The evolution of science fiction

Proto-science fiction

In 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley took the next major step in the evolution of science fiction when she published Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Champions of Shelley as the “mother of science fiction” emphasize her innovative fictional scheme. Abandoning the occult folderol of the conventional Gothic novel, she made her protagonist a practicing “scientist”—though the term scientist was not actually coined until 1834—and gave him an interest in galvanic electricity and vivisection, two of the advanced technologies of the early 1800s. Even though reanimated corpses remain fantastic today, Shelley gave her story an air of scientific plausibility. This masterly manipulation of her readers established a powerful new approach to creating thrilling sensations of wonder and fear. Frankenstein has remained in print since its first publication, and it has been adapted for film repeatedly since the first silent version in 1910. Frankenstein’s monster likewise remained a potent metaphor at the turn of the 21st century, when opponents of genetically engineered food coined the term Frankenfood to express their concern over the unknown effects of the human manipulation of foodstuffs.

Another significant 19th-century forerunner was Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote many works loosely classifiable as science fiction. The Balloon Hoax of 1844, originally published in the New York Sun, is but one example of Poe’s ability to provide meticulous technical descriptions intended to mislead and impress the gullible.

Jules Verne

More significant to the genre’s formation than Poe was Jules Verne, who counted Poe among his influences and was arguably the inventor of science fiction. Verne’s first novel, Paris au XXième siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century)—written in 1863 but not published until 1994—is set in the distant 1960s and contains some of his most accurate prognostications: elevated trains, automobiles, facsimile machines, and computer-like banking machines. Nevertheless, the book’s depiction of a dark and bitter dystopian world without art was too radical for Jules Hetzel, Verne’s publisher.

Hetzel, who published a popular-science magazine for young people, the Magasin illustré d’éducation et de récréation, was a shrewder judge of public taste than Verne. With Hetzel’s editorial guidance, Verne abandoned his far-fetched futurism and set to work on the first of his Voyages extraordinaires—Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; Five Weeks in a Balloon). In this series of contemporary techno-thrillers, the reader learns of balloons, submarines, trains, mechanical elephants, and many other engineering marvels, all described with unmatchable technical accuracy and droll humor.

Verne’s novels achieved remarkable international success, and he became a legend in his own time. His major works, which were adapted for film many times, remained popular into the 21st century, and the “scientific romance” became a permanent fixture of Western popular entertainment.

Another uncannily prescient figure was the French illustrator Albert Robida. His graphic cartoons (see the figure) and essays appeared in Le Vingtième Siècle (1882; The 20th Century), La Vie électrique (1883; “The Electric Life”), and the particularly ominous and impressive La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887; “War in the 20th Century”). Although Robida’s shrewd extrapolations were created for comic effect, they proved remarkably akin to the 20th century’s reality. In fact, since Robida’s time, science fiction has often proved most prophetic not at its magisterial heights of moral sobriety but at its most louche and peculiar.

Classic British science fiction

Great Britain as well as France experienced a flowering of creative imagination in the 1880s and ’90s. Literary landmarks of the period included such innovative works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and H.G. Wells’s phenomenal trio of The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). Never before had fantastic events of seeming scientific plausibility erupted right in the midst of humdrum daily life. These works used the worldview presented by science to rip aggressively at the fabric of Victorian reality. As the 20th century dawned, many of science fiction’s most common themes—space travel, time travel, utopias and dystopias, and encounters with alien beings—bore British postmarks.

The technophilic tenor of the times, as well as 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism, also inspired a reaction from those who longed for a return to a preindustrial life. William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) envisioned a 21st-century pastoral utopia that combined the author’s socialist theories with the lucid and placid values of the 14th century. While some critics dismissed Morris’s work as a communist tract, C.S. Lewis praised its style and language. Indeed, Lewis, Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, J.R.R. Tolkien, and a growing host of imitators imbued pastoral settings with heroic and mythic elements, often borrowing from a Christian ethos. Examples of this type of work existed even across the Atlantic, notably in two novels by William Dean Howells, the dean of late 19th-century American letters. In Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), he described Altruria, a utopian world that combined the foundations of Christianity and the U.S. Constitution to produce an “ethical socialism” by which society was guided. Though heroic fantasy remained a minority taste in Britain and elsewhere for many decades, during the second half of the 20th century, it began to dominate bookstore shelves and book clubs (see Science fiction after World War II).