ABSTRACT
Despite some notable precursors, such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy! (1827), the imagination of fictional futures only begins to become commonplace toward the end of the nineteenth century as sf crystallizes out of post-Romantic secular apocalypses and utopian speculations. It is as if the great narrative sweeps of history had to be composed before authors could consider the future not just as teleology but as narrative. Following the irrevocable changes of the American and French Revolutions, Darwinism and Marxism suggested that the flow of events moves beyond the present to a mysterious, often ineffable future. Just as the nineteenth-century historical novel made the past an imaginative territory in which to examine what we have become, so stories of the future increasingly turned to the exploration of possibility and the hopes and fears of what we might become.
