In 1862, when most of the world’s navies were still wooden, the Union was blockading the two largest cities of the Confederate States in northern Virginia. The metal plated CSS Virginia engaged the three wooden ships in the blockade, destroying two and crippling the third before the sun set. On the following day, on the way to land the death blow to the Union Navy and secure international trade routes, the Rebels encountered the Union’s ironclad USS Monitor positioned squarely in the way. For hours the battle raged with neither ship able to overcome the other; the blockade would remain. The news of the battle sent shivers of panic through every nation with a wooden navy. The game had just changed. To combat the anticipated threat of ironclad ships, the Union had commissioned the construction of the first modern submarine. The Alligator was a fifty foot long metal tube that remained two meters beneath the surface and breathed through tubes on floats. After maneuvering up against an ironclad, proto Navy SEALS would attach underwater mines to the ironclads and sink them.
Or at least that was the plan; the Alligator slipped its tow line en route to its first combat assignment. Up to that point, submarine technology had unanimously met similar demises. In 1775, the American colonials created a submarine out of a large barrel they called Turtle; it failed to sink anything. In 1800, the French tested the Nautilus in the Seine River. This thirty foot metal submarine would run up against ships and jabs them with a spike that deposits an explosive, capable of extended dives at twenty-five feet down. When Napoleon failed to arrive in time for the demonstration, he killed the project out of frustration. In 1814, there was a confirmed death by submarine when the operator drowned trying to sink an anchored warship. Submarines failed to weaponize in any effective way before the twentieth century really. They were just deemed too risky to make work.
Jules Verne wrote Vingt Mille Lieues sous les Mers in 1870. One of his most famous works, the story was about a metal submarine named the Nautilus that was inspired by the eponymous French submarine. The fictional ship could operate continuously out at sea at speeds modern subs can almost match, and sustain dives for up to five days straight. The ship was assembled and manned by a crew without a nation and captained by the elusive Nemo. The thought of a weapon as powerful as a “sea-monster” in the hands of such a rogue was enough to spur nations into active research. To this day his fabled craft exceeds our own submarines in some metrics (to be fair, Jules overshot the maximum depth of the ocean by a few kilometers), but that was the magic of the fiction. The reader is taken along with Captain Nemo, using the Nautilus as a research vessel, to all sorts of underwater sights, including the lost city of Atlantis.
Jules Verne’s fantastic stories influenced an Englishman named Olaf Stapledon to also take up the pen. In a pair of novels, Last and First Men in 1930 and Star Maker in 1937, this imaginative soul described in vivid detail technologies such as genetic engineering, virtual reality, and concepts to this day that remain theoretical such as planet terraforming, Dyson spheres, and the ‘zoo hypothesis’. In the first chapter of the first novel, Stapledon predicts America and China would bring about nuclear holocaust after exhausting Earth’s natural resources in the near future; this pre-dates the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the invention of the nuclear weapon. Eat your heart out, Nostradamus! Throughout the books, it is clear to Olaf that the universe is full of intelligent life with extraordinary abilities. C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, declared Stapledon “so rich in invention that he can afford to lend.” And that is just what he did, inspiring Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury. Since then, NASA was established, mankind set foot on a second celestial body, and a full-blown fascination with aliens has set in.
The important part is to understand the message underlying the fiction. Consider Star Trek, for example. In the future, mankind will have achieved world peace, will travel amongst the stars, and will encounter a variety of friendly and enemy alien races. Yet despite being on the galactic high seas, the mission of the USS Enterprise was “to explore strange new worlds; to seek our new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Humanity was exploring the unknown, not conquering it. How many times did the crew risk themselves to come to the aid of others? How many nameless red-shirts died in the process? By wandering the depths of space with a respect for other life, humanity advanced by leaps and bounds through interaction with our galactic neighbors. The message being: If you want to become that space-faring, utopian civilization, you need to act like it. There is no problem in the world that can be solved better with aggression than cooperation. We humans need to approach the unknown with a sense of wonder, not suspicion.
Science fiction authors have been making the future worth waiting for for generations now. Since the genre exploded in the twentieth century, there have been more options to choose from than ever; any of the names you’ve read are a great start. I know this sounds retro coming from Craig Crossman, but pick up a book and read a little every night, or read it cover to cover in a single day and grab another. Consider it homework for when the aliens really do land on Earth and issue the first pop quizzes.