III.

Early Writers and Works

A.

The Romance of Science

Science and technology began appearing as a subject of fiction in the 19th century. The popular Gothic novel, which emphasized horror and mystery, led to Frankenstein (1818), an influential novel by British novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley that explored the potential of science for good or evil. Many significant authors of the 19th century—such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain in the United States and Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Britain—worked with the themes of science fiction at one time or another. All of them influenced the science-fiction writers who followed.

The first great specialist of science fiction, however, was French author Jules Verne. Verne wrote about a wide variety of subjects, including geology and cave exploration in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864; translated 1874), space travel in From the Earth to the Moon (1865; translated 1873), and underwater marvels in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870; translated 1873). His adventurous tales were later popular fodder for some of the earliest science-fiction films.

Works by lesser-known authors were also important in shaping what would become science-fiction subgenres. A group of stories about wars of the future—many of which described elaborate weapons—was published in Britain and the United States after 1871, culminating in a vigorous subgenre (usually called future war fiction) between the early 1890s and 1914. Stories of lost cultures and unexplored corners of the world, in which the inhabitants often possessed superior science and technology, were also popular in Britain and America. Two books of this type—sometimes called lost race fiction—by British novelist Sir H. Rider Haggard appeared in 1887: She and Allan Quatermain. A famous work in this category, The Lost World by British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was published in 1912.

B.

H. G. Wells and Successors

The first major writer of science fiction in English was H. G. Wells. Wells began to write stories with science themes in 1894, demonstrating more interest in biology and evolution than in other sciences, and more concern about the social consequences of invention than about the accuracy of the invention itself. He called the genre scientific romance. Wells’s reputation grew rapidly after the publication of The Time Machine in 1895. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and several important story collections followed in rapid succession. Wells then turned to other forms of literature during much of the rest of his career.

A number of other British authors wrote scientific romances during the first half of the 20th century; these books are now considered science fiction. Especially noteworthy are works by Matthew Phipps Shiel (The Purple Cloud, 1901), Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men, 1930), and C. S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, 1938). Among British writers of standard fiction who wrote one or two novels of a socially prophetic nature in the manner of Wells, the most notable are Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932) and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949).

C.

Writers Outside Britain and America

Many important science-fiction writers wrote in languages other than English between the 1890s and the 1930s. These included Kurd Lasswitz in German, J. H. Rosny-Aine in French, Evgeny Zamiatin in Russian, and Karel Čapek in Czech. All of them were more or less contemporaries of Wells and wrote major works of science fiction before 1926. World War I (1914-1918) brought an end to the development of some European science-fiction literature, and World War II (1939-1945) halted the rest. By the time the genre picked up again, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, American science fiction had become the dominant tradition.