Friend of the magazine Cory Gross, who blogs at Voyages Extraordinaries, is out with a second anthology of nineteenth-century science fiction, titled Science Fiction of Antebellum America: An Anthology.
The book, which can be ordered on Amazon, collects the earliest satires, hoaxes, macabre tales, lost world fantasies and fairy tales that established the genre of science fiction in the heady days between the American Revolution and the Civil War.
Cory writes that science fiction and the United States of America were created together:
The same Enlightenment ideals that gave rise to the United States also gave birth to science fiction, and the genre developed along with the country. Pioneering authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fitz-James O’Brien, and Washington Irving experimented with this new kind of story to capture the fears and ambitions of a new country, a new frontier, and a new era in human history.
If that sounds right up your alley, also take a look at Cory’s earlier volume, Science Fiction of America’s Gilded Age: An Anthology, which covers the period between the Civil War and World War I.
