A Quest to Discover America's First Science-Fiction Writer

WILEY & HALSTED, No. 3 Wall street, have just received SYMZONIA, or a voyage to the internal world, by capt. As literary landmarks go, it's not quite Emerson greeting Whitman at the start of a great career. But this humble advert may herald the first American science-fiction novel. Although one might point to the crushingly dull "A Flight to the Moon," from 1813, that text is more of a philosophical dialogue than a story, and what little story it has proves to be just a dream. "Symzonia; Voyage of Discovery" is boldly and unambiguously sci-fi.