(It is probably more accurate to suppose that the idea was popularized by an H G Wells story of the same year, "The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes", though Rosny's story is superior as sf.) A E van Vogt's melodramatic Siege of the Unseen (October-November 1946 Astounding as "The Chronicler" 1959 vt as title story in The Three Eyes of Evil coll 1973) has a hero with a third eye which allows him to perceive and then travel into another dimension. Many sf writers have followed Rosny's lead in imagining modes of perception which allow the direct sensing of Parallel Worlds or other dimensions, often through ESP (see also Psi Powers). David Lindsay developed a similar idea in A Voyage to Arcturus ( 1920), in which the protagonist, mysteriously transported to another planet, keeps forming and then losing new organs of perception whose functions run from seeing additional colours to sensing emotions to intensifying the will. J-H Rosny aîné's Un autre monde (1895 Revue Parisienne #5 exp as coll 1898 trans as "Another World" in A Century of Science Fiction, anth 1962, ed Damon Knight) tells of a Mutant with a very fast metabolism who can see colours beyond violet (and new lifeforms) invisible to ordinary humans. Edwin A Abbott's Flatland ( 1884) is an exercise in how beings from a one- or two-dimensional universe would perceive reality, and about how we would perceive a fourth Dimension. R H Horne's The Poor Artist ( 1871), which is partly devoted to the way the world would appear as perceived through the senses of animals, was the first book ever to be described as "science fiction" (by his contemporary William Wilson). Unusual modes of perception appear early in sf. A cognate use of the word, not emphasized in this encyclopedia, can be found in E E Smith's Lensmen series, where it is described as a Weapon useful in the gaining of tactile knowledge of the inside of enemy fortresses, and so forth. The groups are not mutually exclusive, and several stories fall into more than one category. (Many perception stories are discussed, from a different perspective, under Psychology.) For convenience, we can divide sf perception stories into six groups: stories about unusual modes of perception stories about appearance and reality stories about perception altered through Drugs stories about perception altered through Hypnosis (which see) and supposedly more effective Psi-Power equivalents stories about Synaesthesia stories about altered perception of time.
Perception is and always has been a principal theme of sf it is the philosophical linchpin of many stories and has played a subsidiary role in hundreds more. Philosophers are deeply divided as to whether our perceptions of the outside world correspond to an actual reality, or whether they are merely hypotheses, intellectual constructs, which may give us an unreliable or partial picture of external reality, or whether, indeed, outside reality is itself a mental construct. The ways in which we become aware of and receive information about the outside world, mainly through the senses, are together called perception.
0 kommentar(er)
