Tomy Willsher

Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (c. 1771; “The Year 2440”; Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred), a work of French political speculation set in a 25th-century utopian society that worships science. While many writers had depicted some future utopian “Kingdom of God” or a utopian society in some mythical land,

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In 1960, British novelist Kingsley Amis published New Maps of Hell, a literary history and examination of the field of science fiction. This serious attention from a mainstream, acceptable writer did a great deal of good, eventually, for the reputation of science fiction.

Another milestone was the publication, in 1965, of Frank Herbert's Dune, a

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With the emergence in 1937 of a demanding editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., at Astounding Science Fiction, and with the publication of stories and novels by such writers as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction began to gain status as serious fiction.

Campbell exercised an extraordinary influence over the work of his

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At the same time, a tradition of more literary science fiction novels, treating with a dissonance between perceived Utopian conditions and the full expression of human desires, began to develop: the dystopian novel. For some time, the science fictional elements of these works were ignored by mainstream literary critics, though they owe a much

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Writers attempted to respond to the new world in the post-World War I era. In the 1920s and 30s writers entirely unconnected with science fiction were exploring new ways of telling a story and new ways of treating time, space and experience in the narrative form. The posthumously published works of Franz Kafka (who died in 1924) and the works of mo

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The development of American science fiction as a self-conscious genre dates in part from 1926, when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories magazine, which was devoted exclusively to science fiction stories.[54] Though science fiction magazines had been published in Germany before, Amazing Stories was the first English language magazine to solely

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Erewhon: or, Over the Range (/ɛrɛhwɒn/[2]) is a utopian novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published in 1872,[3] set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.[4]

The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are based on Butler's own

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Wells and Verne had quite a few rivals in early science fiction. Short stories and novelettes with themes of fantastic imagining appeared in journals throughout the late 19th century and many of these employed scientific ideas as the springboard to the imagination. Erewhon is a novel by Samuel Butler published in 1872 and dealing with the concept

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The European brand of science fiction proper began later in the 19th century with the scientific romances of H.G. Wells and the science-oriented, socially critical novels of Jules Verne.[45] Verne's adventure stories, notably Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon(1865), and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas

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