A Pre-History of Science Fiction

This undergraduate seminar course traces a possible pre-history of the genre we now know as science fiction.  While science fiction is routinely tracked back to the nineteenth century, often to Frankenstein or The Last Man by Mary Shelley, this course looks at some earlier literary writings that share certain features of modern science fiction: utopian and dystopian societies, space travel, lunar travel, time travel, the mad experimental scientist, and unknown peoples or creatures. While the center of this course features texts associated with the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century (by Bacon, Kepler, Godwin, and Cavendish), it ranges back to the second century Lucian of Sarosota, and forward to the early nineteenth century with novels by Shelley.