Early Science Fiction

Here's a link to a website which discusses the development of science fiction as a genre all the way from the ancient Greeks up to industrialization, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bacon's New Atlantis. An excerpt:

"The period of modern science, technology, and science fiction, which began with the Industrial Revolution just over 200 years ago, would then be equivalent on our spatial scale to .024 inches, about the thickness of a line made by a medium ball point pen.
Within that pen scratch of time, the rate of technological change has been exponential. Modern consciousness therefore is radically different from that of the peoples who inhabited the planet before the emergence of science fiction.

So my key definition is this: Science fiction is the major non-realistic mode of imaginative creation of our epoch. It is the principal cultural way we locate ourselves imaginatively in time and space. "

The site argues that science fiction has its roots in higher literature and has only recently been reduced to a "sub-literary" status.