Fantastic literature has existed as long as literature itself; Renaissance thinkers wrote of utopias and imaginary voyages into space; Jonathan Swift employed the fantastic in Gulliver's Travels (1726) to satirize contemporary society; Brian W. Aldiss has claimed that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote the first science-fiction novel in 1818 with her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus; and through the Victorian era tales based on the fantastic or the scientific or a combination of both found a wide audience, as did the translated novels of Jules Verne. It was H. G. Wells, however, who more than any other author consolidated and transformed these types of writing into the nascent genre of the "scientific romance," in the process changing the nature of science fiction and modern fantasy in his wake. While the term "father of science fiction" has been variously ascribed to different figures by individual historians, Wells undoubtedly deserves to be one...