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Frankenstein, Jules Verne's War Of The Worlds

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The Scientific Romance
Science fiction, as it is understood in today’s world, took form in the nineteenth century. Often time’s early science fiction was described as scientific romance because it combined current science with the themes of the Romantic Movement. These stories grew in popularity during this time because they embraced the scientific advancements of the time while still holding onto the idea that nature will always be more powerful than man. This paper will look at three novels from the nineteenth century that can all be categorized as science fiction, including Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. These works can be considered scientific romances, …show more content…

As mentioned earlier, this modern definition of science fiction really begins to form throughout the nineteenth century. While often Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelly, is categorized as a gothic novel, many experts agree that it is the first novel that can truly be called science fiction. Shelly’s novel was the first to accept modern science and recognize that it was an element of everyday life. Earlier novels had shown science and technology as something man should fight against, but Shelly showed it as something that was already incorporated into everyday life and was not going away. She showed many different forms of science and technology throughout the novel. From the beginning, she illustrates the how important science is to Victor Frankenstein by telling the reader “Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate.” This sentence leads the readers into the first section of the book that foreshadows how science will be twisted later in the novel. In this section, Shelly references Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus, three scientists who at one point were famous for their theories in the field of natural philosophy, but had since been replaced with more accurate theories. These three scientists were real and their theories had been discredited by the time this novel was published. By using their name in theories, …show more content…

Wells in 1898, and it was at this time that the term scientific romance became popular. Out of the three novels this paper looks at, this is the novel that most closely resembles science fiction in the twenty-first century. As with the other two novels that have been introduced, science plays a vital role in this story also. Discoveries in science during the nineteenth century, and earlier, were the inspiration of this Wells’ novel. The first chapter mentions the “older worlds of space," which is a reference to an astronomical theory popular when the book was published that stated the outer planets of the solar system were formed before the central planets. This theory sets the stage for the entire book because it gave the Martians a longer period of time to evolve, and develop technology. The Theory of Evolution is not mentioned out right; it is reinforced when the narrator describes the evolution of the Martians. The narrator describes the foreigners as beings that have developed to the point where they are practically just brains. While this idea seems far-fetched, in the nineteenth century the Theory of Evolution was still a new idea and Wells’ played with the unknown that is the future evolution of humans. Similar to Shelly and Verne, Wells used real scientists throughout his novel as a way to make the unlikely scenario of an alien invasion seem more plausible. For example, on page 125 the narrator states that since

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