Subcultural Greece and Rome 1: Science Fiction

Edwardian beginnings:

• Scientific romance, weird fiction: classical allusion in the early modern SF/fantasy authors. (Lucian, True History)
• Key early authors: Arthur Machen, Saki, H. P. Lovecraft.

Galactic Empires:

• Isaac Asimov, Foundation series: the trope of an Empire in decline and fall. (Gibbon)
• Evil Empires: the Star Wars sequence (and countless fat fantasy trilogies).
• Roman counterfactuals: S. P. Somtow, Aquiliad (1983); William Golding, ‘Envoy Extraordinary’ (1956).
• Space Odysseys … and a Space Aeneid.

Blind alleys:

• Future-gladiator potboilers.
• Polemical SF: Howard Fast, ‘Cato the Martian’.

Case study 1: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones (1987).

• Shogun meets Aeschylus; the ‘Kinships’.
• Agamemnon; Orestes; Electra and Iphigeneia.
• Greek contexts, ‘Greek’ ideas: the para’anin and the Oresteian honour code.

—General point: Greece, big ideas, fazing the mundanes.

Case study 2: C. J. Cherryh, Foreigner sequence.

• Six novels to date (two trilogies).
• The world of the atevi.
• Fourteen words for ‘betrayal’, and none for ‘friend’: atevi language.
• Cherryh as SF author and (conservative) classicist.
• ‘The benefits of a classical education’ repackaged?

Some further reading on classics and SF

Donald A. Wollheim (1971), The Universe Makers

For fun:

Diana Wynne Jones (1996), The Tough Guide to Fantasyland