Gulliver S Travels

Author: Jonathan Swift

Even more than today, writers in the 17th and 18th centuries often used science fictional devices for satire. Of these, none was more devastating than Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. He attacked religion in A Tale of a Tub, suggested that the poor Irish should avoid starvation by eating their own children in A Modest Proposal, and most famously of all attacked just about everyone in Gulliver's Travels from politicians (disputes over which end of an egg to open in Lilliput) to scientists (the flying island of Laputa). This is another of those novels that has been dramatized so often, or abridged for children, that we all know it, though it is generally only the first part of the book that is well known. It is a marvellous voyage in which Gulliver is cast ashore on the land of Lilliput where he is a giant among tiny people. His second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, where he is tiny in a land of giants. On his third voyage he is taken up to the flying island of Laputa and witnesses the first aerial bombardment in fiction, and also scientists trying to extract sunlight from cucumbers. Finally, his fourth voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms, wise and noble horses while the human Yahoos are deformed and debased. Why it's on the list: The science in Gulliver's Travels is deliberately ridiculous, yet the novel is filled with the sort of invention that has inspired a host of later science fiction novels, most recently, Swiftly by Adam Roberts..