II.

Progenitors

The subjects of science fiction have been touched upon by fantastic literature since ancient times. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic dealt with a search for ultimate knowledge and immortality, the Greek myths of Daedalus with the technology of flying, and the True History (c. ad 160) of Lucian of Samosata with a trip to the Moon. Imaginary voyages and tales of strange people in distant lands were common in Greek and Roman literature and found new expression in the 14th-century book of travels written in French by the pseudonymous Sir John Mandeville. Trips to the Moon were described in the 17th century by figures as diverse as the British prelate and historian Francis Godwin, the French writer Cyrano de Bergerac, and the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, among others. Another subject, the structure of better societies or better worlds, which goes back at least to the 4th century bc with Plato's The Republic, was reintroduced and given a generic name when Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia (1516). Stories of an imaginary voyage were usually written for satirical purposes; perhaps the finest example is Gulliver's Travels (1726) by the English satirist Jonathan Swift. But science fiction could not have existed in its present form without the recognition of social change at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (c. 1750). The Gothic novel of the 18th century culminated in Frankenstein (1818) by the British novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, a work permeated by a belief in the potential of science. Many authors of the 19th century, such as Edward Bellamy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain in the United States and Rudyard Kipling in England, worked in the science-fiction genre at one time or another. The first great specialist of science fiction, however, was the French author Jules Verne, who dealt with geology and cave exploration in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), space travel in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Off on a Comet (1877), and the submarine and underwater marvels in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).