Irish Science Fiction
Jack Fennell · Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2014
This chapter comprises a wide-ranging survey of the often overlooked tradition of Irish science fiction. It begins by considering two proto-science fiction novels, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733), after which consideration is given to prominent themes and recurring motifs, such as the mixture of science and spiritualism and the tension between tradition and modernity, in texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, written in both the English and Irish languages. The final part of the chapter examines texts from the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. Here, the emergence of subgenres such as Irish cyberpunk and tropes such as genetic engineering is discussed, as is the influence of Anglo-American science fiction, particularly that of the television and film variety, on contemporary Irish science fiction novelists.