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2.5. Topoi of Science Fiction 
Even in medieval times, people tended to strike or to start revolutions and 
demonstrations in order to improve their present state within a society. Since 
people are able to read and write, they also contemplated their situation in a 

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literary-critical manner. Sometimes they did not only complain, but also 
pointed out alternatives. Still nowadays science fiction considers utopian ideas 
as one of its major themes (Feige 6). Furthermore, animal motifs, 
cosmological objectives as well as the adjacency of the world we have and the 
worlds we could and wish to have are common topoi in science fiction 
literature (Kelleghan xix). 
The kinds of stories maybe mostly reckoned to be science fiction involve 
science and invention (Bould 33). The question of the existence of God loses 
its significance, the more the possibilities of science and those of human 
beings to play the Creator proceed (Feige 76). Kelleghan states that it was 
Charles Darwin’s non-fictional work of The Origin of the Species by Means of 
Natural Selection (1859) that gave science fiction its particular drive. Even in 
the twentieth century, authors time and again reconsidered the idea of 
evolution due to their great pleasure in seeing how life and our world could be. 
Questions, such as What if? Or What might we become? constantly arose and 
played a significant role in several works (Kelleghan xx-xxi, Hamilton 5). Since 
then, the dream of creating an artificial human is an always-recurring topos. 
The artificial reproduction has always inspired researchers and scientists with 
the aim of creating an immortal being who is able to resist all earthly 
catastrophes (Feige 76).
Other science fiction topoi are experiments gone wrong, robots that run 
amok, or technology that is out of control. In contrast to werewolves, vampires 
and aliens, those topoi are man-made, i.e. they are not imposed upon us by 
an external force. These sorts of stories are popular as there is a piece of truth 
inherent in them (Hamilton 5). 
However, science fiction stories can also serve a particular purpose and 
thus can easily justify themselves, since Shippey regards them as an ‘early 
warning system’ in order to make society aware of the consequences of 
scientific inventions and experiments (Shippey 9-10, Hamilton 5).
Science fiction inclines to move on the boundary of scientific possibility. 
The expansion of this boundary, being static for hundreds or even thousands 
of years, accelerated in the nineteenth and twentieth century due to the 
industrialization. Consequently, the field of assumptions, alternatives and 
possibilities increased in which science fiction can thrive and thus also its topoi 
varied (
Shippey
4).

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