material progress could be enough to inspire stories of a future that is different from the present, in which marvelous new inventions exist and new frontiers are explored. Whether the Hellenistic and Roman worlds had the idea of material progress is debatable, but they at least had the fact of it: inventions with practical impact, at least for the upper class (e.g., structural concrete, the rediscovery of the hypocaust, commercial farming of oysters); expanding horizons and knowledge of the world; increasing wealth; tourism; technical and architectural progress. And they also had, for lack of a better word, science fantasy, such as the satire by Lucian (I think) in which people journeyed to the moon in a chariot drawn by swans.
So, let's say a first-century Alexandrian tinkerer writes an early novel entitled "2000 AUC, or the New Archimedes" (yeah, it wouldn't be called that) detailing all the wondrous inventions that exist in the future and even making a stab, albeit a necessarily parochial and short-sighted one, at how they might change society. What would it take for such a work to kick off a genre? (Also, given that a connection between material progress and moral decline was common in Roman literature, would any of these works involve a future of even more material progress and moral decline, and would we face a genre of Latin young-adult dystopias?)
