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Adventure fiction is a genre of fiction in which an adventure, an exciting undertaking involving risk and physical danger, forms the main storyline.
Industry:Literature
The alien invasion is a common theme in science fiction stories and film, in which extraterrestrials invade Earth either to exterminate and supplant human life, enslave it under a colonial system, harvest humans for food, steal the planet's resources, or destroy the planet altogether.
The invasion scenario has been used as an allegory for a protest against military hegemony and the societal ills of the time. H.
G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds exploits invasion panics that were common when science fiction was first emerging as a genre.
Prospects of invasion tended to vary with the state of current affairs, and current perceptions of threat. Alien invasion was a common metaphor in United States science fiction during the Cold War, illustrating the fears of foreign (e.g. Soviet Union) occupation and nuclear devastation of the American people. Examples of these stories include The Liberation of Earth by William Tenn and The Body Snatchers.
In the invasion trope, fictional aliens contacting Earth tend to either observe (sometimes using experiments) or invade, rather than help the population of Earth acquire the capacity to participate in interplanetary affairs. There have been a few exceptions, such as the alien-initiated first contact that begins the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the Vulcan-initiated first contact that concludes the 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact (although after a failed invasion by the Borg in the rest of the film). In both cases, aliens decide to visit Earth only after noticing that its inhabitants have reached a threshold level of technology: nuclear weapons combined with space travel in the first case, and faster-than-light travel using warp drive technology in the second.
Technically, a human invasion of an alien species is also an alien invasion, as from the viewpoint of the aliens, humans are the aliens. Such stories are much rarer than aliens attacking humans stories. Examples include the 1989 video game Phantasy Star II, the 2007 film Battle for Terra, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, the Imperium of Man in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Invaders from Earth by Robert Silverberg, the 2009 movies Planet 51 and Avatar and the 2011 movie Mars Needs Moms.
As well as being a sub-genre of science fiction, these kinds of books can be considered a sub-genre of Invasion literature, which also includes fictional depictions of humans invaded by other humans (for example, a fictional invasion of England by a hostile France strongly influenced Wells' depiction of a Martian invasion).
Industry:Literature
An academic history can mean a large, multivolume work such as the Cambridge Modern History, written collaboratively under some central editorial control. In the 19th century, the idea appeared in universities that a definitive history could be written of a major region of the world for a great span of time in a similar manner to the way that an encyclopedia was written. The time period was subdivided into eras and one volume specified for each. Within each volume there would be a fixed number of topics. Either each volume would either be written by one historian on the faculty, or else each topic would be handled by a faculty member throughout the series of volumes, or perhaps another system of specialization would be prescribed. This procedure was similar to that undertaken on such campuses to produce encyclopedias of natural history, such as marine biology, for which different scholars would write about different phyla. Examples of the end result of this procedure include the series done by Cambridge on Greco-Roman history, and that of Oxford on British history, which may be found on the reserve stacks of many public libraries in the 21st century.
What gives this concept of 'academic history' its own historicity, or "cubbyhole in time", superseded by progress, is that an academic history was intended to be definitive even though its subject matter, unlike the marine biology mentioned above, was not objective. When the volume on the Regency was published, for example, some may have thought that such would be the complete history of that era, and no one would need to do as much work in that field, because the best people with the best resources would already have written it down. Subsequent changes in scholarly perspective can alter that perception; for example the work of Lewis Namier on mid-18th century British politics caused one of the Oxford History volumes to appear outdated.
It was not considered that entirely new viewpoints and methods would come into being, or that scholars would follow new threads of causality throughout stretches of time that differed from the canonical ones over a region which varied over time. And as each academic history was primarily a list of persons, places, things, and events, there was hardly any Marxian content to any of these projects. By the second half of the 20th, there weren't any more academic histories. History is no longer subdivided in such an assembly-line fashion with such an authoritative result expected.
However, the project of globalization has brought with it the notion of writing a history that has no national center. All the projects above, allocated to the faculty of a university, had the viewpoint of their country or region in mind. These new histories are similar to the academic, in that they are large and done by many people by a similar process of allocation, but they do not have the same all-specifying concept of classification; instead, it is interrelation which is of concern.
Industry:Literature
Alternate history or alternative reality is a genre of fiction consisting of stories that are set in worlds in which one or more historical events unfolds differently than it did in the real world. It can be variously seen as a sub-genre of literary fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction; different alternate history works may use tropes from any or all of these genres. It is sometimes abbreviated AH. Another occasionally used term for the genre is "allohistory" (literally "other history"). See also Fictional universe.
Since the 1950s, this type of fiction has to a large extent merged with science fictional tropes involving cross-time travel between alternate histories or psychic awareness of the existence of "our" universe by the people in another; or ordinary voyaging uptime (into the past) or downtime (into the future) that results in history splitting into two or more time-lines. Cross-time, time-splitting, and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another. "Alternate History" looks at "what if" scenarios from some of history's most pivotal turning points and presents a completely different version, sometimes based on science and fact, but often based on conjecture. The exploration of how the world would look today if various changes occurred and what these alternate worlds would be like forms the basis of this vast subject matter.
In French, Italian, Spanish, and German, the genre of alternate history is called uchronie / ucronía, which has given rise to the term Uchronia in English. This neologism is based on the prefix u- (as in the word Utopia, a place that does not exist) and the Greek for time, chronos. A uchronia, then, is defined as a time that does not exist, a "non-time".
Industry:Literature
An antagonist is a character, group of characters, or institution that represents the opposition against which the protagonist or protagonists must contend. In other words, an antagonist is a person or a group of people who oppose the main character(s).
In the classic style of stories wherein the action consists of a hero fighting a villain/enemy, the two can be regarded as protagonist and antagonist, respectively. Of course, some narratives cast the villain the protagonist role, with the opposing hero as the antagonist.
The antagonist may also represent a major threat or obstacle to the main character by their very existence, without necessarily deliberately targeting him or her.
Examples in both film and theatre include Sauron, the main antagonist in The Lord of the Rings, who constantly battles the series' protagonists, and Tybalt, an antagonist in Romeo and Juliet, who slays Mercutio and whose later death results in the exiling of the play's protagonist, Romeo. A convention of the antagonist in a story is that their moral choices are less savoury than those of the protagonist. This is often used by an author to create conflict within a story. However, this is merely a convention and the reversal of this can be seen in the character Macduff from Macbeth, who is arguably morally correct in his desire to fight the tyrant Macbeth.
Industry:Literature
The antihero or antiheroine is a leading character in a film, book or play who lacks the traditional heroic qualities such as idealism, courage, nobility, fortitude, moral goodness, and altruism.
Whereas the classical hero is larger than life, antiheroes are typically inferior to the reader in intelligence, dynamism or social purpose, giving rise to what Robbe-Grillet called “these heroes without naturalness as without identity”.
The term is also sometimes used more broadly to cover Byronic heroes as well.
Industry:Literature
An antinovel is any experimental work of fiction that avoids the familiar conventions of the novel.
Industry:Literature
