Early science fiction

Before there was a name for it, there were novels that asked what happens when knowledge outruns judgement. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is usually called the first of them: a scientist who makes a living being and refuses responsibility for it. Three generations later H. G. Wells, trained in biology, wrote a run of short “scientific romances” that supplied the genre with most of its furniture — time travel, invasion from space, invisibility — and with its habit of turning a scientific idea into a social argument.

This list collects the Bibliomancer editions that belong to that early history: books written before the pulp magazines, before the word “science fiction” itself, when the form was still a branch of the literary novel and a vehicle for speculation about class, empire, evolution and the future.

They are short, fast and still unsettling. Every title is complete and free to read online; the print editions use our standard typesetting so that the whole collection sits together on a shelf.