Specifically, prior to the publication of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. The assumption there is that you cannot have ‘science fiction’ without ‘science:’ and that it was not until Principia that we had any real awareness of the actual operating code of the observable universe. Thus, anything written prior to that point would be more accurately described as speculative fiction; or, if you want to start a fight in a bar, fanfic*.
Discuss.
Moe Lane
PS: Yeah, it’s all in regard to this Kickstarter, which looks perfectly interesting and honorable. But I hesitate to call anything involving Rosicrucians ‘science fiction,’ because. well, Rosicrucians. Not that I have a problem with Rosicrucians; I just don’t think of what they do as being ‘science.’
*It’d have to be a damned esoteric sort of bar, to be sure. And, yes, there’s nothing wrong with fanfic. Although there’s more than a few writers of fanfic who don’t want to be told that they’re writing fanfic…
Why? Writing fanfic gets you Hugos nowadays.
Considering the state of public education, and the number of people who are unaware of the operating code of the observable universe, you STILL can’t have science fiction.
And here’s a cheery thought…50 Shades of Gray started out as Twilight fanfiction. That will either inspire you in a “if she can do it, I can” kind of way, or it will make you feel like the universe has a very sadistic sense of humor that seems to be inordinately at your expense.
I think you are giving Newton to much credit. Mathematics has been around for millennia along with many of the sciences that it supplies. Newton did not wash away myth, he was just able to formalize some basic principles of physics in a way the Renaissance world could accept.
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I’d push it back farther, to William of Occam. There was a daggum scientific revolution going on, until the Black Plague killed most everyone involved.
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As to the Brotherhood of the Rosey Cross, it was one of the great hoaxes of history.
Too bad others tried to latch onto it to try and give themselves mythic credibility.
Heck, if we really wanted, we could push it back to Ptolemy and Archimedes.
It doesn’t predate Newton, but I thought this might be apropos: one of the first science fiction novels ever written, done by a German astronomer in 1744.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1494212420/?tag=webloglicenti-20
Even if you disagree with Sagan and Asimov and discount Kepler’s _Somnium_ (1608), I’m pretty sure that Francis Bacon’s _The New Atlantis_ (1627) has to count.
Bearing in mind that I haven’t read it: the Utopian nature of the story tracks well with a lot of science fiction, but how predictive is it?