Earlier this week on Reddit, a post in r/printSF (the very best sub) asked, essentially, "Who are all the good nineteenth-century science fiction writers who aren't Jules Verne and H. G. Wells?"
Well, never was a question so well designed for me! Unfortunately, I came to it kind of late; I did write a reply but I think most people had moved on from the thread by then. But it occurred to me as given I gave five novels, the comment would also make a good installment of my sporadic "Five Very Good..." series here on my blog, where I list five things in some category.
These aren't necessarily the five best; I've skipped some heavy hitters like Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) in favor of some less common and probably less good good ones because I found them particularly interesting in some way. Unfortunately, the thing you will find when you read a lot of nineteenth-century British science fiction is that the reason we only talk about Wells now is that, largely, only Wells was any good. Wells was excellent at taking the tropes of what was a pretty crappy genre in his day and doing very clever things with them, such that he redefined the tropes! Wells didn't write the first alien invasion story or the first time travel story or the first invisibility story... but he did write the first good alien invasion story, the first good time travel story, the first good invisibility story. (And what I mean by good is that his stories have both the exact right level of scientific rigor but also the ability to say something about a concept outside of science.)
But anyway, here are books I would recommend if you want to read some fun nineteenth-century sf. If I've reviewed them on this blog before, I've included a link to the post.
For a while I was obsessed with this book... and I still do think it's pretty great. It's a world where multiple revolutions have left England a Catholic country with a matriarchal monarchy. Education has come to all classes, leading to incredibly smart laborers-- and thus rich people act incredibly stupid so no one mistakes them for poor people. Technological inventions abound, extending to sending mail by loading letters into metal balls that are launched into a steam-powered cannon, aiming for a net at the house of the recipient. Which is awesome and hilarious all at once. There's a lot of satire going on, here: on class, on gender, on science, on progress. Some of it is funny, all of it is fascinating. Genuinely fun and readable; most early sf isn't. And I haven't even gotten to the mummy accidentally resurrected by a mad scientist who hides in the English palace and dispenses political advice. (You can get the original three-volume edition from Google Books, but I think the reprint edited by Alan Rauch is just fine for casual reading despite being abridged; he captures all the good bits.)
Several generations into the future, after a mysterious disaster has ripped through the heart of Victorian Britain, the Thames is a giant lake and London a deadly swamp. With the upper and middle classes having fled the country for parts unknown, civilization and technology collapsed, leaving a new feudal order to come about, constantly under threat from invasion by the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scottish, all out for revenge. The first third of the novel is just a description of this postapocalyptic world, telling how animals and plants have been affected (Jefferies was a nature writer), and about the political and social setup, with marauding bands of "gipsies" and the sinister Bushmen lurking between cities for hapless travelers. It's well-thought-out, detailed world-building, the best I know of in the nineteenth century, almost Tolkienesque. There are so many fruitful avenues for stories suggested in just five chapters.
Griffith isn't a great writer, but he is a genuinely clever one, basically the first guy to unite the Verne-style "amazing technology" story with the Butler/Lytton-style "strange society" story, giving us a novel about anarchists who use airships to bomb Europe into submission... leading to a utopia! He wrote a lot of novels, and was the leading writer of "future war" fiction for a long time; Wells even makes fun of him in The War in the Air. Angel is his first and best book. Lots of fun stuff; it was reissued under the title "Tsar Wars" for a reason, though the best edition to get is the annotated one Steven McLean edited for Victorian Secrets Press.
Count Pahlen (a Russian nobleman, Tsarist counter-spy, and professor of biology) give his illegitimate daughter up to the Catholic Church, which raises her in a convent and plans to marry her to the heir to the throne of England to turn it into a Catholic country, but the plan fails, and Zalma rejoins her father, who is actually the ringleader of an anarchist conspiracy. Her father dies before he can bring his plans to fruition, and so Zalma decides to dump anthrax on all the capital cities of Europe from balloons. And that just scratches the surface of how bonkers this book is. Sometimes meandering and dull, of course, but usually fascinating. (The book has no modern reprint, but the complete text is available on the HathiTrust site.)
Not quite nineteenth-century, I guess, but close enough. What would you do if you were the last person left alive? Why, you'd probably conclude that the world was made for you-- why else would only you have survived?-- and so you'd tour the cities of Europe, burning each of them down when you were done. Because once you're done with them, certainly no one else is ever going to see them. The novel is filled with brilliant bits where we get to see the narrator trying to cope with being the last man-- and seeing the world those last panicky humans left behind. There's just a lot of nice little moments peppered throughout the novel, which feels so intense and so real. Shiel's ability to depict human isolation without ever getting dull is extraordinary. (I recommend the "Bison Frontiers of the Imagination" edition, which uses the weirder 1929 revised text.)
