Shorter oxford english dictionary satire

) Aside from visiting aliens and future dystopias there are many other strategies for producing such shifts of perspective. (The same strategy is now common in sf television comedy e.g., My Favorite Martian, Mork & Mindy and ALF. , coll 1752 trans anon 1753), Grant Allen a man from the future in The British Barbarians ( 1895), Lester Lurgan a visiting Martian in A Message From Mars ( 1912) and Eden Phillpotts a visiting alien lizard in Saurus ( 1938). Jonathan Swift used intelligent horses in Gulliver's Travels ( 17), Voltaire a visiting giant alien from Sirius in Micromegas (in Le MicromГ©gas de Mr. Indeed, there is a sense in which all satire depends upon just such reversals of perspective, which sf is peculiarly well fitted to supply satire forces us to look at familiar aspects of our lives with a fresh vision, so that all their absurdity or horror is, so to speak, framed, as in a picture. The latter two contain many pungent comments on human society by insect intelligences, both being examples of one of the most popular satiric strategies in sf: the use of an alien perspective to allow us to see our own institutions in a fresh light. It would be impossible to list the innumerable sf satires by less-known writers, but we can pick out Archibald Marshall's Upsidonia ( 1915), Owen Johnson's The Coming of the Amazons ( 1931), Frederick Philip Grove's Consider Her Ways ( 1947) and Stefan Themerson's Professor Minaa's Lecture ( 1953). Satire need not be good-humoured (indeed, that brand of satire said to be descended from Juvenal is commonly biting), and both these works by Wells are notably savage, especially The War of the Worlds in its portrait of a demoralized and cowardly population.ДЄmong the mainstream writers of the twentieth century who have written important sf satires are Anthony Burgess, Karel ДЊapek, Anatole France, Aldous Huxley, AndrГ© Maurois, George Orwell, Gore Vidal and Evelyn Waugh. Wells's The Time Machine ( 1895), for example, focuses in large part on the relationship of the working classes and the leisured classes, and The War of the Worlds (April-December 1897 Pearson's 1898) can be read as an ironic tale in which the UK, the great, technologically advanced colonizing power of the day, is herself subjected to colonization by a technological superior. Samuel Butler and Mark Twain were supreme among the prominent satirists of the nineteenth century who used sf imagery to make their points even when we turn to the work of writers considered more central to the development of modern sf, such as Jules Verne and H G Wells, we find the satirical element prominent. It is an easy argument to support, at least in terms of the number of texts that can be cited as evidence. In his critical study New Maps of Hell ( 1960), Kingsley Amis argued that dystopian satire rather than technological extrapolation is central to sf (perhaps because his own fiction is largely satirical). Thus most sf bears at least a family resemblance to satire. It is almost impossible to write a work of fiction set in another world вЂ“ be it some alien place or our own world in another time вЂ“ which does not make some sort of statement about the writer's own real world. The wonderful exaggerations of this story poke fun at travellers' tales generally, though its zestful telling suggests a certain sympathy with the inquisitive mind which dotes on such imaginings. The satire may also take the form of debunking other kinds of literature, as in The True History (second century CE) by Lucian. Many critics believe that Sir Thomas More intended the reader to take some aspects of Utopia ( 1516 in Latin trans 1551) with a grain of salt. Therefore, by extension, satire is ancestral to the Dystopia, and even the Utopia often contains satirical elements. Proto sf is seldom interested in imagining the societies of other worlds or future times for their own sake most proto sf of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (by, for example, Cyrano de Bergerac, Daniel Defoe, Francis Godwin, Eliza Haywood, Robert Paltock, Restif de la Bretonne and Jonathan Swift) created imaginary settings, commonly on Islands or on the Moon, as a kind of convenient blank slate upon which various societies satirizing the writer's own could be inscribed вЂ“ commonly a travesty of some particular aspect of it (still a common strategy in sf by Mainstream Writers and in Genre SF as well).

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines satire as literary work 'in which prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule'. From the earliest days of Proto SF, satire was its prevailing mode, and this inheritance was evident even after sf proper began in the nineteenth century.

Shorter oxford english dictionary satire