32804 science and fiction: amazing myDistories aso

Another longstanding idea is that the "science" in science fiction is key: SF can only begin, many historians of the genre proclaim, following the birth of modern science. Alongside histories of SF, histories of science have long avoided the medieval (over a thousand years in which, presumably, nothing happened). Yet the Middle Ages was no dark, static, ignorant time of magic and superstition, nor was it an aberration in the neat progression from enlightened ancients to our modern age. It was actually a time of enormous advances in science and technology. The compass and gunpowder were developed and improved upon, and spectacles, the mechanical clock and blast furnace were invented. The period also laid the foundations for modern science through founding universities and advanced the scientific learning of the classical work, & last but not least helped focus natural philosophy on the physics of creation.
The medieval science of "computus", for instance, was a complex measuring of time and space. Scholars have started to reveal the con-
vergence of science, technology and the imagination of medieval literary culture, demonstrating that this era could be characterised by sheer inventiveness and a preoccupation with novelty and discovery. Take the medieval romances that feature Alexander the Great soaring heavenwards in a flying machine and exploring the depths of the ocean in his proto-submarine. Or that of the famous medieval traveller, Sir John Mandeville, who tells of marvellous, automated golden birds that beat their wings at the Great Chan. Like those of more modern science fictions, medieval writers tempered this sense of wonder with scepticism and rational inquiry. Geoffrey Chaucer describes the procedures and instruments of alchemy (an early form of chemistry) in such precise terms that it is tempting to think that the author must have had some experience of the practice. Yet his Canon's Yeoman's Tale also displays a lively distrust of fraudulent al-chemists, sending up their pseudo-science while imagining and dramatising it's harmful effects in the world. Modern science fiction has dreamt up many worlds based on the Middle Ages, using it as a place to be revisited, as a space beyond earth, nor always confined to "back then". William M Miller's immensely detailed medieval future in A Canticle of Leibowitz (1959), for instance, dwells on the way the past consistently reemerges in the fragments, materials & conflicts of a distant future. Connie Willis's Doomsday Book (1992), meanwhile, follows a time-travelling researcher of the near-future back to a medieval Oxford in the grip of the Black Death. Although "medieval science fiction" may sound like an impossible fantasy, it's a concept that càn encourage us to ask new questions about an often-overlooked period of literary & scientific history! Who knows? The many wonders, cosmologies & technologies of the Middle Ages may have an important part to play in a future yet to come. Mor's main heroes now are still among others of course a Yesj & an Algernon, The Magus, The Asiatics, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies and so on .......