Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors.

This is a very solid, although lopsided, collection. Copyrighted and published by the University of Liverpool Press in 1995, the Syracuse volume, "Printed and bound in the European Community" (iv), seems American in imprint only. Despite considering a handful of Americans and Jules Verne, most of these essays, six written by Liverpudlians, silently and mi stakenly act as if "early science fiction" were entirely British. Still, these essayists, ten men and one woman, offer worthy readings and frequently fascinating reports of extratextual and even extraliterary reality. Although there is no synoptic essay, by supplying a good index and arranging the essays in roughly chronological order by subject matter, S eed gives us a volume we gladly read straight through.

In the first essay, "'Able Mechanick': The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins and the Eighteenth-Century Fantastic Vo yage," Paul Baines offers three readings culminating in a fourth. First, he reads most sixteenth- and seventeenth-centu ry fictional voyages not as SF at all but primarily as satiric and either un- or …