Theme: British fantasy fiction in the 20th century.(J. K. Rowling) Contents: Introduction

2.2. British fantasy fiction in the 20th century
⁵The 19th century saw a major acceleration of these trends and features, most clearly seen in the groundbreaking publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818. The short novel features the archetypal "mad scientist" experimenting with advanced technology.[40] In his book Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss claims Frankenstein represents "the first seminal work to which the label SF can be logically attached". It is also the first of the "mad scientist" subgenre. Although normally associated with the gothic horror genre, the novel introduces science fiction themes such as the use of technology for achievements beyond the scope of science at the time, and the alien as antagonist, furnishing a view of the human condition from an outside perspective. Aldiss argues that science fiction in general derives its conventions from the gothic novel. Mary Shelley's short story "Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman" (1826) sees a man frozen in ice revived in the present day, incorporating the now common science fiction theme of cryonics whilst also exemplifying Shelley's use of science as a conceit to drive her stories. Another futuristic Shelley novel, The Last Man, is also often cited[who?] as the first true science fiction novel.

In 1836 Alexander Veltman published Predki Kalimerosa: Aleksandr Filippovich Makedonskii (The forebears of Kalimeros: Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon), which has been called the first original Russian science fiction novel and the first novel to use time travel.[41] Albeit time travel achieved via a magical hippogriff rather than technological means. The narrator meets Aristotle, and goes on a voyage with Alexander the Great before returning to the 19th century.

Somehow influenced by the scientific theories of the 19th century, but most certainly by the idea of human progress, Victor Hugo wrote in The Legend of the Centuries (1859) a long poem in two parts that can be viewed like a dystopia/utopia fiction, called 20th century. It shows in a first scene the body of a broken huge ship, the greatest product of the prideful and foolish mankind that called it Leviathan, wandering in a desert world where the winds blow and the anger of the wounded Nature is; humanity, finally reunited and pacified, has gone toward the stars in a starship, to look for and to bring liberty into the light.

Other notable proto-science fiction authors and works of the early 19th century include:

Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's Le Dernier Homme (1805, The Last Man).

Historian Félix Bodin's Le Roman de l'Avenir (1834) and Emile Souvestre's Le Monde Tel Qu'il Sera (1846), two novels which try to predict what the next century will be like.
Jane C. Loudon's The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), in which Cheops is revived by scientific means into a world in political crisis, where technology has advanced to gas-flame jewelry and houses that migrate on rails, etc.
Louis Geoffroy's Napoleon et la Conquête du Monde (1836), an alternate history of a world conquered by Napoleon.
C.I. Defontenay's Star ou Psi de Cassiopée (1854), an Olaf Stapledon-like chronicle of an alien world and civilization.
Slovak (in that time Hungarian) author Gustáv Reuss's Gustáv Reuss Hviezdoveda alebo životopis Krutohlava, čo na Zemi, okolo Mesiaca a Slnka skúsil a čo o obežniciach, vlasaticiach, pôvode a konci sveta vedel ("The Science of the Stars or The Life of Krutohlav who Visited the Moon and the Sun and Knew about Planets, Comets and the Beginning and the End of the World" ) (1856). In this book Gustáv Reuss sends his hero named Krutohlav, a scholar from the Gemer region, right to the Moon... in a balloon. When the hero comes back, he builds a sort of a dragon-like interstellar ship, in which the characters travel around the whole known Solar System and eventually visit all the countries of the Earth.
Astronomer Camille Flammarion's La Pluralité des Mondes Habités (1862) which speculated on extraterrestrial life.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), a novel where the main character discovers a highly evolved subterranean civilization. PSI-powers are given a logical and scientific explanation, achieved through biological evolution and technological progress, rather than something magical or supernatural.
Edward S. Ellis's The Steam Man of the Prairies 1868 The first novel starts when Ethan Hopkins and Mickey McSquizzle—a "Yankee" and an "Irishman"—encounter a colossal, steam-powered man in the American prairies. This steam-man was constructed by Johnny Brainerd, a teenaged boy, who uses the steam-man to carry him in a carriage on various adventures.

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.[42] 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 Sea (1869) mixed daring romantic adventure with technology that was either up to the minute or logically extrapolated into the future. They were tremendous commercial successes and established that an author could make a career out of such whimsical material. L. Sprague de Camp calls Verne "the world's first full-time science fiction novelist."

Wells's stories, on the other hand, use science fiction devices to make didactic points about his society. In The Time Machine (1895), for example, the technical details of the machine are glossed over quickly so that the Time Traveller can tell a story that criticizes the stratification of English society. The story also uses Darwinian evolution (as would be expected in a former student of Darwin's champion, Huxley), and shows an awareness of Marxism. In The War of the Worlds (1898), the Martians' technology is not explained as it would have been in a Verne story, and the story is resolved by a deus ex machina, albeit a scientifically explained one.

The differences between Verne and Wells highlight a tension that has existed in science fiction throughout its history. The question of whether to present realistic technology or to focus on characters and ideas has been ever-present, as has the question of whether to tell an exciting story or make a didactic point.

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 that machines could one day become sentient and supplant the human race. In 1886 the novel The Future Eve by French author Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was published, where Thomas Edison builds an artificial woman. Although better known for Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote early science fiction, particularly using the character of Professor Challenger. Rudyard Kipling's contributions to the genre in the early 1900s made Campbell describe him as "the first modern science fiction writer".[43] Other writers in the field were Bengali science fiction authors such as Sukumar Ray and Begum Roquia Sakhawat Hussain, who wrote the earliest known feminist science fiction work, Sultana's Dream.[44] Another early feminist science fiction work at the time was Charlotte Perkins Gilman' Herland. Wells and Verne both had an international readership and influenced writers in America, especially. Soon a home-grown American science fiction was thriving. European writers found more readers by selling to the American market and writing in an Americanised style.

In the last decades of the 19th century, works of science fiction for adults and children were numerous in America, though it was not yet given the name "science fiction." There were science-fiction elements in the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Fitz-James O'Brien. Edgar Allan Poe is often mentioned with Verne and Wells as the founders of science fiction although Mary Shelley's Frankenstein predates these. A number of his short stories, and the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket are science fictional. An 1827 satiric novel by philosopher George Tucker A Voyage to the Moon is sometimes cited as the first American science fiction novel.[45]

In 1835 Edgar Allan Poe published a short story, "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" in which a flight to the moon in a balloon is described. It has an account of the launch, the construction of the cabin, descriptions of strata and many more science-like aspects.[46] In addition to Poe's account the story written in 1813 by the Dutch Willem Bilderdijk is remarkable. In his novel Kort verhaal van eene aanmerkelijke luchtreis en nieuwe planeetontdekking (Short account of a remarkable journey into the skies and discovery of a new planet) Bilderdijk tells of a European somewhat stranded in an Arabic country where he boasts he is able to build a balloon that can lift people and let them fly through the air. The gasses used turn out to be far more powerful than expected and after a while he lands on a planet positioned between earth and moon. The writer uses the story to portray an overview of scientific knowledge concerning the moon in all sorts of aspects the traveller to that place would encounter. Quite a few similarities can be found in the story Poe published some twenty years later.

John Leonard Riddell, a Professor of Chemistry in New Orleans, published the short story Orrin Lindsay's plan of aerial navigation, with a narrative of his explorations in the higher regions of the atmosphere, and his wonderful voyage round the moon! in 1847 on a pamphlet. It tells the story of the student Orrin Lindsay who invents an alloy that prevents gravitational attraction, and in a spherical craft leaves earth and travel to the moon. The story contains algebra and scientific footnotes, which makes it an early example of hard science fiction.[47]

William Henry Rhodes published in 1871 the tale The Case of Summerfield in the Sacramento Union newspaper, and introduced weapon of mass destruction. A mad scientist and villain called Black Bart makes an attempt to blackmail the world with a powder made of potassium, able to destroy the planet by turning its waters into fire.

Charles Curtis Dail, a Kentucky lawyer, published in 1890 the novel Willmoth the Wanderer, or The Man from Saturn, had his protagonist travel through the solar system by covering his body with an anti-gravity ointment.[48][49]

The newspaper man Edward Page Mitchell would publish his innovative science fiction short stories in The Sun for more than a decade, except for his first story which was published in Scribner's Monthly in 1874. His stories included invisibility, faster than light travels, teleportation, time travel, cryogenics, mind transfer, mutants, cyborgs and mechanical brains.

One of the most successful works of early American science fiction was the second-best selling novel in the U.S. in the 19th century: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), its effects extending far beyond the field of literature. Looking Backward extrapolates a future society based on observation of the current society.

In 1894, Will Harben published "Land of the Changing Sun," a dystopian fantasy set at the center of the earth. In Harben's tale, the earth's core is populated by a scientifically advanced civilization, living beneath the glow of a mechanical sun.

Mark Twain explored themes of science in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. By means of "transmigration of souls", "transposition of epochs – and bodies" Twain's Yankee is transported back in time and his knowledge of 19th-century technology with him. Written in 1889, A Connecticut Yankee seems to predict the events of World War I, when Europe's old ideas of chivalry in warfare were shattered by new weapons and tactics.

⁶American author L. Frank Baum's series of 14 books (1900–1920) based in his outlandish Land of Oz setting, contained depictions of strange weapons (Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Glinda of Oz), mechanical men (Tik-Tok of Oz) and a bevy of not-yet-realized technological inventions and devices including perhaps the first literary appearance of handheld wireless communicators (Tik-Tok of Oz).

Jack London wrote several science fiction stories, including "The Red One" (a story involving extraterrestrials), The Iron Heel (set in the future from London's point of view) and "The Unparalleled Invasion" (a story involving future germ warfare and ethnic cleansing). He also wrote a story about invisibility and a story about an irresistible energy weapon. These stories began to change the features of science fiction.

Edward Everett Hale wrote The Brick Moon, a Verne-inspired novel notable as the first work to describe an artificial satellite. Written in much the same style as his other work, it employs pseudojournalistic realism to tell an adventure story with little basis in reality.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) began writing science fiction for pulp magazines just before World War I, getting his first story Under the Moons of Mars published in 1912. He continued to publish adventure stories, many of them science fiction, throughout the rest of his life. The pulps published adventure stories of all kinds. Science fiction stories had to fit in alongside murder mysteries, horror, fantasy and Edgar Rice Burroughs' own Tarzan.