Old Sci-Fi Books

Does anyone know of any science fiction books published prior to 1900 (besides the obvious, Frankenstein)? I know of several, mostly found through Wikipedia, but I'm still wondering how many others are out there.

All of Jules Verne and a lot of HG Wells.

What constitutes Sci Fi in an earlier age? Is Beowulf that because it is fantastical? Are the Arthurian legends because they have magic?

Also note the books collected in Astronauts by Gaslight (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/astronauts-by-gaslight/980906)

I consider Beowulf and the Arthurian legends more of mythology, a category of itself, than sci-fi. I was thinking of sci-fi as books similar to Looking Backward 2000-1887, Mary Shelley's novels, Wells' novels.

I would submit

Icaromenippus, Lucian of Samosata, approx 160 - Main character flies to the moon
The Other World, Cyrano de Bergerac, 1657 - Pair of works featuring trips to the sun and the moon via a spacecraft
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1726 - The "Voyage to Laputa" chapter features a floating island built by science
Micromegas, Voltaire, 1752 - features men from Jupiter and Saturn visiting Earth
The Last Man, Mary Shelly, 1826 - post-apocalyptic
After London or Wild England, Richard Jefferies, 1885 - post-apocalyptic

You might want to consider...

The Great Romance by The Inhabitant

From Publishers Weekly
In this anonymous work, first published in New Zealand in 1881 and lost until the 1990s, John Hope puts himself to sleep in 1950 and wakes up in 2143 to find that everyone is telepathic, and evil is almost unknown. He heads off to colonize Venus and soon encounters aliens, with whom he develops a daringly intimate relationship. Despite paltry characterization and amateurish prose by the standards of any century, Hope's story includes surprisingly advanced ideas. This may have been the first time that anyone described space suits, air locks or the difficulties of landing on an asteroid or entering a planetary atmosphere. Alessio argues in his almost obsessively analytical introduction that the story may have had considerable, indirect influence on one of the most widely read books of the 19th century, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. This reprint will be of considerable interest to specialist scholars of science fiction, if not the casual reader.

Some Links -
- News Article: Mystery NZ author's sci-fi tale compared to Austen
- Preview Copy at Google Books: The Great Romance

The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel (1900)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (1889)
She by H. Rider Haggard (1886)
The Power of the Coming Race by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1871)
Erewhon by Samuel Butler (1872)

#8

The Purple Cloud is good until you open it up and start reading it.

I agree! But it does fulfill the request.

Freeland: A Social Anticipation by Theodor Hertzka (1890) - Utopia set in Africa by a German writer.
Two Planets by Kurd Laßwitz (1897)
Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss (1898)
The Moon Metal by Garrett P. Serviss (1900)
A Honeymoon In Space by George Griffith (1900)
Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (1888)
Flatland by Edwin Abbot (1884)
After London by Richard Jefferies (1884)

Seriously there are 100s - most of them are not very good and haven't stood the test of time.

The answer to this question will be different in a hundred years when the amoeba that is SF has swallowed all genres of fiction. Any fiction work will be eligible, then.

It may be hard to do a complete list. I should imagine a great many books that were written that were science and fantastical, are out of print and out of memory.

I've heard of a lot of these, though not several on andyl's list or Icaromenippus. The Astronauts by Gaslight book looks really interesting.
The time period, however, that I am most interested in is before the Civil War, though I realize there's a lot more the closer you get to 1900 than before 1865.

E. A. Poe wrote several stories that qualify as SF.

You may want to find a copy of Billion Year Spree by Brian W. Aldiss. He discusses some very early sf novels and stories. I don't know if Trillion Year Spree covers the same material.

I don't know what, if anything, may be available from this writer in English, but he's well worth remembering:

Albert Robida

I had some of his books illustrated by himself, marvellous art (just look at that "Leaving the Opera in 2000"!)

After Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels other people emulated him including A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727) by Captain Samuel Brunt and A Trip to the Moon (1728) by Murtagh McDermot. I took this information from The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. There are more titles listed if you are interested I'll type in some more. BTW I have no idea if you could ever find a copy of any of them.:)

Even if I can't find a copy, I still want to know about them. Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints seems to have published a group of books called Gulliveriana. What else does that encyclopedia have?
It looks like The Twentieth Century is available in English from the Wesleyan press that has the Early Classics of Science Fiction series as well as The Clock of the Centuries from another publisher, Lola.

I just saw that, Susie! Looks like a honking big book too, almost 2 pounds. Gee, I hope it's illustrated. Anyone know if it is? By Robida, that is? Because in that case... I'll break my book-shopping fast.

Omg! Yes! Yes it is! Over 300 Robida's drawings!

*one order closer to bankruptcy*

his drawings on the Wiki page are rather impressive.

I've also found one called The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty Second Century by Jane Loudon, first published in three volumes in 1827. What was probably the most interesting thing about it was that it was published by a woman, first of all, and Loudon was better known for her gardening books.
Ann Arbor Paperbacks republished it a few years ago in one volume (unfortunately, abridged). I managed to get it off of BookMooch, so I'm assuming the new version isn't that rare or expensive.

I'm reading a book now (my mom picked it up for me at a library sale a few weeks ago; just now getting around to looking at it) about the belief of subterranean worlds in literature and science, to name some places. It's called Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface, and its bibliography includes a lot of books published prior to 1900. I plan to read the book and see which of those listed in the bibliography would fall under sci-fi.

Auugh! This Wesleyan series has the potential to ruin me, I ordered the German and the Latin American sci-fi anthologies too!

Relation d'un voyage du pole arctique au pole antarctique (1721)
Lamekis, ou les voyages extraordinaires d'un egyptien dans la terre interieure (1734)
Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground by Ludvig Holberg (1741), published by Bison Frontiers of Imagination
The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock (1751)
Icosameron by Jacques Casanova (1788) This one is very long, according to Hollow Earth, over 1800 pages, and weird - it involves incest and hermaphroditic, nudist, color-coded dwarfs.
Symzonia by John Cleves Symmes (1820) The first American utopian novel.

incest and hermaphroditic, color-coded dwarfs.

Who. Could. Resist.

Damn, it better NOT be in print.

I think Jenna Press published an English translation of Icosameron in 1989.

Oh dear, it IS "the" Casanova! I had no idea he wrote, um, fantasy.

#28

I checked, it looks like the English edition is severely abridged, given your specs above.

I should be able to get it in Italian or French, though.

Darn, the only English translation is abridged. How can they turn a 1800 page book down to only 260 pages?!!!!! I really need to learn foreign languages...sometimes that's the only way to get a book.

The New York Public Library website has a bibliography of utopian books (some of which count as sci-fi) going back to the 16th century....
http://utopia.nypl.org/primarysources.html

More books mentioned in Hollow Earth (and two more reasons to learn French):
Le voyage au centre de la terre by Jacques Collin de Plancy (1821)
Isaac Laquedem by Alexander Dumas pere (1852-1853) Unfinished, untranslated

Does anyone know of any more books?

There's a collection of George Griffith stories called The Raid of 'Le Vengeur' edited by the remarkable Sam Moskowitz, which also contains a bibliography.

The anthology Science Fiction by the Rivals of H.G. Wells contains 16 stories from 1900 and earlier by George Griffith, W.L. Alden, Rudolph De Cordova, Cutcliffe Hyne, Wardon Allan Curtis, Edward olin Weeks, Fred M. White and Ellsworth Douglass & Edwin Pallander.

The collection Eight Dime Novels, edited by E.F. Bleiler, contains The Huge Hunter or The Steam Man of the Prairies from Beadles Half Dime Library 1882... I can't help but note that this was two years after Jules Verne's Steam House first appeared.

That's all I can think of off my shelves.

Broadview Press is publishing The Man in the Moone from 1638 starting in August; it's probably the first sci-fi novel written in English. They also publish some more common sci-fi books like The Time Machine, The Coming Race, Looking Backward, and News from Nowhere.

Gustavus Pope
-A Journey to Mars
-A Journey to Venus 1894

Percy Greg
-Across the Zodiac 1880

Robert Cromie
-Plunge into Space 1890

Ellsworth Douglas
-Pharoh's Broker 1899

Also what about Ambrose Bierce?

I just read Micromegas, suggested in Message 6. The full text of the short story (translated, presumably) is here:

http://www.wondersmith.com/scifi/micro.htm

And I have to say, it's AMAZING. I feel like a biologist looking at a fossil of a primitive animal from millions of years ago. The story is clearly science fiction, but so... raw and primitive. None of the more complex sci fi memes that have evolved over the recent decades, builting upon eachother and taking advantage of the presence if earlier ideas in the "public consciousness".

I'm also struck that the purpose of this early work of Sci Fi is still very similar to the purpose of a lot of current science fiction: commentary on our world by using the lense of the Other, getting us to expand our view of ourselves by expanding our view of the Possible.

Fantastic story. And very funny, in parts.

The Bible?

If we are talking about when they were written, not when the physical copy we have was printed, the King James bible dates from 1611. Many of us have The Odessy which dates from the eighth century BCE. Who do I have to kill to get a First Edition of THAT?

Is there any copy of the Odyssey in a museum anywhere? It was Greek, but then with the Roman Empire would scrolls have been written of that tale? Did Homer even know how to write?

That is a good question. I would think he could but 2800 years ago? I don’t have a clue. Was Homer literate or was it passed on orally before being put to paper? I was trying to be funny about the FE but it would be interesting to know what the oldest existing version is.

Wikipedia says it was oral first, but I would look that up in a text. I am not sure in my library if I actually have a text that would address that. In The A-Z of Great Writers which I have, I looked up Homer which seven cities claim to be his birthplace. It didn't address the question of written or oral but says that this and the Iliad were both oral. It was not clear if they were oral before Homer who wrote them down, or oral after Homer started telling them.

I've read about a dozen short stories by Voltaire, including Micromegas, and enjoyed all of them for their satirical humor.

> 37,38,39

The question of whether the Odyssey was originally a written or oral composition is still debated, but the general consensus today is that both it and the Iliad were composed orally. Before 1971, it was thought to have been written because it was assumed that no one could have both composed and memorized the whole thing. Critical studies of its structure and new evidence as to the ability of trained persons to retain such epic poems has changed that opinion.

The consensus date for composition of the Iliad is near the end of the eighth century BC. The Odyssey a little later. Invention of a Greek alphabet for writing? First half of the eighth century BC. Invention of papyrus scrolls and reed pens? Approx late seventh century BC. So when Odyssey is composed we have writing but no real means to edit anything you write. I mean, rock and clay is not a word processor. Given that and the fact that the Odyssey is a polished composition, many scholars say composed orally, written at earliest at the end of the sixth century BC (when paper and pen had become ubiquitous enough for the purpose).

Some interesting (or boring, depending on your viewpoint) facts on the various versions of the Odyssey:

Our numerous extant medieval manuscripts of the Odyssey are all Byzantine, or derived from Byzantine originals, and present a uniform text. This indicates that there was a standard text as of at least approx. 1000 A.D. in Constantinople.

In the mid second century BC, the head of the Great Library of Alexandria, Aristarchus, wrote a celebrated (and thus well distributed) commentary on the poems. Additionally, the numerous surviving papyrus fragments we have ranging from the second century BC to the third century AD correspond with the later Byzantine texts. So, can one conclude there is a standardized text as early as mid second century BC?

The few surviving papyrus fragments from third and early second century BC have some "longer" versions of the text, or at least versions with additional lines. Additionally some commentators from the period quote lines we no longer have.

But, from the fifth century BC and onward, numerous authors such as Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, etc., refer to the poems in a way that assumes the poems are common knowledge. Specifically, in their writings they quote from the poems the same we quote from movies today. (Odysseus, I'm your father!)

There is evidence that in the latter part of the sixth century BC the poems were being recited as part of the Great Panathenaic Festival held in Athens every four years. If this last is true, I personally suspect attempts at writing it down would have begun at the latest around then.

It is my firm belief that The Iliad and The Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by another, different ancient Greek of the same name.

#43 - One of these days we'll be able to separate authors that have the same name.

The best we can do now is Homer (1) and Homer (2).

Based on that superior summary I retract my previous post and will ditto justjim. :)

My guess, for what it's worth, is that Homer wrote down the oral versions he heard and edited them into pretty much what we have today. It's possible additional lines referred to above are from the original oral tradition, but were left on the cutting room floor. Thus people familiar with the oral tradition would be familiar with those lines as well.

www.violetbooks.com has a very long bibliography of "lost world/race" literature; a lot of these can be considered science fiction.

#18 (Re: Albert Robida)

Speculative in nature is Robida's text available from Project Gutenberg:
The End of Books (La Fin Des Livres); although the text is only available in French, it does contain illustrations, and there is an introduction and abstract in English.

#43
I snorted coffee on my keyboard. Just thought you would like to know that.

#43
Maybe his name was Pierre Menard?

Wasn't he the fellow that was writing the Quixote as bits of it condensed out of the air?

He was. Fluent in 17thC Spanish and an expert on Cervantes and his time, he wrote entire chapters of Don Quixote that, as it turned out, follow the original word for word.

Amazing!

Lola: Black Coat Press, a division of Hollywood Comics, publishes English translations of Robida's The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul and The Clock of the Centuries.

One of the earliest science fiction books I'm aware of is The Bible. It introduced the first 'super-hero', known as God, a remarkably powerful man-like alien capable of endowing nothingness with somethingness. Any book with the Christian God, Greek Gods, Norse Gods, Egyptian Gods, et cetera, is an early form of science fiction. Clearly, men fantasized a lot about Gods.

55> If you're going that route, the Australian Aboriginal myths have it beaten by about 9,000 years.

You should try most of Rudyard Kipling's novellas - they are mostly sci-fi.

>34 WastelandWarrior666: Ambrose Bierce
I would not consider his work as 'sci-fi', since it reads mostly like a more subdued Lovecraft - dreams, the uncanny, the distortion of the real, the bizarre...

Now, you could read Cyrano de Bergerac's travels to the moon (17th century).

Yes, and War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged, and David Copperfield are Science Fiction, too, aren't they? What with their being set in alternate history with make believe characters. That's all it takes to be Science Fiction, isn't it? Just be in an alternate history with fictional characters?

I don't really consider alternate history by itself as science fiction.
My definition of science fiction is books/stories/plays/poetry that either take place in the future (for the time they were written) or include apocalyptic catastrophes, new inventions, space travel, alien contact, or scientific phenomenon - all which are scientifcally explained.

Project Gutenburg has a "Precursors of Science Fiction" page at "http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Precursors_of_Science_Fiction_%28Bookshelf%29". They start with Lucian of Samosata in the 2nd century.

Dan