Verne & Wells are sort of the classic Victorian SF writers?
But that's partly because it hadn't really organized itself as a genre until then, so you'd just get a writer doing a book or two that happened to have SF elements, or short stories showing up in fiction magazines. And a lot of it's not really, like, classic literature. And as mentioned above, I have done more reading *about* it than actually *reading* it. But even Mark Twain wrote a book in 1894 where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were abducted by a UFO! (okay, it was a "mysterious airship," but close enough.) And a lot of mystery/adventure stuff from that period had "fifteen-minutes-in-the-future" technology, like Madelyn Mack's "pocket telephone." And a whole subgenre of utopias, like "Looking Backward" or "The Sultana's Dream."
And that's not even getting into the technophilic boys' series of the early 20th century of which Tom Swift is only the tip of the iceberg.
no subject
But that's partly because it hadn't really organized itself as a genre until then, so you'd just get a writer doing a book or two that happened to have SF elements, or short stories showing up in fiction magazines. And a lot of it's not really, like, classic literature. And as mentioned above, I have done more reading *about* it than actually *reading* it. But even Mark Twain wrote a book in 1894 where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were abducted by a UFO! (okay, it was a "mysterious airship," but close enough.) And a lot of mystery/adventure stuff from that period had "fifteen-minutes-in-the-future" technology, like Madelyn Mack's "pocket telephone." And a whole subgenre of utopias, like "Looking Backward" or "The Sultana's Dream."
And that's not even getting into the technophilic boys' series of the early 20th century of which Tom Swift is only the tip of the iceberg.