Anastasia Klimchynskaya, Science Fiction and the Modern World: The Emergence of a Genre in a Revolutionary Age (Liverpool University Press, 2026) 206 pp. $130.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781836244905
Anastasia Klimchynskaya’s Science Fiction and the Modern World: The Emergence of a Genre in a Revolutionary Age is a significant intervention in science fiction studies that reconsiders the origins of the genre by placing it within the intellectual, scientific, and political transformations of the long nineteenth century. While providing a chronological history of science fiction, Klimchynskaya goes beyond historical narration to argue that the genre emerged as a cultural response to a profound crisis in humanity’s understanding of itself. Industrialisation, rapid technological innovation, revolutionary scientific discoveries, imperial expansion, and political upheavals have fundamentally altered how people conceive nature, progress, and human agency. Her work also critiques the tendency to map and explore science fiction primarily from a Western perspective, suggesting that such an approach limits a fuller understanding of the genre’s broader cultural and intellectual development. Klimchynskaya further contends that science fiction does not reflect a disenchanted world. Rather, it captures a sense of human power over the world, one that renders enchantment accessible through human means. She describes science fiction as heterocosmic and rationalised, constructing alternative worlds in which the magical and the supernatural are transformed into something plausible through scientific and technological means. Rather than relying on inexplicable miracles, science fiction rationalises extraordinary and seemingly impossible phenomena through scientific speculation and technological advancement.
The book’s chapter organisation reflects a carefully developed intellectual argument. The book’s five chapters progressively develop Klimchynskaya’s argument about science fiction’s distinctive relationship to modernity. In ’The Factual Reporting of Fiction’, she identifies the genre’s use of the rhetoric and authority of factual reporting as one of its defining innovations. Nineteenth-century science fiction made the impossible appear credible by presenting extraordinary events through the language of science, journalism, travel writing, and empirical observation. This rationalisation of the extraordinary is important to Klimchynskaya’s larger argument because it shows how science fiction transformed the boundaries between the possible and the impossible. This idea develops further in ’Masters of the Universe’, where she argues that science fiction expresses modernity’s belief that scientific knowledge could achieve what magic once promised. Science thus becomes not simply a replacement for magic but a new source of wonder, which shifts the power to produce the miraculous from gods and supernatural forces to human ingenuity, inventors, engineers, and scientists. This shift in the source of wonder also changes how science fiction understands humanity itself. In ’The Contingency of Humanity and the Literature of Change’, Klimchynskaya argues that the nineteenth century increasingly understood humanity as contingent rather than fixed or central, shaped by historical, scientific, and environmental forces. Influenced by Darwinian thought, science fiction therefore becomes a ‘literature of change’, that imagines transformations in individuals, societies, technologies, environments, and even the human species. Change matters here not simply as a recurring theme but as a principle through which the genre questions assumptions about human permanence and centrality.
Klimchynskaya moves to the epistemological function of the genre in ’The Laboratory of the Mind’s Eye: Science Fiction as Thought Experiment’. Science fiction becomes a space in which authors and readers can test the social, ethical, and scientific consequences of technological possibilities without conducting real-world experiments. This means, its significance lies less in predicting technological developments than in interrogating their consequences. By asking ‘What if?’ and tracing the consequences of that premise, science fiction becomes a mode of inquiry through which possible futures can be imagined, evaluated, and critiqued. The final chapter, ’The Uses of Science Fiction’, examines the possibilities of such imaginative inquiry. Science fiction thus enables readers to consider the ethical, political, and social implications of innovation before those possibilities become reality. Its enduring significance, then, lies not in its ability to predict the future but in its capacity to expand humanity’s ability to think critically about different futures and the choices that might produce them. In sum, Klimchynskaya presents science fiction as more than a literary genre: it becomes a way of understanding modernity, questioning human power and contingency, and imagining the consequences of the worlds that scientific and technological change makes possible.
Methodologically, Klimchynskaya’s study engages numerous Anglophone and Francophone authors across the nineteenth century, with particular attention to Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells. She argues that the lives and works of these figures set the stage for understanding the emergence of science fiction. Her methodology is interdisciplinary, comparative, and historicist, combining literary analysis with the history of science, intellectual history, and cultural studies to explain how science fiction emerged as a response to modernity. Klimchynskaya’s comparative approach is particularly valuable because it challenges a predominantly Anglophone genealogy of science fiction and demonstrates that the genre developed through broader intellectual and literary exchanges across national traditions. Rather than studying science fiction in isolation, she situates it within the broader contexts of scientific discovery, political change, and cultural history, supporting her argument that the genre reflects humanity’s changing understanding of itself and its relationship to the modern world. Stylistically, the book combines rigorous scholarship with accessible prose. While grounded in extensive historical research and literary analysis, Klimchynskaya writes with clarity and precision, making sophisticated theoretical arguments understandable without sacrificing intellectual depth.
Although the author’s primary focus is on the long nineteenth century, centering on European and American traditions, this can be seen not as a deliberate limitation of scope but as an opportunity. Klimchynskaya’s framework opens greater possibilities for future scholarship and provides a strong foundation for integrating African, Asian, Latin American, and Indigenous speculative traditions into the genealogy of science fiction.
Overall, Klimchynskaya’s work is an indispensable contribution to science fiction studies, nineteenth-century literary criticism, comparative literature, and the history of ideas, and it provides scholars with a compelling framework for understanding why science fiction continues to serve as one of the most powerful literary forms for thinking through the uncertainties of modern existence.
Temitope Adetoyese, The University of Texas at Austin
