Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-217) and index
Introduction -- "The banner of science": science and the nineteenth-century British -- Literary imagination -- "Beautiful and sublime images of the operations of nature": Erasmus Darwin -- "Mirrors of the gigantic shadows of futurity": Wordsworth and Shelley -- "A new species": Mary Shelley's science fiction novels -- "A tangled bank": Darwinian science fictions -- "Dim outlines on a desolate beach": H.G. Wells -- Conclusion: "Where do we go from here?"