Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, is widely considered to be the first science fiction novel.1 While books with science fiction themes were published prior to Frankenstein, they are considered proto-science fiction because they lack a scientific framework to explain their stories. Even after Mary Shelley, it wasn’t until the 1920s that science fiction developed as a literary category.
Before the creation of the literary genre, many archetypes, tropes, and paradigms of science fiction began to appear in the nineteenth century. Archetypes are usually centered around the traits and motivations of characters, which are demonstrated in science fiction by monikers such as the chosen one, the mad scientist, the alien, or the robot. Tropes are general plot devices common across a genre, like space travel, alien encounters, artificial intelligence, and time travel. Paradigms are more general than both tropes and archetypes, encompassing the way the subject of the story is understood at the time of writing. Science fiction is somewhat unique as its paradigm, the scientific method and scientific progressivism, is informed by what is known or possible based on current scientific knowledge. Thus, it varies widely over time, evolving along with our understanding of science in the real world.
In the middle 1800s, the terms ‘scientific fiction’ and ‘scientific romance’ were sometimes used to describe what we consider to be science fiction classics. The first known appearance of the term ‘science fiction’ was in 1851, in chapter ten of William Wilson’s A Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject.2 In 1876, ‘science fiction’ appeared again in an essay about fantastic literature by William Henry Rhodes.3 While these early references used the term ‘science fiction’, they didn’t mean science fiction in a modern sense. The first modern use of ‘science fiction’ may have been in 1898, in a review of an H.G. Wells’ novel in the Bulletin of Pharmacy, or a decade later, in a 1911 issue of the Chicago Inter Ocean in an advertisement for Garrett Putnam Serviss’s A Columbus of Space.
Between 1818 and 1926, there were relatively few science fiction novels published, and the authors of these books typically wrote in other genres as well. Paul K. Alkon’s book Science Fiction Before 1900 discusses some of the major works of science fiction of this period. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, (and to a lesser extent, George Jones Griffith) wrote about space travel and alternative history stories. Juvenile Dime Novels that feature robots, space travel, and imaginary travel destinations can also be classified as science fiction.
Science fiction short stories and novellas were published in magazines and pulps at that time, as well. Locating these early science fiction stories is difficult, but many have been identified in Sam Moskowitz’s Under the Moons of Mars and Science Fiction by Gaslight, as well as in other reference works concerning the pulp and slick magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Alongside these authors, Edgar Allen Poe published several science fiction books like The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall (1835) and The Balloon Hoax (1849). There was also Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which featured time travel and alternative history.
Jules Verne and H. G. Wells generated many of the initial archetypes, tropes, and paradigms of science fiction, but other authors also contributed their share. The tropes of pre-1920 science fiction are collected by Crawford, Donahue, and Grant in 333: A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Novel. Notable examples include advanced intelligence in J. D. Beresford’s The Wonder (1917), the detonation of a superbomb in Arthur C. Train and Robert W. Wood’s The Man Who Rocked the Earth (1915), and lost civilizations in H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook (1919).
As you can see, many of the archetypes, tropes, and paradigms developed before 1920 formed the foundations of modern science fiction. To understand how science fiction literature has grown and expanded in the past 100 years, we need to study these early stories, and understand how they formed the basis for today’s novels, stories, and films.
Steven Woolfolk is the owner of Xenophile Bibliopole & Armorer, Chronopolis, a rare books specialty bookstore in Richland. Xenophilebooks.com.
References:
- Canavan, Gerry, and Eric Carl Link. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2019: 50.
- hbrucefranklin.com/articles/history-of-science-fiction
- Franklin, H. Bruce, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the 19th Century. Oxford University Press, 1966.
