MarzAat reviews Brian Stableford’s scholarly history The Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950 (1985). His review also reveals a book unknown to me and not previously noted on Tentaclii…

I would recommend this book to others interested in the history of science fiction, but, I suspect, it’s been superseded by Stableford’s four volume New Atlantis. Published in 2017, it pushes his survey back in time to some works of proto-scientific romance starting with Francis Bacon.

New Atlantis: A Narrative History of Scientific Romance appears to be from Wildside Press though some booksellers have it as Borgo Press, and the cost of extracting a set of paperbacks from Wildside is currently $64 plus shipping. In the UK they can also be had via eBay, with free shipping. There appears to be no ebook version yet.

Vol. I: The Origins of Scientific Romance sounds rather interesting in its own right. A weary reviewer castigated the book for its compendious nature…

Its aim seems to be to enumerate in the most exhaustive fashion how virtually every form of storytelling and every instance of scientific or pseudoscientific speculation, from the ancient world to the end of the nineteenth century, contributed to the gestation of the six-decade life of the scientific romance.

… but that sounds fine to me. One may not want to actually read through 300 pages in that form. But it sounds like a good ‘dip in at random’ book, for idle moments with tea and toast. I’d be interested to see if Stableford noticed my local lad Erasmus Darwin as being a precursor of science-fiction.