Age of reason summary

FICTION 1945 TO THE PRESENT

The first atomic bomb dropped on august 6, 1945, at 8:15 A.M. in the Japanese city of Hiroshima symbolizes the last half of the twentieth century, and its famous mushrooms cloud represents the proliferation of science and technology. After that bomb, science and technology have taken an important role in people’s life, due to they have increased our life spansand fed and housed us better. However, it is important to take into account that science and technology have also standardized and “assembly-lined” our lives. Some people even predict that our new technologies threaten to deliver the planet itself back to lower organisms.

Although many Americans disapproved of the use of the atomic bomb to end World War II, most Americans agreed withthe purpose of the war itself. They were fighting against tyranny, against regimes that would destroy the American way of life. Twenty years later United States takes part of another war -Vietnam war- that divided the nation. Some people were against the purpose of this war, and began to protest. It was a rebellion or just a sense of increasing precariousness of existence, that was the “sixtiesgenerations”. Some of these young people used drugs to escape from the real world’s uncertainties. Others began to challenge the accepted ideas of American society.

The new voices in fiction

Talking about the recent literature we may say that it was characterize by a lack of perspective. To some writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern and others; the madness of theworld was an inescapable condition of modern life, and the only appropriate response was hard-edged laughter at life’s tragic ironies. That is why; it is used the term “Black Humor”. After the war, Catch-22 was a novel written by Heller in which madness and war are inextricably mixed, not because madness is a result of war but because war is a result of madness.

The search for transcendenceAmerican fiction has often dealt with larger questions, such us the nature of good and evil and the search for transcendent spiritual values in the natural world.

Fiction

Fiction comes from Latin “Fictum” which means “created”. It is any form of narrative that is factual, but unreal and invented by its author (s). In other words, Fiction is anything that is no true. For example, astory may be fact or fiction; if it is fiction it is a story that the author has made up and cannot rely on factual truth. Also, Fiction can be found in books, magazines, articles, stories, documentaries, movies, theatrical and musical work. On the contrary, non-fiction deals with factual events for example, biographies and histories.

Science Fiction

Science fiction involves a burstof imagination into reality using science as an ally for the fantasy, leading the transformation of a reference both credible and something that could be supposed,

The definition assumes that there is a relation between the empirical (real world) and transcendentalism (supernatural), in which the science fiction literature is related to the real world and the terror and fantasy to thesupernatural. However, there are known examples of science fiction novels of terror, such as Frankenstein. And novels that involved unique elements typical of the genre of science fiction, spaceships and robots, with mystical and magical elements as the most appropriate of the fantasy genre. Some critics use terms like science fantasy to indicate the gender mix of those novels.

The visualstyle of the genre of science fiction can be characterized by an impact shock that can surprise the public between strangers and family pictures or settings. This confrontation takes place when the images become familiarly strange. Finally, it may be the case where the strange and familiar images are juxtaposed, as in The Deadly Mantis when a giant praying mantis scales the Washington Monument....