The Victorian Roots of Science Fiction

Science fiction did not begin with the 1950s pulps, or even with the word "science fiction" itself. It began in the 19th century, in the age of steam and electricity and empire, when writers first started asking the question that defines the genre: what if?, and answered it with the tools of the new science.

These are the scientific romances: tales of journeys to the centre of the earth and the surface of the moon, of vanished worlds and coming catastrophes, of machines that could do the impossible. They're the deep past of the future, and they're where every later rocket and robot ultimately comes from.

Why read the Victorians?

Partly for the pleasure of origins, you can watch the genre inventing its own furniture in real time, before any of it had become cliché. And partly because the best of them are simply great stories: strange, ambitious, and written with a 19th-century seriousness of purpose that still lands.

Where to start

Our The Victorian Roots collection gathers the scientific romances and lost-world tales that gave the genre its shape. You can also browse straight into the decades themselves, the 1890s and 1880s are especially rich, to see the century's imagination decade by decade. All free to read.