The relationship between science fiction and science, which dates back to the 19th century. Works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), with its horrific picture of life created through the application of (then current) scientific principles running amuck, paved the way for later writers. Science fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was dominated by two writers: Frenchman Jules Verne and Englishman H. G. Wells. These two illustrate two different schools of science fiction: science fiction based on invention, and science fiction based on speculation.
Verne’s work, including Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and The Mysterious Island (1874), provides examples of science fiction based on invention. In these works and others, Verne predicted the development of air and space travel, submarine warfare, the aqualung, and television. In several ways, however, Verne was simply extrapolating from existing technology. Submarines, for instance, had served in the U.S. Civil War, although with a notable lack of success. Verne’s inventions were refinements of tools that already existed; he confirmed this pattern in an interview with the journalist Gordon Jones. “I have always made a point in my romances,” he said, “of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge.”