Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century: An AnthologyWinner of the 2008 American Studies Association's Carl Bode Norman Holmes Pearson Prize "for lifetime of achievement and service" This selection of unusual storeis by important American writers Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Bellamy and Twain and by less well known tellers such as Ambrose Bierce, S. Weir Mitchell and Fitz James O'Brien, challenges the commonly held belief that science fiction is a twenthiethcentury phenomenon, or that it began with Jule