It has been around since humans began to speak. The earliest forms of speculative fiction were likely mythological tales told around the campfire. Speculative fiction deals with the "What if?" scenarios imagined by dreamers and thinkers worldwide. Journeys to other worlds through the vast reaches of distant space; magical quests to free worlds enslaved by terrible beings; malevolent supernatural powers seeking to increase their spheres of influence across multiple dimensions and times; all of these fall into the realm of speculative fiction.
Speculative fiction as a category ranges from ancient works to cutting edge, paradigm-changing, and neotraditional works of the 21st century. It can be recognized in works whose authors' intentions or the social contexts of the versions of stories they portrayed is now known. For example, Ancient Greekdramatists such as Euripides, whose play Medea (play) seemed to have offended Athenian audiences when he fictionally speculated that shamaness Medea killed her own children instead of their being killed by other Corinthians after her departure. The play Hippolytus, narratively introduced by Aphrodite, is suspected to have displeased contemporary audiences of the day because it portrayed Phaedra as too lusty.
William Denby Hanna (July 14, 1910 – March 22, 2001) was an American animator, voice actor, and occasional musician who is best known for co-creating Tom and Jerry and providing the vocal effects for the series' title characters. Alongside Joseph Barbera, he also founded the animation studio and production company Hanna-Barbera.
The Time Traveler's Wife is the debut novel by American author Audrey Niffenegger, published in 2003. It is a love story about Henry, a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably, and about Clare, his wife, an artist who has to cope with his frequent absences. Niffenegger, who was frustrated with love when she began the novel, wrote the story as a metaphor for her failed relationships. The tale's central relationship came to Niffenegger suddenly and subsequently supplied the novel's title. The novel has been classified as both science fiction and romance.
The book was published by MacAdam/Cage, a small publishing firm located in San Francisco, California. The book became a bestseller after an endorsement from author and family friend Scott Turow on NBC's Today. As of March 2009, the novel had sold nearly 2.5 million copies in the United States and the United Kingdom. Many reviewers were impressed with Niffenegger's unique perspective on time travel. Some praised her characterization of the couple, applauding their emotional depth; while others criticized her writing style as melodramatic and the plot as emotionally trite. The novel won the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize and a British Book Award. (Full article...)
Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.
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—Brian Aldiss (b.1925), Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (1973).
Credit: W.J. Morgan & Co. (lithography); Adam Cuerden (restoration)
A poster from an 1884 American production of William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth, a tale of regicide and its aftermath. Starting anti-clockwise from top-left, we see Macbeth and Banquo meet the witches, Macbeth just after the murder of King Duncan, Banquo's ghost, and Macbeth dueling with Macduff. Over the centuries, the play has attracted some of the greatest actors in the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The play has been adapted to film, television, opera, novels, comic books, and other media. Shakespeare borrowed the story from several tales in Holinshed's Chronicles, a popular history of the British Isles, although the story itself bears no relation to the actual history of Macbeth of Scotland. (POTD)
... that some audience members fainted while others fled the 350-seat Grand Ducal Theatre in Stuttgart at the first appearance of the Furies in Jean-Georges Noverre's (pictured) 1763 balletJason et Médée?
There are several main characters in Carnivàle, an American television serial drama set in the United States Depression-era Dust Bowl between 1934 and 1935. It aired on HBO from 2003 to 2005. It follows the disparate storylines of an ensemble of characters, with the two central characters of Ben Hawkins, a young man working in a traveling carnival; and Brother Justin Crowe, a Californian preacher.
Carnivàle has a large cast, with eighteen regular actors over its two-season run. Most of them are introduced in Ben's storyline: Samson, a little person co-running the carnival with management; Jonesy, Samson's right-hand man with a crippling knee injury; Apollonia and Sofie, two fortunetellers working a mother-daughter act; Lodz, a blind mentalist, and his lover, Lila the Bearded Lady; the Dreifuss family striptease act; the snake charmer Ruthie and her son Gabriel, a strongman; and many other sideshow performers. The supporting characters of Brother Justin's storyline are his sister Iris, his mentor Reverend Norman Balthus, the radio show host Tommy Dolan, and the convict Varlyn Stroud. Several characters appear in mysterious dreams and visions connecting the slowly converging storylines. (Full article...)
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