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The prevailing view is that Frankenstein was the first science-fiction novel – there are some, however who argue that • Literature imagined technologically marvelous cities, space travel, and aliens before the scientific revolution even hit its stride.
17th century advances in astronomy and navigation led to a focus on the moon and mysterious islands • Domingo Gonsales, for example was the fictional narrator of The Man in the Moone, a space travel novel by Francis Godwin, a bishop in the Church of England published in 1638.
Other works include • Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634), Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1688), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) all share the driving curiosity that defines so much classic science fiction. “There is no man this day living that can tell you of so many strange and unknown peoples and countries,” writes Thomas More, describing the discoverer of his fictional island of Utopia.
In New Atlantis by Francis Bacon • Future technological marvels are described : • “Versions of bodies into other bodies” (organ transplants?), “Exhilaration of the spirits, and putting them in good disposition” (pharmaceuticals?), “Drawing of new foods out of substances not now in use” (genetically modified food?), “Making new threads for apparel” (synthetic fabrics?), “Deceptions of the senses” (television and film?).
Fiction about scientific things • Whether we want to call it “proto” or “official,” a form of science fiction (or at least fiction about scientific things) certainly did exist before Shelley. • For example, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote a book called “Somnium” ( “The Dream”) in 1608. A story about demons that can carry humans to the moon, the narrative would not be published until after the author’s death in 1634
Another example is Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, • Born in 1623, Cavendish was an outspoken aristocrat who traveled in circles of scientific thinkers, and broke ground on proto-feminism, natural philosophy (the 17th century term for science), and social politics.
Cavendish published 20 books • Amid her works of poetry and other essays, she also published in 1666 one of the earliest precursors of science fiction entitled • The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World. Cavendish starts it all by addressing the women in her reading audience. “To all Noble and Worthy Ladies,”
She begins • “The First Part is Romancical; the Second, Philosophical; and the Third is meerly Fancy; or (as I may call it) Fantastical. And if (Noble Ladies) you should chance to take pleasure in reading these Fancies, I shall account my self a Happy Creatoress: If not, I must be content to live a Melancholly Life in my own World, which I cannot call a Poor World, if Poverty be only want of Gold, and Jewels: for, there is more Gold in it, than all the Chymists ever made; or, (as I verily believe) will ever be able to make.”
In the Blazing World a woman is kidnapped and forced to join a lovesick merchant sailor at sea. After a windstorm sends the ship north and kills all the men, the woman walks through a portal at the North Pole into a new world: one with stars so bright, that midnight could be mistaken for midday. She enters a parallel universe where creatures are sentient, and worm-men, ape-men, fish-men, bird-men and lice-men populate the planet. They speak one language, they worship one god, and they have no wars. She becomes their Empress, and with her otherworldly subjects, she explores natural wonders and questions their observations using the emerging language of science.
When Cavendish put her pen to paper, she didn’t just aim to tell a fun story. She also examined popular theories about science. In the 17th century, scientists began asking new questions about how the natural world worked, using the slide rule, telescope and microscope. Researchers dissected animals, interested in understanding their many parts. They also began to question the role of spirits, and God. Cavendish was fascinated by all of it.
Cavendish includes descriptions of • flying vehicles and submarines, as well as discussions on scientific innovations, particularly the most recent discoveries afforded by the invention of the microscope. • The novel is especially notable for its narrative complexity. The author herself appears as a character and reflects on writing, “making and dissolving several worlds in her own mind … a world of Ideas, a world of Atomes, a world of Lights.”
Science-fiction may not have arrived quite yet in the 17th century, but authors were already using storytelling to reflect on the many new discoveries being made on land & sea, in the heavens and in laboratories. • “What the scientific revolution did,” writes the British historian Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England, “was to … buttress up the old rationalist attitude with a more stable intellectual foundation.” That is, science fiction wasn’t always derivative of scientific explanations themselves. Even before science had fully defined itself, literature offered a means for thinking about science.
questions • What kid of discoveries in science and navigation were inspiring fiction writers in the 1600s? • Describe some of the “scientific things” mentioned in works written before the time of Mary Shelley. • Does “The Blazing World” by Margaret Cavendish qualify as a work of science fiction? Why or why not? • What makes Cavendish different from Mary Shelley and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft?
