Francis Bacon 47 min read

Storm-driven sailors reach the hidden island of Bensalem, where an enlightened Christian society has built Salomon's House, a great institution devoted to the mastery of nature through science.

Francis Bacon's 1627 'New Atlantis' is a foundational utopia and a visionary prophecy of organized scientific research. Profound, prophetic, hugely influential. Read it for the fragment that dreamed the modern research institution into being, a cornerstone of both utopian and science fiction.

In its time

Published in 1627, during the Pre-1800, voyages to the moon, subterranean worlds, and philosophical utopias, the deep roots of the imaginative tradition, from kepler and cyrano to the enlightenment.

Reading it

47 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).