Past and future
When a storyteller begins his story we believe that the things he deals with are finished and thus lie back in time at least some way. Particularly when the plot is set in the future, it is generally told by the storyteller as if he is looking back to show a clear view of what has happened.
 |
| The prophet Solomon Eagle, from A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe vivid, fictitious 18th-century tale of London's 1665 plague. |
However, we have had an interest in the past for its own sake. History's outstanding events and personalities catch our eye. We are also curious about the aspects of everyday life, culture, clothing, voice, feeling, and action in different times and places than ours. The storyteller can use the characteristics of the true history as the setting for an imagined story within the historical novel. Walter Scott was one of the first novelists to re-create the past as it was in fact. By doing so he was largely responsible for the sense of credibility that historical novels now suspect. And by painting portraits of men set against a detailed picture of the days they were what is supposed to have lived in, Scott later showed novelists-Balzac in particular-how to portray their own time culture.
The historian then reconstructs another age's life and atmosphere and clothing the facts with his own imagination. Of course, he can use both real and invented historical characters. The Roman Emperor Nero appears in Quo Vadis, in the case of Richard I of England, in Scott's Ivanhoe (1820), and Louis XI of France in Notre Dame de Paris (1831), in Victor Hugo (1802-85)? (1896), Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) of the Polish novelist; Charles VIII of France, Machiavelli, and Savonarola (1863) of George Eliot, all appear at Romola. Historical books such as The Man on the Donkey (1952) by H continue to be of interest. F. M. Prescott (born 1896), in which the English writer explains the impact of Henry VIII's break with the Papacy on England in the 16th century; and The Cornerstone (1954), in the 13th century France set during the Crusades by the French author Zoë Oldenbourg (born 1915-1916). In the US, the Civil War is also the backdrop of novelists like Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) who had international success with her "Gone with the Wind" (1936).
 |
| David Low caricatures H.G Wells juggling the world like a medicine ball- a way of emphasizing his habit of reshaping society in his prophetic novels. |
The future as a setting adds a certain kind of creativity to the storyteller. He is free to create circumstances and conditions well beyond the existing experience of humanity. However, he must make them as believable as all storytellers. The "Man and Fahrenheit 4511 Illustrated," by the American writer Ray Bradbury (born 1920), has the same reach as many of the so-called "science-fiction stories" which are beautifully written in the future, as interplanetary voyages have become a completed reality. H.G.Wells(1866-1946) from England, for example, in The Shape of Things to Come and War in the Air, an aerial warfare fore-saw war, tanks, and a nuclear bomb.
 |
| The flying machine described by French writer Jules Verne in Master of the World(1904) |
Often the author uses the future as a suitable framework for social and political criticism; many of the novels set in the future are actually about the present in that way. William Morris (1834-96), of England, set up News from Nowhere in 2003. It is the story of an ideal state and a sort of socialism propaganda. Morris portrays a world from which law and politics have almost vanished, and where suffering, grief, passion, and hate are all in harmony with nature. Brave New World, by the English writer and critic Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), satirized capitalist civilization by showing it evolved so much along industrial lines that it had eliminated the need for human effort and moral values. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), written by the English writer George Orwell (1903-50), is as much a message against the prospect of people being corrupted by the unscrupulous use of the mass media as it is about how oppressive and soulless the totalitarian state will become when formed to its absolute limit.
 |
| A rocket ship featured in a science-fiction story by modern American writer Ray Bradbury. Most science-fiction writers today draw ideas from current research in nuclear physic and astronautics. |
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon