The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward S. Ellis was the first U.S. science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 dime novel

Dime novel

Dime novel, though it has a specific meaning, has also become a catch-all term for several different forms of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S...

 and archetype of the Frank Reade

Frank Reade

Frank Reade was the protagonist of a series of dime novels published primarily for boys. The first novel, Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the Plains, an imitation of Edward Ellis's "The Steam Man of the Prairies" , was written by Harry Enton and serialized in the Frank Tousey juvenile magazine...

 series. It is one of the earliest examples of the so-called "Edisonade

Edisonade

"Edisonade" is a modern term, coined in 1993 by John Clute in his and Peter Nicholls' The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, for stories based around a brilliant young inventor and his inventions, many of which would now be classified as science fiction...

" genre. Ellis was a prolific 19th century author best known as a historian and biographer and a source of early heroic frontier tales in the style of James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo...

.

The original novel was reprinted six times from 1868 to 1904.
The only known copy of the first 1868 printing with its cover intact is owned by the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia.

External links

• The Huge Hunter or, the Steam Man of the Prairies at Project Gutenberg
• STEAM MAN: The World's First fictional Robot