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Concept
Scientific romance
Summary
Scientific romance is an archaic, mainly British term for the genre of fiction now commonly known as science fiction. The term originated in the 1850s to describe both fiction and elements of scientific writing, but it has since come to refer to the science fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily that of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. In recent years the term has come to be applied to science fiction written in a deliberately anachronistic style as a homage to or pastiche of the original scientific romances.
The earliest use of the term "scientific romance" is thought to have been in 1845, when critics applied it to Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a speculative natural history published in 1844. It was used again in 1851 by the Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal and Literary Review in reference to Thoman Hunt's Panthea, or the Spirit of Nature. In 1859 the Southern Literary Messenger referred to Balzac's Ursule Mirouët as "a scientific romance of mesmerism". In addition, the term was sometimes used to dismiss a scientific principle considered by the writer to be fanciful, as in The Principles of Metaphysical and Ethical Science (1855), which stated that "Milton's conception of inorganic matter left to itself, without an indwelling soul, is not merely more poetical, but more philosophical and just, than the scientific romance, now generally repudiated by all rational inquirers, which represents it as necessarily imbued with the seminal principles of organization and life, and waking up by its own force from eternal quietude to eternal motion." Then, in 1884, Charles Howard Hinton published a series of scientific and philosophical essays under the title Scientific Romances.
"Scientific romance" is now commonly used to refer to science fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as in the anthologies Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912–1920 and Scientific Romance in Britain: 1890–1950.
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