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The founding texts of a genre — H.G. Wells and Jules Verne imagining futures that shaped an entire literary tradition. Scientific speculation as social critique and adventure.
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Browse all genres →Science fiction as a genre is generally dated to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), which for the first time used scientific speculation rather than supernatural machinery as the basis for an imaginative narrative. But the genre found its characteristic form in the late nineteenth century, in the work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Both used the possibilities opened by the Industrial Revolution and the rapid development of science to imagine futures, other worlds, and technologies that did not yet exist, using these speculations as the basis for narratives that were simultaneously thrilling adventures and social critiques of the world as it was.
Verne and Wells represented two distinct strands of early science fiction. Verne was primarily interested in the possibilities of technology: his submarines, rockets, and aeronauts are fascinating as engineering visions, and his books carry considerable technical detail that has aged surprisingly well. Wells was more interested in using scientific speculation as a vehicle for social satire and philosophical inquiry. His Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine are a projection of Victorian class divisions into the distant future; his Martians in The War of the Worlds are a mirror held up to European colonialism.
The most important thing that early science fiction accomplished was the demonstration that speculative narrative could be a serious mode of social criticism. By displacing contemporary social arrangements onto other times, other worlds, or other species, science fiction could make familiar assumptions look strange and therefore visible. Wells's invisible man is not simply a fantastical figure; he is a thought experiment about what happens to a person when social accountability is removed. The Time Machine is not simply an adventure story; it is an argument about where Victorian class inequality was likely to lead if unchecked.
These texts are the foundation of one of the most popular and culturally influential literary genres in the world. Reading them makes visible the origins of conventions that later science fiction has largely taken for granted, and shows how much of the genre's characteristic preoccupation with the relationship between technology and human society was already fully formed in its earliest works. They are also compulsively readable: Wells in particular had a narrative energy and an ability to convey wonder and dread that make his novels as gripping today as when they were written.