Some list Homer. And to a certain extent that’s so: he wrote voyages to the unknown worlds and to hell and back. And some list the Egyptian Sinbad, Sinhue, who did likewise: in the days before space travel, there were ‘exploration’ stories. But to really get the earliest, I think you’d have to go to Gilgamesh, who journeys to the Scorpion Guards at the limit of the world, and who pursues immortality, has it within his hands, and loses it while he sleeps, as a snake devours the plant that would confer it. All these are imaginative fiction which we might equate with space travel: the protagonists explore off the map places and encounter strange beings and forces.
The Roman writer Lucian (b. 125) envisioned a voyage to the Moon.
According to one researcher, you can probably put Marco Polo (b. 1254) on the pile: she did a thorough search of indexed Chinese records of the time and turns up no such visitor…and the Chinese were obsessive indexers. [Possibly he got TO the Silk Road and simply chronicled travelers’ tales.]
In the mid-1600’s Cyrano de Bergerac (b 1619) had a voyage to the Moon powered by fireworks.
But Jules Verne (b. 1828) was much more the first sf writer: a) he confronted a modern era’s skepticism and worry about machines by romanticizing the Machine b) he, more than de Bergerac, tried to envision how such machines would work. c) he integrated his machines into a ‘changed world,’ ie, showed what effect such things might have and d) he was pretty much an optimist about the effect of science, in terms of people not only coping but creating. In 20000 Leagues, eg, Nemo might have been a disillusioned, bitter nutjob, but he was also creating a sort of utopia for his crew and seeking in the ocean a protected zone without the problems of the world as he saw them.
Following him was HG Wells—and to an extent Conan Doyle and H Rider Haggard, who both wrote ‘Lost World’ stories. You could begin, in their era, to add others, like Edgar Rice Burroughs, born in 1875, and dying in 1950.
Without doing any research, first, I think “SF” has to be taken strictly as Science Fiction. If you allow in fantasy, it is so gentle a transition from folk tales to fantasy, I don’t think a meaningful line can be drawn. That aside, perhaps it’s worthwhile to distinguish between the first SF story (would it have to follow the modern rule allowing only one fantastic technology?) and the first SF writer, one who writes not just one or two SF stories, but a substantial body of them. That suggests Verne to me.
Doing a little research, Wikipedia mentions these, rediscovered and published by Verne’s great grandson:
Voyage en Angleterre et en Ecosse (Backwards to Britain, 1860, first published 1989)
Paris au XXe siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century, 1863, first published 1994)
Describing the latter, “The novel’s main character is 16-year-old Michel Dufrénoy, who graduates with a major in literature and the classics, but finds they have been forgotten in a futuristic world where only business and technology are valued.”
“His publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, would not release the book because he thought it was too unbelievable…”
There were several loosely classed fantasy / voyage / utopian stories around the 1700’s (18th century) in English and French lit. Stories like Gulliver’s Travels, for instance. One or two of my college lit books had excerpts from these. So there were voyages to imaginary lands and peoples with fantastical political and social systems and physical characteristics. There were also voyages through the “celestial aether” to the Moon or cloud-cities and so on. I need to get those out and reread, they were neat little excerpts, really glossed over in the book and lecture.
I can’t recall if there was some sort of balloon or parachute in any of those, aside from Verne’s later Around the World in 80 Days or the balloon used to get to the Mysterious Island. (Hah, the movie version of the “giant prehistoric birds” got to me as a kid. 🙂 )
When I read the prologue chapters of Foreigner 1, I took several things in there to be homages to the French and English Enlightenment, and later learned the great musical 1776 might’ve been an inspiration too.
In books on early SF, I’ve seen Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula as two other potential early SF stories, more so Frankenstein. But Jules Verne’s stories are generally listed as the first true SF, unless the critic goes for voyage fantasies too.
One unusual thing, if you stretch your imagination only a little, many of the ancient hero myths and religious or philosophical stories tell of adventures that sound like a Bronze Age or pre-Bronze Age person’s understanding of a technological or space-faring culture. People shooting lightning bolts from arrows, hammers, or other devices? Strange powers and immortality? Mythical beasts and creatures? Other ways of birth, gestation, or death, or coming back, that might be other than lack of knowledge about, say, human biology?
Then there are things that could happen, but get embellished upon, so that there are probably real people behind the gods, demigods, and heroes whose stories grew into legend and folklore and religious stories, but might have begun as someone who did a mighty, heroic deed, or some very unlikely thing happened, but had a real origin, now forgotten.
I think I agree with Walt, some definition of terms is necessary, in particulat Science Fiction vs Speculative Fiction.
Science as we know it today probably dates to the “Natural Philosophers” of the 17th Century. Maybe we could extend it back to the medieval alchemists. The earliest I’d be prepared to agree to would be the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece.
The question leads us to the definition of Science, if we want to take it that far. But perhaps we may stop a bit short and agree that the essence of Science Fiction is that the cause and effect relationships in the story must behave as the known Universe is observed to behave. The author’s freedom is to extrapolate from those, e.g. Hal Clement’s “Mission of Gravity”, or to propose new cause and effect relationships consistent with the known Universe but not yet observed, e.g. “warp drive”.
There is also Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440 (The Year 2440), in which the author imagines a Paris of the far future.
You will find an 18th century English translation on Google Books under the title Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred.
But I would say that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is probably the first work that can really be classified as SF in the modern sense
Mary Shelley also wrote a post-apocalyptic book “The Last Man” written in 1826 describing the changes in society and the effects on individual people of a world-wide plague. It is very evocative and seemed to me to be similar (as a precursor) to modern to ventures like “I am Legend”. I think she qualifies as an author of more than one work that can be called SF.
I see Frankenstein as a screed on the responsibilities of parenthood, and what happens when they are not met. I’ll have to find and read “The Last Man”.
On the subject of Frankenstein, the idea of reanimating a dead person was already being discussed in the decades before Mary Shelly wrote. So the idea wasn’t original, but her treatment of it was.
Science to me is inquiry…into the natural world and its limits, or the quest FOR science, in the case of being born before anyone had put a name to chemistry and physics. Some of our ‘science’ is likely as ‘off’ relative to our general body of knowledge as the notion of the Scorpion Guards at the edge of the human world, but we have no way to know it until science goes there.
If you wanna go there… 😉
But one of the essential points of Science is “falsifiability”. That is, in Science anything we think we know is “provisional”. Things that are long regarded as settled, e.g. Newton’s Laws of Motion, can be shown to be wrong and replaced, by General Relativity in that case.
Religious fundamentalists point to changing scientific “theories” (which they totally misunderstand) as a flaw in the Scientific Method. They are used to truths for now and all time. In fact, scientists see these corrections as one of its great strengths.
Not SF, but in a closely-related speculative genre, is Thomas More’s Utopia. Construction of an imaginary-but-plausible society, with advantages and disadvantages different from those in the readers’ society—maybe it is SF?
It’s certainly the earliest book I can think of whose critics include (by Larry Niven’s definition of the word) “idiots”.
Every time someone describes Gilgamesh, I think to myself “That sounds like a Michael Moorcock story.”
Lol—if you can get a good translation, it’s great. He goes to talk to Utanapishtim (love that name) who is Noah, and then goes after the herb of immortality, defeats the Wild Man, Enkidu, who is kind of like an abominable snowman with serious resemblance to Esau in the Bible, and Enkidu becomes his friend and sidekick. Some of the imagery is pretty cool. The Sumerians envisioned the great Dragon Sea as being the chaos before there was a world, and they call that the Tiamat, and then the world happened, floating (flat) and girded by the Tiamat, which also lies partly under it. It viewed the rivers and such as sort of like springs coming out of this vaster universe of turbulent water, and when it talks in the Bible about the Noah flood and opening the ‘springs of the deep,’ it is in reference to this universe-concept. This is why there are Scorpion Guards at the gates, because it’s important to barrier out the Tiamat…it’s kind of a universe teetering always on the edge of apocalypse, since the Tiamat could break out at any time…
Among the early SF authors you shouldn’t forget Hans Dominik, Arthur Mahraun (both politically problematic), and especially Konstantin Ziolkowski.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/28/life-start-on-mars-origin-martians-new-evidence_n_3830652.html?ncid=webmail25
I think it’s kind of a stretch. Wasn’t it Heinlien who posited this?
Mars was impacted some time ago by something big enough to blow off a good deal of mantle into space. Its crust is thinner over one very big area. With that would have gone pieces of rock, which could be inhabited, which could survive entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
‘Live’ rock is something we use in aquaria: rock soaked in seawater and permeated with bacteria, clear to the core. Takes about 12 weeks for a fist-sized chunk of totally dry rock to pick up passengers clear to the core.
And here is something which deep cave have taught us: miles down in the crust of the earth, yes, bacteria. So planets (and possibly moons, asteroids, and comets) may have this sort of bacteria going on—and once one planet has it—everybody catches it, like the common cold.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23855436
Off topic, but may be of interest:
Roman nanotechnology
That’s much neater than a unicorn horn cup!
I vote for using that for art as well as biochem science. Very curious, clever cup.
OMG… just OMG!!!
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/37/image/a/
My son posted this to me full size.
Who is the Marco Polo researcher you mentioned? I hadn’t heard that, and it sounds really interesting. I want to go digging farther.
I don’t know who the researcher is, but I remember reading that Polo’s Chinese place names were all based on the ones used by Muslim traders.
Don’t forget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_Arthur%27s_Court
Re Marco Polo, this covers part of it: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/presence-marco-polo.html
But in the absence of Polo from court records in China, I am myself more disposed to believe he sat somewhere in a city like Samarkand, sipping tea and talking, through local translators, with caravan masters who came and went…wrote down THEIR adventures and their accounts of what was at the other end.
The main “denier” of Marco Polo’s tale is Frances Wood in “Did Marco Polo go to China?”, but her work is not very well regarded. Apparently, most scholars do think that Polo really went to China and his record is quite accurate…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo#Debate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Did_Marco_Polo_go_to_China%3F