George Washington's Science Fiction Library

A few days after I wrote my last entry, I wondered: just what did the Founding Fathers read? Is it possible that they did actually read what we would call genre fiction? So I asked the Internet that question and got an answer, not by using AI but by going to a website called George Washington's Mt. Vernon and a sub-website--a catalogue--called "Books Owned by George Washington." I searched the catalogue using the keyword "literature." I didn't recognize any explicitly gothic or fantastic title or author. Many of the works of literature owned by George Washington were in fact by British authors of the early to mid eighteenth century. H.P. Lovecraft was supposed to have been fond of Augustan literature. Maybe he would have approved of Washington's library. But then I found the following entry in "Books Owned by George Washington":

Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred [by] Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1795)

(Boldface added.)

By its title, Mercier's novel is instantly recognizable as a genre work. And so I looked it up on Wikipedia, which, as far as I know, is still being created by human beings. Here are the first two paragraphs of its entry on Mercier's Memoirs:

L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (literally, in English, The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One; but the title has been rendered into English as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred or Memoirs of the Year 2500, and also as Astraea's Return, or The Halcyon Days of France in the Year 2440: A Dream) is a 1771 novel by Louis-Sébastien Mercier.

It has been described as one of the most popular and controversial novels of the 18th century, one of the earliest works of science fiction, and the first work of utopian fiction set in the future rather than at a distant place in the present.

I find it impossible to reconcile my image of George Washington as a man of eminent practicality with the possibility that he read science fiction. The idea that Abraham Lincoln read tales of ratiocination by Edgar Allan Poe is easy to accept. It fits with him, I think, and with American culture of the nineteenth century. It gives Honest Abe another interesting dimension, this in a man who already has in our imaginations manifold dimensions. But then I have to realize that Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred is a utopian story, thus an implicitly--or explicitly--political one. It also bears in an indirect way on the French Revolution. As a man involved in politics and revolution, maybe Washington recognized the value in reading or perusing a book like Memoirs. (Both he and Mercier were Masons, too.) Whatever the case may be, it's fascinating to learn that George Washington had in his library a work of proto-science fiction.

One more thing: like Buck Rogers, Mercier's unnamed protagonist sleeps his way into the 25th century.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley