Forgotten Women of Early Science Fiction: The Pioneers Who Imagined the Future Before the Genre Had a Name.

Ask most readers to name the founders of science fiction, and the list usually runs through familiar names: H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley. The last of these is the exception that proves the rule — yes, Frankenstein is often called the first science fiction novel, but Shelley is typically treated as a solitary forerunner, not as a participant in an ongoing tradition of women writing speculative futures.

The truth is far richer. From the seventeenth century onward, women were writing visionary fiction that imagined other worlds, future societies, and the moral implications of scientific discovery. Their work was read, reviewed, and debated in their own time, but much of it faded from the literary record as the genre coalesced around male authors in the early twentieth century. Recovering these writers is not merely an act of historical correction — it is essential to understanding what science fiction is and what it can do.

Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World and the Birth of Science Fiction

In 1666, the Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, published The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World, a work that has a strong claim to being the first science fiction novel in English. It is an extraordinary hybrid: part philosophical dialogue, part utopian fantasy, part adventure story, in which a young woman travels through a portal at the North Pole into an alternate universe inhabited by talking animals and presided over by an empress who rules through rational inquiry.

Cavendish was deeply engaged with the scientific debates of her day. She corresponded with Thomas Hobbes, visited the Royal Society (the first woman to do so), and wrote extensively on natural philosophy. Her Blazing World is not simply a fantasy — it is a thought experiment about what a society organised around experimental science might look like, written by a woman acutely aware that the new scientific establishment was excluding her from its conversations.

The novel features submarines, flying machines, and a prescient exploration of the relationship between scientific knowledge and political power. Cavendish understood something that later science fiction would make central: that imagining new worlds is always, inescapably, a commentary on the one we inhabit.

Mary Griffith: The First American Science Fiction

Almost exactly two centuries after Cavendish, an American writer named Mary Griffith published Three Hundred Years Hence (1836), a utopian novel that imagines the United States in the year 2135. Griffith's future is one in which women have achieved full educational and professional equality, cities are clean and rationally planned, and technological progress has eliminated many of the social ills of her own time.

Griffith's novel is remarkable not only for its early date — it precedes the work of Wells and Verne by decades — but for its integration of social critique with technological speculation. She imagines pneumatic tubes replacing postal delivery, air conditioning, and a form of central heating. More importantly, she imagines a society that has reorganised itself around principles of justice and efficiency. Her future is not a fantasy; it is an argument.

The Victorian Visionaries

The second half of the nineteenth century saw an explosion of speculative fiction by women, much of it concealed behind pseudonyms or lost to the genre's male-dominated canonisation process.

Jane Loudon's The Mummy!

In 1827, Jane Loudon published The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, a novel that anticipates both the scientific romance tradition and the modern fascination with reanimation. In Loudon's future, England is ruled by a female monarch, technology has advanced dramatically, and the reanimation of an Egyptian mummy sets off a chain of political and philosophical consequences. The novel predates Frankenstein by only nine years and deserves to be read alongside it as an early exploration of the ethical boundaries of scientific ambition.

Florence Dixie's Feminist Utopia

In 1890, the Scottish writer Florence Dixie published Gloriana; or, The Revolution of 1900, a feminist novel in which a woman disguised as a man rises to become Prime Minister — and then uses her position to enact women's suffrage and sweeping social reform. Dixie was herself a remarkable figure: a travel writer, war correspondent, and advocate for gender equality, she used speculative fiction as a vehicle for political argument in a way that anticipates the feminist science fiction of the 1970s by nearly a century.

The Turn of the Century: Women and the Scientific Romance

As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, women continued to write speculative fiction that engaged with scientific themes, even as the genre began to be coded as masculine. Writers like Menie Muriel Dowie (Gallia, 1895) and George Egerton (the pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne) wrote fiction that explored the social consequences of evolutionary theory and the changing position of women in a scientific age.

The most significant of these later writers was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose Herland (1915) imagines an isolated society of women who reproduce through parthenogenesis. The novel is a utopian thought experiment about what a society organised entirely by women might look like, but it is also a serious engagement with the biological and social sciences of its day. Gilman was not only a novelist but a sociologist and evolutionary theorist in her own right, and Herland reflects a mind trained in scientific reasoning as well as literary imagination.

Why These Writers Matter Now

The recovery of women's early science fiction is not antiquarian curiosity. These writers did something that the male founders of the genre are not always given credit for: they insisted that imagining the future must include imagining new social arrangements, not just new machines.

Wells gave us the time machine and the Martian invasion. Verne gave us submarines and space travel. But Cavendish, Griffith, Loudon, and Gilman gave us something equally essential: the idea that a future worth having must be different not only in its technology but in its relationships, its gender roles, and its distribution of power. Their futures are not just invented — they are argued for.

For the modern reader, these works offer a bracing reminder that science fiction has always been wider, stranger, and more inclusive than its popular reputation suggests. The genre was not invented by a handful of canonical men and then gradually opened to other voices. It was multiple from the start — a conversation across centuries in which women were present from the very first sentence.

Their books are still in print, many of them available as public-domain editions. The future they imagined is still waiting to be discovered.