Science fiction did not suddenly appear when Jules Verne loaded passengers into a cannon or when H.G. Wells misplaced a time traveler. Long before the genre had a name, writers were already launching heroes toward the Moon, reviving ancient pharaohs, imagining microscopic civilizations, building murderous robots, and worrying that technology might turn society into one enormous customer-service department.
The following underrated sci-fi stories published before 1864 reveal how deeply the genre’s roots extend. Some are novels, some are shorter tales, and several disguise their speculation as satire, philosophy, fantasy, or imaginary travel. What unites them is a distinctly science-fictional question: What happens when new knowledge changes the limits of the possible?
What Counts as Science Fiction Before Science Fiction?
The label “science fiction” was not commonly used until the twentieth century, so applying it to older literature requires some flexibility. Early speculative writers rarely separated astronomy, philosophy, religion, satire, and fiction into tidy bookstore categories. Their imagined inventions might coexist with spirits, alchemy, or talking trees.
Nevertheless, these stories use the scientific ideas available in their eras to explore unfamiliar worlds, future societies, artificial life, advanced machines, and humanity’s place in the universe. They are not merely fairy tales with shinier furniture. They extrapolate from contemporary debates about astronomy, microscopy, electricity, industrialization, and political organization.
That makes them important ancestors of modern science fictionand far more entertaining than their dusty publication dates suggest.
The 10 Best Underrated Early Science-Fiction Stories
10. Somnium by Johannes Kepler 1634
Johannes Kepler is better remembered for describing planetary motion than for writing lunar fiction. Yet Somnium, published posthumously in 1634, may be one of the earliest serious attempts to imagine the Moon as a physical world rather than a decorative lamp hanging over Earth.
The narrative follows a young man whose mother communicates with a spirit capable of describing a journey to the Moon. The transportation method is supernatural, but Kepler uses the voyage to examine genuine astronomical problems. He considers the movement of Earth as observed from the lunar surface, the extreme length of lunar days and nights, and the environmental conditions that hypothetical Moon creatures might face.
Kepler even included extensive explanatory notes, apparently deciding that his strange lunar dream required the seventeenth-century equivalent of a deluxe Blu-ray commentary track.
Somnium matters because it transforms current astronomy into worldbuilding. Its Moon is speculative, but it is also governed by physical conditions. Modern hard science fiction would later build entire civilizations from exactly this kind of reasoning.
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9. The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin 1638
Francis Godwin’s hero, Domingo Gonsales, reaches the Moon using a flying machine powered by large migratory birds called gansas. The engineering would probably receive several concerned emails from the Federal Aviation Administration, but the idea represents an important step toward technological space travel.
Published after Godwin’s death in 1638, The Man in the Moone sends Gonsales to a populated lunar world inhabited by tall, peaceful people. More significantly, the traveler looks back from the Moon and sees Earth moving across the sky. That reversal of perspective reflects the era’s changing understanding of the cosmos after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler.
The story combines adventure, utopian speculation, communication with extraterrestrials, and an invented flight system. Its gansa-powered vehicle may seem charmingly absurd, but its function is recognizably science-fictional: a machine allows a human being to leave Earth and encounter another civilization.
Centuries before sleek rockets appeared on book covers, Godwin demonstrated that readers would happily board a questionable spacecraft if the destination sounded interesting enough.
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8. The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish 1666
Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World begins with a kidnapped woman entering another world near the North Pole. She soon meets talking Bear-men, Bird-men, Fish-men, Worm-men, and other hybrid inhabitants. Instead of spending the novel screaming, she becomes their empress.
The Blazing World contains learned societies devoted to astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, and experimental science. Its inhabitants use advanced ships, including vessels capable of traveling beneath the water. Cavendish also discusses microscopes, matter, perception, alternate worlds, and the limitations of scientific institutions.
Much of the novel is playful satire. The empress listens to experts disagree, establishes research programs, reorganizes society, and eventually deploys the world’s technologies in war. In other words, she discovers that managing scientists can be more complicated than conquering a parallel dimension.
The book is especially remarkable for placing a woman at the center of intellectual and political power. Cavendish did not merely imagine a new planet; she created a space in which women could direct science rather than wait outside the meeting room.
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7. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century by Samuel Madden 1733
Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is one of the earliest prose works set in a precisely dated future. Published in 1733, it presents diplomatic documents supposedly written during 1997 and 1998 and transported back to the eighteenth century.
The mechanism involves a supernatural messenger rather than a polished time machine. Even so, the narrative performs a crucial science-fiction maneuver: it creates distance from the present by treating the future as recorded history.
Madden uses this device largely for political and religious satire. His imagined twentieth century is not a detailed technological wonderland, but the formal experiment is groundbreaking. The future is no longer a vague prophecy. It is a specific historical location with governments, international relationships, correspondence, and consequences.
The book had limited influence, partly because Madden tried to suppress it soon after publication. That decision was not ideal for long-term brand recognition. Today, however, the work deserves attention as an early ancestor of future histories, alternate timelines, documentary science fiction, and stories assembled from reports sent across time.
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6. Niels Klim’s Underground Travels by Ludvig Holberg 1741
In Ludvig Holberg’s 1741 novel, Niels Klim falls through a mountain opening and discovers a populated world inside Earth. There he encounters the planet Nazar, intelligent mobile trees, unusual political systems, and provinces inhabited by creatures with radically different customs.
The underground geography draws upon hollow-Earth theories that serious thinkers had previously discussed. Holberg turns that speculative model into a laboratory for comparing societies. One region is governed by women, while elsewhere Klim encounters beings shaped like musical instruments. Apparently, even the center of Earth has experimental local government and extremely committed marching bands.
Like Jonathan Swift, Holberg uses imaginary travel to challenge prejudice, arrogance, inequality, and religious intolerance. The protagonist repeatedly judges other cultures by his own standards, only to expose the weaknesses of those standards.
The science is outdated, but the method is timeless: invent an alien environment, populate it with unfamiliar societies, and use the encounter to make the reader reconsider what is considered “normal.” That structure remains central to sociological science fiction today.
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5. Micromégas by Voltaire 1752
Voltaire’s Micromégas follows an enormous traveler from a planet orbiting Sirius. After visiting Saturn and befriending a comparatively tiny Saturnian, he journeys to Earth. The two extraterrestrials initially struggle to believe that microscopic humans could possess intelligence.
Through improvised magnification, they eventually communicate with people aboard a ship. The conversation quickly becomes a satire of warfare, philosophy, religious certainty, and humanity’s confidence that the universe was designed with us as its main attraction.
The scale of the characters allows Voltaire to transform cosmic proportions into comedy. Human conflicts that appear enormously important to us seem ludicrous when viewed by beings who can almost overlook our entire species while cleaning under a fingernail.
Yet the story offers more than excellent jokes about human smallness. It imagines intelligent extraterrestrial life, interplanetary travel, alien biology, advanced scientific instruments, and the philosophical consequences of encountering civilizations older and larger than our own.
Micromégas is frequently mentioned in histories of science fiction but far less frequently read. That is unfortunate, because it remains sharp, accessible, and wonderfully rude about human self-importance.
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4. The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century by Jane Webb 1827
Jane Webb, later known as Jane C. Loudon, wrote The Mummy! while still a teenager. Published in 1827, the three-volume novel is set in a twenty-second-century Britain filled with air travel, steam-powered devices, advanced communications, and mechanical workers.
The plot begins when an experiment using a galvanic battery revives the Egyptian pharaoh Cheops. He escapes in a balloon and becomes involved in Britain’s political and romantic affairs. Yes, the future apparently contains both revolutionary technology and complicated courtship. Some inventions change; other problems merely acquire steam engines.
The novel imagines automated professionals, rapid communication systems, mobile buildings, and machines performing everyday labor. At the same time, it refuses to present technological progress as automatic moral progress. Its futuristic society remains vulnerable to vanity, ambition, political manipulation, and social inequality.
By combining reanimation, electricity, automation, future history, and social satire, Webb created a missing link between Gothic fiction and later technological science fiction. The book’s enormous size and tangled romantic plot have limited its modern popularity, but its speculative ambition is difficult to overstate.
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3. The World as It Will Be by Émile Souvestre 1846
Émile Souvestre’s illustrated novel Le Monde tel qu’il sera, commonly translated as The World as It Will Be or The World as It Shall Be, transports a young couple into the year 3000.
What they find is not a sparkling utopia. Souvestre imagines a mechanized, commercialized civilization in which industrial efficiency has overwhelmed individuality, compassion, and meaningful culture. Education, politics, work, and social relationships have been reorganized around production and consumption.
The result anticipates later dystopian science fiction. Instead of asking whether machines will function, Souvestre asks what kind of society will form when mechanical values influence every institution. His future is absurd enough to be funny and familiar enough to be uncomfortable.
The novel’s illustrations strengthen the satire by presenting futuristic systems with the visual confidence of a product catalog. Readers are invited to admire the inventions and then notice that the people using them appear increasingly standardized.
Long before dystopias became crowded with surveillance screens and matching gray uniforms, Souvestre recognized that a nightmare future might arrive dressed as convenience.
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2. “The Bell-Tower” by Herman Melville 1855
Herman Melville is not usually included in conversations about early robot fiction, but “The Bell-Tower” contains one of the nineteenth century’s most unsettling mechanical creations.
The story centers on Bannadonna, an ambitious engineer commissioned to build a magnificent Italian bell tower. He also constructs a powerful automaton designed to move independently and strike the bell with perfect precision.
Bannadonna views machinery as a path to mastery over nature. His creation, however, does exactly what it was built to do without understanding context, mercy, or human fragility. The machine ultimately kills its creator, and the tower later collapses.
The tale anticipates several themes that would become science-fiction standards: the isolated inventor, artificial labor, technological pride, unintended consequences, and a machine whose obedience is more dangerous than rebellion.
Modern stories often worry that artificial intelligence will refuse to follow instructions. Melville suggests another possibility: the machine follows the instructions perfectly, and that is the problem.
Compact, symbolic, and grimly efficient, “The Bell-Tower” deserves recognition beside better-known stories about artificial beings.
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1. “The Diamond Lens” by Fitz-James O’Brien 1858
Published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1858, “The Diamond Lens” follows a scientist named Linley who becomes obsessed with building the most powerful microscope ever created.
After obtaining a massive diamond through morally catastrophic means, he constructs a lens capable of revealing a beautiful microscopic world inside a drop of water. There he sees a tiny woman whom he names Animula and immediately turns scientific observation into a one-sided romantic relationship.
The premise combines real excitement surrounding nineteenth-century microscopy with a speculative breakthrough. An improved instrument does not merely enlarge known life; it opens access to an entirely unsuspected civilization.
O’Brien also explores the danger of obsession. Linley’s supposed devotion to knowledge becomes possessive and destructive. He cannot communicate with Animula, cannot enter her environment, and cannot accept that observing something does not make it his property.
The conclusion is both scientifically inevitable and emotionally brutal: the drop of water begins to evaporate. All the brilliance of Linley’s instrument cannot protect the world it reveals.
“The Diamond Lens” feels surprisingly modern because it combines technological wonder with ethical unease. It asks whether discovery produces responsibility, obsession, or bothand whether a scientist can truly understand a world when he only sees it through glass.
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What These Forgotten Stories Contributed to Science Fiction
These early science-fiction stories introduced ideas that later writers would turn into entire subgenres. Somnium and The Man in the Moone helped transform the Moon into a destination. The Blazing World treated an alternate world as a place for scientific and political experimentation. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century demonstrated that the future could be narrated as history.
Niels Klim’s Underground Travels used a strange world to compare social systems. Micromégas approached humanity from an extraterrestrial viewpoint. The Mummy! filled the future with automation and advanced transportation. Souvestre developed an industrial dystopia, while Melville and O’Brien examined the moral hazards of machines and scientific instruments.
Their predictions were not always accurate. Humans did not reach the Moon behind a team of unusually motivated birds, and steam-powered lawyers have not become commonalthough some legal bills suggest a substantial fuel requirement.
Accuracy, however, is not the only measure of successful speculative fiction. These writers recognized that scientific change alters perspective. A telescope changes humanity’s position in the cosmos. A microscope reveals invisible life. A machine changes labor. A future setting turns current habits into historical curiosities.
That intellectual movement from discovery to consequence is the heartbeat of science fiction.
A Reader’s Experience: Exploring Science Fiction Before 1864
Reading science fiction written before 1864 can initially feel like entering a laboratory where someone has stored philosophical debates, travel narratives, political jokes, supernatural machinery, and at least one talking tree in the same cabinet. The genre boundaries familiar to modern readers do not yet exist, so the books move freely between ideas that would now be shelved separately.
The best approach is to read them as experiments rather than imperfect versions of contemporary novels. Their pacing may be uneven. A lunar adventure can suddenly pause for twenty pages of astronomy. A future novel may abandon its most exciting invention to investigate a marriage proposal. Characters sometimes behave less like psychologically realistic individuals and more like mobile platforms carrying the author’s opinions.
Once those expectations are adjusted, the experience becomes rewarding. The strangeness of the works allows readers to witness familiar science-fiction concepts before conventions hardened around them. Godwin’s bird-powered Moon vehicle feels fresh because it predates the visual language of rockets. Cavendish’s hybrid scientists are unpredictable because they were created before fictional alien species came with established templates. Melville’s automaton is frightening without software, glowing eyes, or a dramatic speech about eliminating humanity.
It is also fascinating to notice which concerns have survived. Early writers worried that experts might become detached from ordinary life, that machines could encourage cruelty, that wealth might dominate politics, and that people would mistake technological sophistication for wisdom. Apparently, humanity has been promising to address these issues after the next administrative meeting for several centuries.
Reading the stories chronologically creates an especially useful experience. In the seventeenth-century works, astronomy opens physical worlds beyond Earth. Eighteenth-century writers use imaginary voyages and future documents to challenge social assumptions. By the nineteenth century, electricity, steam power, industrialization, automation, and scientific instruments become central narrative forces.
Readers may also benefit from choosing accessible editions with introductions or explanatory notes. Older spelling and long sentences can slow the experience, but many of these works are available in modern digital editions. Beginning with shorter texts such as Micromégas, “The Bell-Tower,” or “The Diamond Lens” makes the transition easier before attempting sprawling novels such as The Mummy!.
Most importantly, these stories change how literary history feels. Science fiction stops looking like a genre invented by a few famous nineteenth-century novelists and starts resembling a centuries-long conversation. Astronomers, satirists, philosophers, Gothic writers, social critics, and experimental storytellers all contributed pieces before anyone agreed on a name.
The experience is similar to exploring an old workshop and discovering prototypes of devices that supposedly belonged to the future. Some are awkward. Some are brilliant. Several appear unsafe to operate indoors. Together, however, they reveal that the desire to imagine other worlds is nearly as persistent as the desire to complain about this one.
Conclusion
The most underrated sci-fi stories before 1864 prove that speculative fiction has never depended on modern electronics, spacesuits, or scientifically accurate rocket engines. It depends on curiosity.
These writers looked at telescopes, microscopes, astronomical theories, electricity, industrial machinery, and political change, then asked what might happen next. Their answers included inhabited moons, hollow planets, automated workers, resurrected pharaohs, microscopic women, dystopian consumer societies, and machines that destroy their makers.
Modern readers will encounter outdated science and unfamiliar storytelling styles, but they will also find remarkably current questions about artificial life, technological power, scientific ethics, cultural difference, and human arrogance. The future may have changed since these works were written. Our habit of worrying about it has not.
