I did not finish this book. It was difficult to read and did not capture my imagination. Unfortunately, it did not, for me at least, live up to it's description.

A creative collection of short stories, Scientific Romance is a classic sample of the works of some of the founders of science fiction. The foresight of these authors is incredible; it’s easy to forget these are not contemporary stories. Enjoy the ride!

Mixed bag of stories. Annotations are my favorite part. Good read.

A collection of science fiction avant la lettre, written between 1835 and 1924, and likely to be absolute catnip to st**mp*nks; it even has Babbage cropping up in the handwaving explanation of an automaton in a story written in 1879, whereas I'd the vague impression he wasn't really appreciated in this context until hindsight made the importance of his pioneering work clear. Similarly, an 1891 piece is already asking whether robots will liberate the working class from drudgery, or simply steal their jobs. Alas, that story then spirals into an especially idiotic revolt of the machines, as indeed the piece is titled, with infectious sentience and rebellion afflicting every work of human craft down to the stick. Which obviously makes not a lick of sense - see also the one about the chap making the most deadly bacillus in the world, not for germ warfare or profit, but just as a hobby, pretty much 'because it's there'. Though Hell, it's not as if the actions of the scientists in Prometheus made any more sense, and that just got a $100 million sequel, so who are we moderns to judge?

Obviously, sometimes it's a case of science having surpassed the understanding available at the time of writing. But I'm fairly sure even Newton could have pointed out the holes in the understanding of optics at the heart of Jack London's 'The Shadow and the Flash'. This one's also notable as having a particularly strong dose of the, shall we say 'attitudes very much of their time'?, inevitable in such a collection. Yes, there's a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne's son where it's mentioned in passing that as civilisation spreads, the skin of the civilised naturally lightens. But only in London is the supposed invisibility of black people until they smile an actual plot point. Still, he almost redeems himself with the whiff of the Freudian; you see, there are two rival inventors each seeking invisibility, and a woman who regrets that she can't marry them both - which meant I was thinking in terms of 'bisexual invisibility' jokes even before the bit where one man is beating another naked (albeit invisible) man with a tennis racket.

But at least London demonstrates some idea of how to write a story. Many pieces here are under the impression that 'a scientist or engineer has a smart idea - but it doesn't go to plan!', or 'some weird astronomical shit goes down!', is sufficient in itself. Other pieces are presented as dialogues between two inhabitants of the future, or journalistic accounts of events, and these often tend more towards the satirical squib or sketch than anything you can really consider as fiction, especially from this distance of time. Even 'The Gorilloid', which anticipates the themes of a much more famous piece of French SF better known to Anglophones as Planet of the Apes, is presented as a lecture (by a future gorilla) rather than Boulez' action adventure.

This is not in itself a bad thing, of course; 'The Gorilloid' is by no means the only nicely-done piece by a writer of whom I was previously unaware. And there are many of these, alongside the big names (Wells, Verne, Poe) and the more cultish favourites (William Hope Hodgson, Ambrose Bierce). But there's also much that's of historical interest only, and even between the good and bad there's often a certain tendency to sameyness, making this a book better bought and then dipped into than read from the library; there's a reason it's by some distance the longest I've ever taken over a Netgalley ARC. That problem might seem paradoxical in a genre yet to build its walls, which you'd think should be freer and more various, but really it demonstrates one of the uses of genre - the awareness that other people have dealt with these issues before is instructive in ensuring that those who come after know they need to do differently, offer new angles. Which is also, of course, why even nowadays, writers adamant that their own SF isn't really SF tend in fact to be writers producing feeble and hackneyed SF. But this may also explain why it's the final pieces here, including those by Hope Hodgson and Conan Doyle, which for me were among the strongest - even as they begin to push at the genre boundaries, verging at times closer to the proto-Lovecraftian weird tale than anything we'd now tend to consider primarily science fiction.

I requested this book from NetGalley out of idle curiosity, eager to find out what Scientific Romance actually was. I don’t read much science fiction myself so this seemed a good way to learn more about the origins of the genre. Brian Stableford’s introduction proved to be not only interesting but pretty much invaluable for me. He describes scientific romance as a species of imaginative fiction that existed before we started using the term science fiction, which term was adopted in the 1920s and became generally accepted after WWII. Scientific romance had its period of greatest success in the last decade of the 19th century and the first of the 20th – but all the stories collected here were originally published between 1835 and 1924. They're a mixed bag. I didn’t read them all although I will probably do so at some stage, and the ones I did read were more engaging and enjoyable than I expected. H G Wells is as interesting as he always is, but I was also struck by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s take on the subject, as well as Jerome K Jerome's. An excellent anthology, more perhaps for the enthusiast of this type of writing than the general reader, but I imagine just about anyone could find at least one or two stories here that would appeal.

It’s great early science fiction and nothing to do with romance

This is an excellent collection of early science fiction stories from authors in the US, UK and France. I had heard about several of the authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, but others were new to me. Editor Brian Stableford did a great job in selecting the stories and a credible job in writing the biographies of the writers. In the introduction (worth reading) he also explains the subtle difference between scientific romance and science fiction. This is an anthology well worth reading.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley for review purposes.

I really enjoyed the stories in this book even though I'm not usually a big fan of 'hard' sci-fi. But these tales, published between 1835 and 1924, are more Victorian (and Edwardian) explorations of the scientific advances which thrilled the society of the day. Their authors range from the incredibly well-known, like Conan Doyle, to unknowns and they hail from France and America as well as the UK. They are, in fact, something like the originals of steampunk itself! There are stories of automata, intelligent machines who, since they are given a social conscience, come to the conclusion that the workers would be better off without machines taking their jobs: one where Scotland becomes a nature reserve and historical theme park (with the help of a device which can control the weather) and one which explores the human costs of 'perfect' societies (eugenics and the fact that cultural/religious norms hold more sway than natural emotional responses). My favourites (probably no surprises here) are a tale which explores climate change caused by humankind's over-use of fossil fuels and one which turns evolution on its head in a lecture given by a gorilla professor on whether apes were descended from humans.

I saw these stories as proof that sci-fi isn't all about space battles and explosions (as good as Rogue One was...). It doesn't even have to involve space - science has enough mysteries to keep us going even today.