America’s First Science-Fiction Novel Is Now 200 Years Old — But Who Wrote It?

Symzonia; Voyage of Discovery, published in 1820, follows a ship-captain/seal hunter to the South Pole (still undiscovered at the time), where there’s a portal to the interior of Earth (which is hollow), where lives a different race of beings. It’s a satire of colonialism and American self-regard, though a few newspaper writers at the time thought the book was non-fiction. But Symzonia was published anonymously — and here Paul Collins, with the help of JGAAP software, works out who the likely author was. – The New Yorker