Best Proto-Science Fiction

Frankenstein

by Shelley, Mary

While not “strictly” a steampunk, this is one of the first science fiction novels, the ultimate science-gone-wrong story, and Victor Frankenstein is the quintessential mad-scientist, harnessing the power of a storm to cr...

Utopia

by Thomas More

Throughout the Middle Ages there had been folk stories about perfect places, whether it was Heaven or the Land of Cockaigne, but when More wrote about a perfect place he did something very different. He suggested that Ut...

The Strange Case Of Dr Jeckyll And Mr Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

What we learned from Jeckyll and Hyde is that Frankenstein's monster is in all of us. Taking elements from the real-life case of Deacon Brodie, a respectable cabinet maker who was also a secret burglar, and from James Ho...

The Man In The Moone

by Francis Godwin

Godwin was Bishop of Hereford, and this extraordinary story was discovered among his papers after his death. Read today it is hard to realise what an amazing work it was, incorporating scientific ideas that wouldn't beco...

Micromegas

by Francois Voltaire

The name means "Little, Big", and like Gulliver's encounters with the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, there is a lot of play with issues of scale. But it is a very different sort of story. Voltaire uses a tale of alien...

From The Earth To The Moon (Extraordinary Voyages)

by Verne, Jules

Of all the works of translated science fiction, there can be few rivals for the mass and continuing popularity of Jules Verne's extraordinary voyages. Between 1863 and his death in 1905, he produced well over 50 novels (...

The Blazing World

by Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, sometimes known as Mad Madge, was an amazing figure, a friend of major thinkers like Descartes and Hobbes, she was an early exponent of atomism, and persistently tried to join th...

The Battle Of Dorking

by George Tomkyns Chesney

In the middle years of the 19th century, Prussia embarked on a series of military adventures against Denmark, Austria and finally France which succeeded in uniting the German states under the Prussian crown, establishing...

After London Or Wild England

by Richard Jefferies

One of Mary Shelley's late novels, The Last Man, envisaged a world ravaged by plague in which humanity is wiped out. Although not well received at the time, the romantic notion of a world stripped bare of people set in t...

New Atlantis

by Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was a scientist to his fingertips, one of the very first to argue for the primacy of experiment, and so devoted to his own observations that he died after catching a cold during an experiment in refrigerati...

The Twentieth Century

by Albert Robida

Robida was an illustrator and caricaturist more than a novelist, which is just as well because it is the many charming illustrations for this book that have survived better than the story itself. But what illust...

The Journey Of Niels Klim To The World Underground

by Ludvig Holberg

Throughout the 18th century, there was a vogue for stories about other worlds inside our own. In time, these would give rise to Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in W...

News From Nowhere

by Morris, William

At the start of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, a bunch of characters assemble, most of them identified only by their job: the local mayor, the journalist, and so on. One unnamed figure is actually William Morris, artist...

Mundus Alter Et Idem

by Joseph Hall

Usually translated as "Another World and yet the Same", Bishop Hall's book has been claimed as the first anti-utopia. Coming less than a century after Thomas More wrote his seminal book, this was an outrageous satire in...

The Xipehuz And The Death Of The Earth

The Belgian writer, who used the pseudonym J.-H. Rosny aîné, was possibly the leading continental rival to H.G. Wells, producing a string of vivid and inventive short novels. This one, for example, is set in a distant fu...

Comical History Of The States And Empires Of The Moon And Sun

by Cyrano De Bergerac

First published, in a bowdlerised form, after the death of Cyrano de Bergerac, the two parts of the book are incomplete, probably because they were considered too heretical and too racy. It is probable that a third part,...

The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym

by Edgar Allan Poe

Hugo Gernsback defined scientifiction as "the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allen Poe type of story". Poe was a very varied writer, associated with romantic and gothic fiction, one of the fathers of the horror story...

The Consolidator Or, Memoirs Of Sundry Transactions From The World In The Moon

by Daniel Defoe

Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year among many others, is not generally recognised for his science fiction, but in fact he wrote one of the most peculiar of early voyages to the Moon. The vehi...

Looking Backward 2000-1887

by Edward Bellamy

If The Time Machine was, in part, a response to News from Nowhere by William Morris, then News from Nowhere was in turn a response to Looking Backward. Morris didn't find Bellamy's version of Socialism to his taste, but...

The Coming Race

by Edward Bulwer-lytton

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the first Baron Lytton, financed his extravagant lifestyle by writing a string of best selling if often pot boiling novels. Titles like The Last Days of Pompeii and Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tri...

Somnium

by Johannes Kepler

Following the Copernican Revolution, Kepler was probably the most important astronomer in the story of our understanding of the Solar System. He worked with Tycho Brahe and became court astronomer to Emperor Rudolph II i...