Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand LeaguesUnder the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King arthur'sCourt and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.

Science Fiction Before 1900 was voted an Outstanding Acedemic Book in Choice. Paul K. Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre in general and its relation to other kinds of literature.

"Defoe and Fictional Time "shows Defoe's relevance to issues now central to criticism of the novel; relationships between narrative time and clock time, the influence of time concepts shared by writers and their audience, and above all the questions of how fiction shapes the phenomenal time of reading. Paul K. Alkon offers first a study of time in Defoe's fiction, with glances at Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne; and second a theoretical discussion of time in fiction. Arguing that eighteenth-century views of history account for the strange chronologies in "Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, " and "Roxana, " Alkon explores Defoe's innovative use of narrative sequences, frequency, spatial form, chronology, settings, tempo, and the reader's cumulative memories of a text. Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Year" is the first portrayal of a public duration--passing time shared by an entire population during a crisis--ranking Defoe among the most creative writers who have explored the way in which fictional time may influence reading time.

For nearly two thousand years, the future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 the French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance "Epigone," which carried the subtitle "the history of the future century." Unlike the stories of space travel that were popular at the time, or the tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin's romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age.

Paul Alkon's "Origins of Futuristic Fiction" examines the earliest works of prose fiction set in future time, the forgotten writings of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that are the precursors of such well-known masterpieces of the form as H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine," Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," and George Orwell's "1984." The first secular story to break the imaginative barrier against tales of the future, "Epigone" marked the emergence of a form unknown to classical, medieval, or renaissance literature. Guttin's courageous displacement of narrative into future time was followed by writers such as Samuel Madden, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Cousin de Granville, Mary Shelley, and Emile Souvestre, who wrote books with such titles as "Memoirs of the Twentieth Century," "The Year 2440," "The Last Man," and "The World As It Will Be."

Most extraordinary, though, may be Felix Bodin's great metafictional "Le roman de l'avenir," "the novel of the future." Both a narrative of the future and a poetics of the new genre, this book identified in the previous isolated works set in future time a situation rarely encountered in literary history, in which the possibility for a new form clearly existed without yet being altogether achieved. In the introduction to his uncompleted novel, Bodin presented his vision of the futuristic novel as a literature of realism, morality, and fantasy. His remarkably astute attempt to define the aesthetics of a major transformation in the relation between literature and time still stands as the basis for the poetics of futuristic fiction.

Tracing the early literary history of what became a major form of modern fiction, "Origins of Futuristic Fiction" examines the key works of the earliest writers of the genre not for what they betray of past expectations but for what they reveal about the formal problems that needed to be resolved before tales of the future could achieve their full power in the works of later novelists.