I am writing to announce the recent publication of my new book, Science Fiction and the Modern World: The Emergence of a Genre in a Revolutionary Age (Liverpool University Press, 2026).
This book considers the emergence of science fiction in the nineteenth century, but, rather than adding yet another genre history to a field that abounds with them, it takes on the more ambitious project of demonstrating how a new type of fiction that emerged during this period reflected a set of sweeping material and intellectual transformations.
The long nineteenth century was marked by a combination of industrialization, technological transformation, revolutionary scientific discovery, and political upheaval that recalibrated humanity’s understanding of its own place in the natural order. By examining the work of authors including Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells, as well as other primary sources, I explore how the nascent genre of science fiction captured a far-reaching but contradictory conceptual shift: on the one hand, a newfound sense of seemingly unprecedented human mastery over the natural world enabled by technological innovation occurring on an unprecedented scale and a new ideology of science; and, on the other, a set of discomfiting discoveries – from the fields of geology to evolutionary science – that decentered the human within the natural order. This persistent tension between power and insignificance, I suggest, marks both the genre and our thinking to this day.
The book is available for purchase from the publisher or the storefront of your choice. Please reach out with any questions about the book, how you might use it in the classroom, or my work more broadly.
Best,
Anastasia Klimchynskaya
