Proto Sci Fi

In the millennia before the term 'science fiction' appeared in 1851 or Hugo Gernsback popularized the term in 1929, storytellers were already gazing at the moon and wondering who might live there, and what other wonders and terrors the universe might hold. They imagined voyages to other worlds, encounters with alien intelligences, utopian futures, and experiments that pushed human knowledge too far.

Proto Sci Fi gathers the earliest, most visionary examples of the genre ina two-thousand-year compendium of speculative fiction that begins when the height of technology was Roman concrete and the watermill, and ends on the cusp of the pulp era.

This is the hidden ancestry of modern sci-fi. Collected herein are thirty-one stories, many the first of their kind, often penned by writers you know from very different contexts. Plutarch considered the science of the moon, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote the first hard SF, Voltaire imagined alien beings contemplating Earth with curiosity and bemusement, George Eliot tried her hand at clairvoyance and dangerous knowledge in The Lifted Veil, Edgar Allan Poe produced moon voyages, apocalypses, and visions of the far future. Even Ambrose Bierce turned his satirical pen towards killer robots, and Jack London took a trip into prehistoric discovery.

Many seminal works of fiction are included, from "the ancestor of all tales" in Japan (The Bamboo-Cutter and the Moon-Child).

Francis Bacon's New Atlantis is a standout example of utopian fiction, Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World was a proto-feminist work, and Cyrano de Bergerac's moon flight has been unfairly overshadowed by his later portrayal in theatre.

The stories cover five enduring tropes. Lunar Voyages (100 CE-1869) gathers travel to the moon, taken by whirlwind ship, space stations made out of bricks, or balloons Cosmic Perspectives confronts the truly alien and the indifferent cosmos with cometary apocalypses, invisible entities, a rogue star, and a colour from the beyond. Future Histories covers visions that foretell terrible futures, or show how terrible the present is from the perspective of the far future. Other Worlds opens hidden realms in hollow earths, drops of water, and lost prehistoric plateaus. The category of Dangerous Experiments was ignited by Frankenstein, and tracks scientists going too far, from Hawthorne's perfectionist surgeons to Bierce's killer automaton.

From Plutarch's discussion of philosophical theories of the moon in 100CE onwards, every story is a snapshot of its era's cutting-edge knowledge, whether that is Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics, mesmerism, or electrical engineering. Together, they show that while the term science fiction has only been popular for a century, speculative fiction based on science goes back as far as scientific discovery itself does.