12 Sci-Fi Stories Written Before Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

The Syrian author Lucian was both a very pragmatic person and a very sarcastic writer, and ludicrous tales of myths and fantasy presented as facts annoyed him very much. As a result, he decided to write his own. True History is an utterly fallacious account of Lucian’s travels to a far-off continent, a sea of milk, inside a whale, and even the moon. There, he discovered a war between the animal-human denizens of the moon and the sun, thanks to giant spiders who tether the two spheres with their webs. The moon people also have detachable genitals, so you probably couldn’t classify this as hard sci-fi per se, but it shares plenty of similarities with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars books.

Given that Scheherazade had to tell more than a thousand stories to the Sultan to keep from being executed, it makes sense some of these Arabian folk tales would contain some science fiction elements, no? Robots (well, puppets that dance without strings), different planets, an underwater city, a lesson on lunar real estate, ancient civilizations with ancient technology, and more grace a variety of smattering of stories, from “The City of Brass” to “Abu al-Husn and His Slave Girl Tawaddud.”

Originally titled The Treatise of Kāmil on the Prophet’s Biography, Ibn al-Nafis’ theological novel was released in English as Theologus Autodidactus (or, The Self-Taught Theologian). That’s because the story begins with a tween named Kamil who spontaneously generates on an island, with no idea of civilization, only to be found by scholars. Kamil uses his education and pure logic to conclude the existence of God and the factuality of Islam, but then he uses that same logic to reason out the end of the world, which would see the end of the sun rotating around the Earth (as was assumed) and complete social breakdown, giving the novel a literally apocalyptic ending.

Its full name is Somnium: Seu Opus Posthumum De Astronomia Lunari, or The Dream, or a Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy. It was written by famed German scholar/astronomer/philosopher Johannes Kepler in 1608, but as its title suggests, it wasn’t published until after the author’s death. It’s a very odd story about Kepler falling asleep and dreaming about an Icelandic teen who gets sold to Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. After learning astronomy, he returns to his mother to discover she’s been talking to demons, who are willing to fly them to the kingdom of Levania—aka the moon. Sounds more fantasy than sci-fi at first, but Kepler knew that both heat and oxygen would be in short supply on the trip, they’d have to slow down upon approach unless they wanted to crash-land, how the moon would look from the Earth, and more. Of course, the moon is home to a wide variety of flora and fauna on both of its sides, but the science in this fictional book is irrefutable.

After Domingo Gonsales gets stranded on an uninhabited island, he assembles a device that can harness a flock of geese and fly him away. After a few misadventures, his contraption brings him to the moon where its native inhabitants don’t speak any human language, but are, thank goodness, good Christians. They live in an unearthly paradise, although Domingo later learns this is because they swap out their bad Lunar kids for good Earth kids when necessary. This novel, written under a nom de plume by Church of England bishop Frances Godwin, a historian, linguist, and scientist, used recent discoveries in astronomy and cosmology to underpin his novel.

Although best known as a character in the play named after him, Cyrano de Bergerac was very real. The Other World is the pithy name for A Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon. Inadvertently using a rocket ship—the first in fiction, according to sci-fi-luminary Arthur C. Clarke—to travel to the moon, Dyrcona meets its four-legged, technologically advanced inhabitants. Although the protagonist discusses science and philosophy with the aliens, Cyrano spends a lot of time making fun of religion, which is why the book wasn’t published until after his death, and presumably why a manuscript of the book’s sequel—A Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun—has never been found.

Revolutionary hardly begins to describe Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (full title: The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World); first and foremost, it was written during a time when female authors were almost unheard of. Second, it accompanied Cavendish’s nonfiction science book Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, which was even less heard of, but it helped that Margaret was also the Duchess of Newcastle. In the book, a woman travels to the North Pole but gets mysteriously transported into another realm full of anthropomorphic animal people, gets made Empress, discusses science and philosophy with all the scholars there, meets the Duchess of Newcastle (long story), and then leads her new army when Great Britain invades, conquering them in turn. Besides musing on the nature of matter, where thunder and lightning come from, and more, her forces include submarines pulled by fish-men. Fun!

The French philosopher Voltaire wrote this novel about the titular alien who hails from a planet that orbits the star Sirius. After a small bit of scientific heresy, Micromégas decides to spend his 800-year exile traveling around the galaxy with a bit of help from the forces of attraction and gravity. He eventually arrives on Saturn and befriends one of the minuscule scholars there. They decide to travel to Earth, which the two deem to be lifeless until one of them spots a tiny speck that turns out to be a boat. Did I mention the Saturnian was 1.2 miles tall and Micromégas is 24 miles tall? No? My bad. The two fashion a system of communicating with humans, who eventually start telling the aliens about different philosophies, which they find flawed at best and infuriating at worst.

Although it’s primarily a political allegory/satire, Daniel Defoe’s (yes, he of Robinson Crusoe fame) The Consolidator, or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions From the World in the Moon still manages to get some sci-fi in there. Admittedly, the protagonist gets to the moon by a chariot pulled by two winged creatures—the titular Consolidator—but once there he meets the Lunarians, who used advanced telescopes to examine life on Earth and mostly note how dysfunctional the British government was. The Lunarians also had a “thinking machine” that could visually transmit what a person was thinking to a pair of goggles, so make of that what you will.

Jonathan Swift’s satire has basically been read non-stop since its publication nearly 300 years ago, but most people remember it for the protagonist Gulliver’s accidental discovery of the island of Lilliput, and the tiny denizens who live there. But one of the places Gulliver eventually visits is the flying island of Laputa, which flies thanks to its inhabitants’ control of magnetic levitation. Because Swift was determined to make fun of just about everyone, the Laputans are brilliant astronomers who are just so darn smart about everything they end up lost in thought, walking into things, and failing to notice their horny wives committing adultery. Weirdly, the Laputans discovered Mars had two moons… something nonfictional scientists wouldn’t discover until 1877.

Irish writer Samuel Madden published this strange novel which consisted entirely of fake letters sent during the almost unfathomably far-off future of 1997 from various countries to the Lord High Treasurer of King George IV (who in real life would come into existence long before ‘90s Georges like Clooney and H.W. Bush). These letters are mostly used to detail the future socio-political landscape of the world, which he was worried would be ruled by those insidious Catholics and Jesuits. So, obviously, there’s not a ton of science here, but many scholars have noted this is the first use of time travel in English fiction, and maybe anywhere.

Subtitled A Dream If There Ever Was One (well, that’s the English translation, at least), French author Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s look at France in the year 2440 was eerily prescient in some ways, which made it exceedingly controversial in his own time. After man sleeps his way, Rip Van Winkle-style, into the 25th century, he wakes up in the ruins of the Palace of Versailles. The France he finds is pretty much a utopia based on rationality and science. There are no taxes, no slavery, no poverty, no soldiers, and no religion. On the flip side, there are no vices such as alcohol and tobacco—Wikipedia notes even the pastry chefs had to go, as presumably their wares were too delicious and fattening—and most books have been burned for being secularly immoral. This book was, as you can guess, a major critique of the French monarchy and exploitative aristocracy and thus not particularly well-received by those groups. Mercier didn’t claim ownership until 1791, after the French revolution made it safe to do so.

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