Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: How did the thematic repertoire of early English-language science fiction change as the genre consolidated between 1818 and 1930?Using a corpus of 238 public-domain texts, we apply temporally binned latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), comparing models with and without Authorless preprocessing (which probabilistically downweights author-specific vocabulary).Cross-period topic alignments exceed a permutation null baseline, indicating continuity in topic structure over time.Fullcorpus LDA can produce comparable per-topic quality, but only temporal binning enables diachronic alignment; within the binned setting, Authorless reduces author concentration and modestly increases the share of thematic topics without materially reducing coherence.Four high-continuity topic chains -centered on mobility, affect, planetary scale, and scientific knowledge -suggest a shift from earlier romantic and speculative concerns toward more consolidated technoscientific forms.These chains generate interpretable hypotheses about the literary history of early science fiction, and the workflow supports diachronic analysis in small, author-skewed corpora.
Author: Jonathan Gordon
Institution: Vassar College
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166823807