Science fiction (SF) writing may seem a definitively modern phenomenon, but it has a rich and varied history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this course, we examine early modern SF not only a vehicle for popularizing the new philosophy of the “scientific revolution,” but as a space for the interrogation of competing beliefs about the relationships between humankind and the cosmos, knowledge and belief, or public and private living. Through early modern SF, we explore the self-consciously literary and poetic ways in which early modern natural philosophers worked through their ideas. No “two cultures” here.
