SF: The first era - European proto-science fiction
The first “era” of science fiction literature that I will read in my survey of the history of the genre is filled not by actual works of science fiction but by their literary progenitors, works that operate much better when read in other literary modes but which contain the seeds of SF. These seeds are spread across three centuries of European history, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 and a small number of other utopian works in the century that followed. My list of these early works progresses then through the rest of the 1600s and into the 1700s, wherein a variety of fantastical travels to the moon took place alongside the monumental Gulliver’s Travels, right up to the true dawn of the genre with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818. Within this time period readers were introduced to a variety of concepts that became mainstays of science fiction, including travel to other celestial objects, travels to alternate realities, travels through underground worlds-within-worlds, and travels to the far future.
I expect certain difficulties in tracking down some of these volumes, nearly all of them having been published in non-English European countries and a number of them, I am sure, being all but lost to time but for the saving graces of literary scholarship. In other words, Not everything will be readily available at my local library in a modern translation. Some of this reading will be dry and laborious, and some of it may end up not happening at all. Nevertheless, having never read much in the way of “antique” literature save a pinch of Shakespeare here or there in school, I am eager to discover what literature was like in these earlier centuries.
I began with three works of utopian nature, and my review is forthcoming.
-Brenton
Tags: literature, science fiction, SF