‘Science’ from scientia, knowledge (Latin, then Old French in the eleventh century), originally comprised imaginative, inductive and observational understanding of what could be known, and made knowable. In travel writing studies, science has been more narrowly demarcated: it equates with empirical, expert and imperial European knowledge-gathering missions that were undertaken from the early eighteenth century (Raby 1996; Driver 2000). Scientific travelling and its forms of factual writing – travelogues, field notebooks and journals, official government reports from overseas – therefore focus on the investigative exploration, discovery and ‘bioprospecting’ of (non-European) New Worlds (Jardine et al. 1996; Schiebinger 2004). In consequence the model for the scientific traveller is the European explorer of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as James Cook, Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin (Williams 2013).

Science has however always been imparted throughout history by the users of transport and trade routes, and through resource and knowledge collection from territories of the unfamiliar. It has also been purveyed in multiple forms and recording traditions. The prehistoric cave paintings uncovered in 1994 at Pont d'Arc (‘La Grotte Chauvet-Pont d'Arc’ 2015) testify to sophisticated human understandings of the natural, and supernatural, worlds of the Palaeolithic period, and to advanced technical skills in recording its significance. In more recent millennia, peoples in the world's tundra, desserts and equatorial rainforests have deployed rock art, textiles and narration in song-line, dance and ritual ornamentation of the human body to pass on similar knowledge (scientia) about the forms, maps and phenomena of the outer reaches of known worlds. Other templates for speculative and observational science therefore include astrological monuments, astronomies, epics, (medieval) bestiaries, mappa mundi and portulans. Indeed, in its hybrid mix of real and imagined travel knowledge, postmodern science fiction about new intergalactic worlds only rediscovers the many roots, and routes, of ‘real-imaginary’ Western travel writing traditions, not only Swift's satire Gulliver's Travels (1726) or Voltaire's Micromégas (1752) (Kerslake 2007), but also On the Nature of Things by Lucretius (c.55–c.99 BC), The Geography and Almagest (Astronomy) of Ptolemy of Alexandria (c.90–c.168 AD), the Natural History of Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) and Verne's Voyage au centre de la terre (1864).