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First Science Fiction and Proto Science Fiction Stories — Babel Nexus Index

Literature / Voyages, Worlds, and Hypotheses

A Level II literature chamber of the Babel Nexus Index · 22 primary public-domain works.

What First Science Fiction and Proto Science Fiction Stories argues

  • Science fiction has a longer pedigree than its 20th-century branding admits: a Greek satirist sails to the Moon in the 2nd century, an astronomer dreams the same trip in 1634, and a poet sends a Spaniard there with a bird-drawn machine in 1638.
  • The hexagonal gallery holds twenty-one works that establish the lineage — imagined voyages, lunar and solar empires, utopian science academies, mathematical and satirical worlds (Flatland, Erewhon, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), early planetary romance (Burroughs's Mars and Tarzan), the founding scientific romances of Verne and Wells (the Moon voyages, the descent to the Earth's core, the time machine, the Martian invasion), and the first novel to ask what a human-built being would feel.
  • Frankenstein (1818) closes the proto era and opens the modern one: from here forward the genre belongs to Verne, Wells, and the 20th century.

Primary works in First Science Fiction and Proto Science Fiction Stories (22)

Chambers connected to First Science Fiction and Proto Science Fiction Stories

  • First Novels — Frankenstein and Gulliver belong to both rooms — the prose-fiction form carrying speculative cargo.
  • First Mystery Novels and Stories — Twin Victorian inheritances of the Enlightenment: the detective infers from clues, the scientific romance infers from premises.
  • Astronomy — Kepler’s Somnium is a working astronomer’s thought experiment about lunar perspective — fiction in service of celestial mechanics.
  • Philosophy of Science — Bacon’s New Atlantis sketches Salomon’s House: the first imagined research institute, anticipating the Royal Society by thirty-five years.
  • Engineering — The genre’s flying machines, submarines, and automata are the literary ancestors of the engineering hexagonal gallery’s real ones.
  • Wisdom Literature — The imagined voyage is wisdom literature’s satirical descendant — a strange land used to mirror our own.
  • Epics — Lucian’s True Story is a direct parody of Homeric voyage; the lineage runs from the Odyssey to the Renaissance lunar voyages.
  • Fiction Set in Libraries — Borges’s Library of Babel reads as speculative fiction: the library imagined as a combinatorial cosmos.
  • First Horror Stories and Novels — Frankenstein and The Mummy! are simultaneously horror and the founding texts of science fiction.