The Science Fiction That Came Before Science

“A reading list of these early stories includes works of varying canonicity, such as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634), Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1688), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).”

“Though obscure today, Godwin’s The Man in the Moone captivated 17th-century readers with its tale of a Spaniard who travels in a ship powered by geese.”

“The French author Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac poked fun at the book in his satirical 1657 novel, The Other World.”

“Edgar Allen Poe referenced the novel in his 1835 story “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall.””

“H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel, The First Men in the Moon, was directly inspired by Godwin.”

“Even more provocative when it was first published was The Blazing World, by the first woman in the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish.”

“Godwin, Cavendish, and their contemporaries are important for generating a freely speculative space of imagination—which is still science fiction’s role today. In constructing worlds—or birthing “paper bodies,” as Cavendish called them—the authors’ acts of envisioning possible futures had a tangible impact on how reality took shape.”

“Even before science had fully defined itself, literature offered a means for thinking about science.”

“Science fiction has since been the social laboratory of visionaries like Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel Delaney, Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler.”

“Their imaginations didn’t always require empirical discoveries to have happened first; their fancies were written in the poetry of delight and wonder, before being confirmed in the prose of experiment and logic.”