George Eliot – the pen name of Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans – is celebrated today as a writer of realist novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871) and Daniel Deronda (1876).
We don’t tend to associate her with science fiction. But in 1859, as she was embarking on her career as a novelist, Eliot published a short science-fiction novel titled The Lifted Veil.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is often credited as the first “science fiction” novel, but in the mid-1800s the term was rare. It was used to describe literature depicting aspects of current scientific thought. It became popular as a genre term in the late 19th century, when it was applied to the work of speculative writers, such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
