![]() Science fiction, however, has always offered more than is expected. Projections about technology and the future came face-to-face with contemporary anxieties to create a genre that has since grown so pervasive that many readers take its narratives for granted as the stuff of cliché. Wells, whose novels The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898) are also considered proto–science fiction, or even Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley (her 1826 novel, The Last Man, takes place in a future world decimated by plague), Bellamy was staking out a territory that had yet to be determined. Verne called his books Voyages Extraordinaires, which is certainly part of science fiction’s visionary appeal. How could he? Although by the 1860s Jules Verne had begun to produce the speculative adventure novels- Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and many others-that have long been regarded as among the earliest science fiction, there was no label to apply to what Bellamy was doing. When Edward Bellamy published his utopian novel Looking Backward in 1888, he would never have referred to it as science fiction. ![]() ![]() ILLUSTRATION REPRODUCED COURTESY OF BONESTELL LLC ![]()
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