For All Mankind? Reading Race in Early American Science Fiction, 1836-1888

Abstract

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, a new type of literature envisioned what the United States would look like in the far future. Now known as science fiction, three of these works - Mary Griffith’s “Three Hundred Years Hence,” George Tucker’s A Century Hence, and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward - are exemplary in how they reflect social concerns of their time, particularly in the construction of notions of race in America. Through the idea of science as a universal and rational ideal, these authors imagined a progressive, white future for the United States, in which science and progress are increasingly identified by their proximity to whiteness and distance from blackness. These authors are not outliers, but form the foundation for a liberal tradition in American science fiction that runs through popular culture to the present day