What this chamber 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 this chamber (21)
- Lucian of Samosata — A True Story (175) — Book
- Francis Bacon — The New Atlantis (1626) — Book
- Johannes Kepler — Somnium (1634) — Book
- Francis Godwin — The Man in the Moone (1638) — Book
- Cyrano de Bergerac — Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657) — Book
- Cyrano de Bergerac — The States and Empires of the Sun (1662) — Book
- Margaret Cavendish — The Blazing World (1666) — Book
- Jonathan Swift — Gulliver’s Travels (1726) — Book
- Ludvig Holberg — Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741) — Book
- Mary Shelley — Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) — Book
- Mary Shelley — The Last Man (1826) — Book
- Edwin A. Abbott — Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) — Book
- Samuel Butler — Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872) — Book
- Mark Twain — A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) — Book
- Edgar Rice Burroughs — A Princess of Mars (1912) — Book
- Edgar Rice Burroughs — Tarzan of the Apes (1912) — Book
- Voltaire — Micromégas (1752) — Book
- Jules Verne — Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) — Book
- Jules Verne — From the Earth to the Moon (1865) — Book
- H. G. Wells — The Time Machine (1895) — Book
- H. G. Wells — The War of the Worlds (1898) — Book
Connected chambers
- 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.