Science Fiction and the Modern World

The long nineteenth century was marked by a combination of political upheaval, technological transformation, and revolutionary scientific discovery that birthed a contradictory set of ideas about humanity’s place in the world and the scope of its power. Science Fiction and the Modern World reads the emergence of science fiction during this turbulent period as an expression of the ensuing recalibration of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Attending to a variety of authors across linguistic and national boundaries, including Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells, as well as other primary sources, this book demonstrates how the nascent genre of science fiction captured a far-reaching but contradictory conceptual shift: a newfound sense of seemingly unprecedented human mastery over the natural world coupled with a set of discomfiting discoveries that decentred the human within the natural order. Marked by a persistent tension between power and insignificance, such fictions propagated assumptions about progress, knowledge, order, and empire that define our thinking to this day.