iguanamouth:

gangler:

joisbishmyoga:

Imagine telepathic aliens.  Imagine aliens who have no concept of language, who maybe didn’t figure out writing or math until they were figuring out electronics, who still struggle with the entire idea of symbolic thinking, and then they find us.  And they’re going “I can see the technology and cities, and it all looks made for and by these bipeds, but where is the sapience and WHAT IS ALL THIS EFFING HOOTY MOUTH NOISE?!” until someone wonders if the hooty mouth noise has meaning in it.

Imagine aliens going “OMG they’re communicating by noise” and “OMG they’re using code naturally” and “OMG they’re using open-ended productive recursive code how is that POSSIBLE” and “OMG writing” and “OMG they have THOUSANDS of codes”, and it’s all paraoxysms of academic delight and then someone discovers metaphor, and someone discovers encryption, and someone discovers slang and l33t and txting and emoji, and this entire telepathic species has its minds completely blown and the one who went “what if the hooty noise has meaning” wins the alien Nobel.

That would be so weird for them to study because the codes keep stretching inward and outward like some sort of infinite fractal.

Like there’s language and then there’s dialect and then there’s sub-dialect and then there’s local slang and then there’s little things that pop up in the sub-cultures of a locality like slang that’s become commonplace in a specific highschool and then there’s sub-cultures within those sub-cultures with their own unique jargon and then there’s even smaller groups of friend with their own invented terminology.

But every layer of that code is constantly changing. So if you create a cipher for one culture today it might start running into problems yesterday or tomorrow.

And it’s all context sensitive too. The same hooty noise can carry dramatically different meaning depending on whether it’s said to a friend or an employer, but the nature of these relationships wouldn’t necessarily be immediately apparent to the aliens.

Then there’s body language, tone of voice, facial expressions etc that can all be used to modify the meaning of a particular hooty noise. Sarcasm alone would throw them through a loop. Can you imagine? You’re three years into creating your cipher when it becomes apparent that all along there’s been a particular inflection that modifies the meaning of nearly every hooty noise to its approximate opposite? You’d pretty much have to start over from scratch. All your previous data is fucking useless since it didn’t check for sarcasm.

teashoesandhair:

Quick history lesson! No.

(Edit: For some reason, I misread your question as ‘science fiction novel’ rather than ‘author’, but all the points are still valid – I just focused on the works themselves rather than the authors. I am also not a science fiction expert – I’ve just argued this case an irritating number of times)

Firstly, there’s no definitive ‘first science fiction novel’. This is primarily because it’s kind of hard to track the evolution of a genre right back to its original work; the original work itself must have been influenced by genre tropes. You could argue that the first true original genre work was the first to encompass all of the genre tropes that we recognise today as being typical of science fiction, but then that would mean that every work of science fiction would need to conform to all these tropes in order to fit the definition, which they obviously don’t.

Let’s also just get the definition of ‘science fiction’ out of the way. From dictionary.com:

Some people argue that there are incredibly early works which could be defined as science fiction, most notably The Treatise of Kamil on the Prophet’s Biography (Al-Risalah al-Kamiliyyah fil Siera al-Nabawiyyah in Arabic) by Ibn al-Nafis in ~1270CE. In the final two chapters of this Arabic work the author predicts a possible end of the world scenario based upon the contemporary knowledge of the world, and the rest of the narrative is about a protagonist being shown that the human mind can comprehend truths about the universe, such as the existence of a god (it’s an Islamic work) through logic and reason. This clearly shows the speculative element often present in science fiction, and the plot is hinged upon the exploration of ideas which were, at the time, scientific and theological truths. There are even arguments that works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh (~2100BC) could be defined as science fiction, given that they include tropes such as the discovery of new worlds and rationalisation of truth.

Other arguments counter that true science fiction can only really exist when true science does; that without the knowledge of things such as biology, astronomy and physics, the science part of science fiction is absent, and you just have fiction. This argument means that the bulk of science fiction work as defined this way was produced after the Age of Reason, in which a vast number of scientific discoveries and theories were made (or re-made, depending on the extent to which it can be argued that this is a whitewashed version of historical discovery), such as heliocentrism, gravity, and new anatomical knowledge, and enabled authors to combine fact and fiction in ways that had never been possible before. I do think it’s important to reiterate that this particular definition of ‘when science was finally done properly’ is a bit of a Westernised idea, and it’s a tricky one to wrangle with. It’s yet another reason why we can’t really pin down the first example of the genre – in order to define science fiction, we kind of have to define science, and it’s not really inaccurate to say that a lot of science, through the lens of history, has traditionally been rewritten, and a lot of discovery dates have been fudged.

That aside, the first novel we have that fits this second and more nuanced definition – assuming, however erroneously, that the Age of Reason is a factor – was written in England in 1666. The Blazing World, completed a year before the birth of Jonathan Swift and written in a precursor to his popularised satirical tone, is a work of pseudo-utopian fiction about a world that can only be reached through the North Pole, where even the stars in the sky are different. The unnamed protagonist enters this new world, inhabited by strange animal men, and is immediately made ruler. They begin to restructure the society so that it is free of unjust social hierarchies, including sexism, and war, and begin a scientific research programme. The protagonist then calls for the citizens to debate a number of scientific and religious questions, trying to resolve Biblical accounts with scientific logic. At the end of the narrative, the protagonist is warned by the author (yes, it’s meta) that Earth is under attack, and the protagonist takes their new subjects back to their own world and defeats an the invasion. Well. Her homeland, as the protagonist is female.

Oh, and the author was named Margaret Cavendish.

There are of course people who argue that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is the first true work of science fiction – and it’s true that it’s certainly the work that began to narrow down the genre into a more recognisable form – it wasn’t exactly the first of its kind. It was, however, a precursor to Asimov in just about every way. The difference is that Asimov’s work was produced during a time when the phrase ‘science fiction’ first came into parlance, before which point the term ‘science romance’ was used (’romance’ meaning something fanciful, e.g. fiction, rather than bodice ripping). However, if you’re going to argue that only works that were actually called ‘science fiction’ when they were written are actually science fiction, then you’re discounting War of the Worlds (1898), and I don’t think anyone can really argue that that particular work isn’t science fiction. Even Poe wrote a story in 1850 named The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal, in which the protagonist constructs a hot air balloon to transport him to the moon, and all the factors involved – such as the distance between the Earth and the moon – are explained. That’s science fiction.

Heck, not even Asimov himself claimed to have invented science fiction. He was part of a group of science fiction fans, which became known as The Futurians, in the mid ‘30s. He visited the headquarters of a magazine which was literally titled Astounding Science-Fiction before completing his first science fiction story. To say that Asimov invented science fiction is just, y’know, wrong. He may have further refined the genre, and he was certainly a pioneer of hard science fiction, but he didn’t invent the genre anew. I think it’s kind of simultaneously hilarious and devastating that people are still arguing that he did, and I think we all know why (hint: the alternatives mean that it isn’t a genre shaped exclusively by white dudes).

Sources:

• Al-Risalah al-Kamiliyyah fil Siera al-Nabawiyyah – Ibn Al-Nafis

• The Blazing World – Margaret Cavendish
• Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

• The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal – Edgar Allan Poe

• War of the Worlds – HG Wells

• Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference – Carol A. Kolmerten

• Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction – Lyman Tower Sargent (it’s a good starting point! The science fiction VSI is way too US-centric to be of any use)

• The History of Science Fiction – Adam Roberts