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Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
Science-fiction & fantasy literature: a critical list with discussions.
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“The dim man was now again approaching our table, and this time he made up his mind to pause in front of it. ‘You don’t remember me,’ he said in a toneless voice.”
– “Enoch Soames”,
Max Beerbohm
What Is a “Golden Oldie”?
By the cutesy term “Golden Oldie”, I refer to works of fantasy or science fiction that antedate the usual supposed “beginnings” of speculative fiction. For fantasy, that beginning is said to be William Morris, whose novel The Glittering Plain appeared in 1891; for science fiction, it is said to be Mary Shelly and her novel Frankenstein, published in 1818.
Those are remarkably parochial views. The Golden Ass, a trenchant social-satire fantasy by the Roman writer Apuleius, dates to somewhere (opinions vary) between 158 to the late 180s CE; and Lucian of Samosata, circa 125 - 190 CE, wrote A True Story, another trenchant social satire that can only be called “science fiction” (involving as it does a journey to the Moon). And neither of those examples is really stretching the definition of “speculative fiction”.
Let us review that definition: speculative fiction (to me, anyway) is a tale in which one or more significant rules—whether of nature or of human behavior—work differently than those in the fields we know, and in which that difference is used to allow the author to better or more readily make comments on or offer explanations of The Human Condition.
That simple definition helps a lot. Consider, for example, The Epic of Gilgamesh. It is certainly fantastic enough, but it doesn’t pass the test, because it is not a literary device but rather a supposedly (more or less) true recounting of epic deeds—supernatural, but from an age where what we call “supernatural” was believed to be a part of everyday life. That is so for a good deal of what we now call “mythology” and even “folk tales”.
One clue, useful as a rule of thumb but not absolute, is whether a given work has an identifiable author. It is possible that some qualifying works might be so old or once-obscure that though they had a particular author that author’s name is now lost to history. But by and large, Anonymous did not write a lot of true speculative fiction.
Mind, having a known, named author does not in itself make a work with fantastic elements a work of speculative fiction. The best-known Arthurian works, the Morte d’Arthur cycle, were written by Thomas Malory, and there are fantastic episodes galore in them. But Malory was simply writing adventure stories spun out of the common folklore of the time, and—though it is quite difficult to be certain—it seems likely that either he or his intended readership, or both, would probably accept most or perhaps all of the fantastic elements as credible—that is, non-fantastic—in the real world as they then understood it.
Even with that thought, there remain some works hard to classify. Did Dante’s Commedia (onto which Boccaccio tacked the now-ubiquitous adjective “Divine”) take place in a truly fictional setting devised chiefly or wholly as a literary medium, or was he being another Malory? Wikipedia remarks that Dante’s “imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century.” But it is hard for a modern reader to doubt that the fiery author was not mainly interested in a setting in which to offer scathing and often quite personal satire. I would count it as legitimate speculative fiction.
Understand these two things: one, this is a sampling, not an exhaustive list, of early fantastic fiction; and two, the literary, as opposed to historical, value of these works is not clear to me, as—being honest—I have read only a few of them, and those now long ago.
It seems interesting that the great majority of these works use the element of the fantastic to enable social criticism, often scathing. Of the others, there are a couple of romantic adventures and a perhaps naive utopia. There is, I freely admit, some subjectivity at work here: some might say the Amadis and the Orlando are in the same class as Malory, but for vague reasons not worth the electrons to dilate on here, I feel them legitimate specfic.
Note well that most of these were not written in English, and so a good deal of one’s pleasure or lack of it in the reading may depend on the particular translator whose work you read. I have tried to discover who the generally preferred translators are for each work; in some cases, that wasn’t hard, but for several it was close to impossible. Caveat emptor.
Finally, as all of these are, obviously, in the public domain, they are likely available from one or another of the free-ebook sources on the web. (But some of the better translations may still be under copyright.) In any event, each title is a link to the AbeBooks listing for a good edition of that work.
(I have located, for some of these works, free on-line downloads; for those, I supply the links in the tan-colored boxes below the “Useful Link” for that work.)
by Lucian of Samosata [2nd century CE]
Preferred translation: any of H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler; A. M. Harmon; or Evan Hayes and Stephen Nimis.
Useful Link
Free on-line: Volume 1 - translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler
Free on-line: Volume 2 - translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler
Free on-line: Volume 3 - translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler
Free on-line: Volume 4 - translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler
Free on-line: The Divine Comedy (complete) - translated by John Ciardi
Amadis of Gaul
· Book I
· Book II
· Book III
· Book IV
by Montalvo (Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo) [1508 or earlier]
Preferred translation: Sue Burke (4 volumes)
Useful Link
Free on-line: Amadis of Gaul (complete, but in bite-sized chunks) - translated by Sue Burke
by François Rabelais [1532-1534]
Preferred translation: M. A. Screech.
Useful Link [archived copy]
Somnium
by Johannes Kepler [1609]
Preferred translation: Edward Rosen.
(Regrettably, even a “Fair” condition copy of Rosen’s translation now approaches a hundred dollars (for a roughly 20-page book). The second-best translation, by Patricia Frueh Kirkwood, stiil hovers around fifty dollars. Your best bet is to see if your local library can get an inter-library loan of one of those two editions, which is why I provide no bookseller links here. [For reference, the ISBNs are 9780486432823 for Rosen and 9780520323186 for Kirkwood.] Be aware that the countless cheap print-on-demand knockoff versions are all the translation by Normand Raymond Falardeau, said to be ghastly bad.)
Useful Link
by Cyrano de Bergerac [1657 & 1662]
(This is an omnibus of Cyrano’s two closely related fantastical works.) Preferred translation: Geoffrey Strachan
Useful Link
by Ludvig Holberg [1741]
Preferred translation: James I. McNelis, Jr. But there’s a problem here: the only edition by McNelis is now scarce and quite expensive. There are tons of (mostly) inexpensive English-language translations of the book to be found, but most do not specify the translator. The translation by John Gierlow is said by experts to be terrible, but I suspect that most or all the unlabelled print-on-demand knockoff editions use his version. If you want to read this book, either spring for the Bison Press McNelis edition or seek it out at a library.
Useful Link
(This work is often typically published in two volumes, but the linked edition seems to be the whole Hooper translation in one volume. I say “seems” because I could find no satisfactory description of that edition, and am simply working from the fact that its cover makes no mention of “volume”.
by Mercier (Louis-Sébastien Mercier) [1771]
Preferred translation: William Hooper.
(There is only one other and it is bad; Hooper’s 1772 translation is effectively Hobson’s Choice here.)
Useful Link
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