How long ago did our authors of books describe the past? Who was the first one? Or lets say the future? Id suspect it would be about the 1800th century with Jules Verne etc. Anyone know of earlier?
The Epic of Gilgamesh was presumably written some time after the events it describes are meant to have taken place.
Thanks. Also curious about the first books written about the future.
history of - What was the first story to be set in the future? - Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange Seems like someone asked this question before me
Moved to Cafe Society (from FQ) since this is about books.
Surely any book that reports on historical events necessarily would have to be referring to the past.
I would imagine that the very first writings of any type were reports after the fact. Mythology would likely be some of those early writings and that would likely be set prior to contemporary memory.
The book of Genesis, somehow.
Ninja’d by burpo
I was expecting to be tossed out on my ear.
And Plato wrote about Atlantis. I think putative histories were among the first stories written. Ever since writing got past the accounting stage, we’ve been writing about the past.
I assume the OP is excluding history/documentaries, which, at the time they were written down would include mythology and Genesis (and the rest of the early biblical books).
I’m picturing early Cro-Magnons sitting around the campfire, and one says “Thag, tell tribe story, how Thag ended up on top stampeding Mammoth!” “Again…? Oh, okay.”
Errr… the late Thag Simmons got killed by a stegosaurus.
Hardly. It was probably written no earlier than the Exile.
All of the earliest books would have been written about the past, or at least what was believed to be the past. Works of fiction and future predictions would not have come along for a while. Remember that we only know the past, even what happened this morning or 5 minutes ago happened in the past.
Many books have been written about the origins of non-realistic fiction (speculative fiction, fantastic fiction, proto-science fiction: it goes by a lot of names). By sheer coincidence I was just yesterday looking for the first specifically dated future volume, so I pulled a pile of books of my shelves.
The best is probably I. F. Clarke’s The Pattern of Expectation 1644-2001 (written in 1979, so the 2001 refers to the book and movie). His first line is “the modern style in futuristic fiction begins with the European success of L’An 2440 in the 1770s,” written by Louis Sebastien Mercier. Then he jumps back and hits many of the precursors in that very good Stack Exchange link.
France was crazy for future fiction for a full century before Verne. Dozens of authors set utopias, dystopias, satires, and predictions, most heavily illustrated with tons of flying contraptions, in various futures. Verne himself was influenced by these earlier writers, although almost all his work was set in the present with extrapolated current technology.
England and Germany also produced more dozens of these books. Few people remember that Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man after Frankenstein and it is set at the end of the 21st century.
The first book set in the past is much fuzzier as a question. Shakespeare was hardly the first to set works in Greek and Roman times: he drew on, even stole from, multiple earlier ones. His plays about English kings also are set in the past, though more recent. If you limit books to the form that developed into what is now called the novel, you can start with Don Quixote from the 1610s. Quixote sinks into his delusions by binge-reading chivalric romances, which were historicals set back in the days of knights and chivalry. Cervantes set his book in the present, as were many of the famed early novels, so he doesn’t count as first but he makes clear that the concept stretches back as far probably as fiction itself.
Thanks for all the interesting replies!
For that matter, Revelation is about the future (though likely not the first ‘future book’ by the time it was written)
True, the Book of Daniel is an earlier prophetic text from the Bible.