Mary shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) a variation of the Faust legend that had been current in European literature and folklore for centuries, established a useful and recurring science fiction myth, that of the mad scientist whose arrogance challenges the laws of nature and thus creates havoc. In the last decades of the 19th century, Jules Verne in France and H.G. Wells in England both produced novels that masqueraded as science although they were, in fact, pure fantasy, Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864; Eng. Trans., 1872) and twenty thousand languages under the sea (1869-70, Eng, trans, 1876) voiced the growing infatuation with the achievements of technology and helped develop two popular science-fiction themes; adventures in space and forays into unknown worlds on Earth. H.G. Wells, in The Time Machines (1895) and The War of The Worlds (1898), warned humankind of its precarious position in an indifferent universe. Other authors wrote fantasies about prehistory, future history, and lost empires, notions that derived from contemporary discoveries in geology and paleontology. The idea of utopias was given new form in Edward Bellamy’s looking Bacward (1988) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1891).
In addition to novels of fantasy, the United States contributed two early pulp magazines. The All Story (founded 1914) discovered several important authors, including Edgar rice Burroughs. Argosy (founded 1882) offered such respectable fantasist as James Branch Cabell and was the first to print the work of longtime science fiction writer Murray Leinster.
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