Science fiction emerged about 300 years ago when science made great strides. Authors tried to understand their world by imagining a possible future.

Gulliver's Travels is the earliest science fiction. This satirical 1726 travel narrative is consid...

• 1921: Yevgeny Zamyatin writes We after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The story is set in a dystopian society where people are numbered and live in glass buildings to allow them to be watched by the state.
• 1926: Hugo Gernsback

• 1949: George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four during the Cold War. The book is set in a future Britain where the government monitors all private and public activity.
• 1950: I, Robot is a collection of short storie...

• 1974: Doris Lessing published a tale of post-apocalyptic societal breakdown in the novel Memoirs of a Survivor.
• 1975: Academic and feminist Joanna Russ wrote The Female Man. She describes a positive community of wo...

• 1962: JG Ballard's The Drowned World is the first of his novels dealing with ecocatastrophes. He deals with the idea of societal breakdown after the polar ice caps have melted.
• 1968: The futuristic novels of Philip K Dick ...