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 then refuses responsibility for it. Everything on this page comes after that question and before the pulp magazines gave the form a name and a shelf of its own.

Three habits run through these books. The first is the voyage that turns into an argument — Verne sending men down a volcano in 1864 and round the moon in 1865, working out the engineering as he goes; John Jacob Astor IV doing the same for the planets in 1894; David Lindsay abandoning engineering altogether in 1920 and sending his traveller to Arcturus through a landscape that keeps rearranging what a body is. The second is the machine question. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) contains three chapters called “The Book of the Machines” which argue, seriously, that machines are evolving and will succeed us — written eleven years after Darwin, and still the most disquieting thing in the book. The third is the society built as a thought experiment: Edward Bellamy waking a Bostonian in the year 2000 to a nationalised utopia in 1888, a book that sold in the hundreds of thousands and started real political clubs; Charlotte Perkins Gilman answering in 1915 with Herland, where three men stumble into a country that has had no men in it for two thousand years.

Between them sit the two that escaped the genre entirely — Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (1886) and Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), which gave the world Professor Challenger and every dinosaur plateau since.

They are short, fast and still unsettling. Every title is complete and free to read online, set in the same Bibliomancer typesetting so the whole collection reads as one consistent edition.