Science Fiction Drama in the Age of Scientific Romance 101

Rodríguez, Mariano Martín. "Science Fiction Drama in the Age of Scientific Romance 101." SFRA Review #310 (Fall 2014): pp. 36-40.[1]

In the SFRA Review "101" series of short essays introducing a topic to scholars of SF but not necessarily that subbranch of SF scholarship.

Period covered: 1870s-1940s, "arguably the Golden Age of European science fiction" (p. 36). Films also mentioned and placed into context (see note 2, p. 36) and "some science fiction screenplays by famous writers which were not filmed, but published." One of note: La Révolte des machines (The Revolt of the Machines 1921) by Romain Rolland.

Begins with an elegant discussion of why it "it might have seemed quite difficult" to use stage production (as opposed to fiction or film) for SF — we will note that it is difficult to stage SF — and allows "the difficulty of making plausible far future action that has 'concreteness' on the stage" (p. 37). Still, there have been successful plays set in the far future and a number of SF plays beyond such relatively well-known ones such as R. U. R. (the source of the word "robot"), including the following, of interest for the theme of this wiki:

• "Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne’s Wings over Europe (1928). This is a highly political drama in which a young scientist used his mastering of the atomic forces to convince a reluctant British government to broker universal peace or else suffer his explosive retaliation." For which cf. and contrast "Wings Over the World" in H. G. Wells, William Cameron Menzies, and Alexander Korda's film of THINGS TO COME (1936) and, according to Rodríguez's essay, "Vladimir Nabokov’s play Izobretenie Val’sa [The Waltz Invention] (1938)," that has "a plot quite similar to the one developed in Wings over Europe, albeit with a more sarcastic tone [...]" (pp. 38-39). 

• The Anguish of the Machines by Ruggero Vasari, which see at link.

RDE, finishing, 2Aug21