From the Earth to Poe to the Moon: The Science-Fiction Narrative as Precursor to Technological Reality

Abstract

The core assumption about adaptation concerns the transformation of a narrative’s form, usually from one medium into another. Adaptation studies has traditionally focused on the relationship between a written text and a cinematic product, as evidenced by George Bluestone’s landmark 1957 Novels into Film; however, recent trends call for a “textual studies” approach (Leitch 168), one that “carefully and rigorously examine[s] ‘intertextual’ relationships” (Albrect-Crane and Cutchins 13), suggesting multiple directions of transformation, toward and away from the “source” text. However, nonnarrative material can also be adapted into a narrative. Linda Hutcheon identifies this type of adaptation as “transposition,” calling it “a shift in ontology from the real to the fictional, from a historical account or biography to a fictionalized narrative or drama”: an event becomes a text (8). Hutcheon considers many such traditional adaptations but fails to consider the inverse: a shift in ontology from the fictional to the real. In this alternate option, a text can become an event, a real thing, following the pattern by which Pinocchio begins as a marionette and ultimately becomes a boy.