Who Was America's First Science Fiction Writer?

I've always thought of American science fiction as starting in the 1920s with the publication of Hugo Gernsback's magazine, Amazing Stories. There were certainly stories that we'd consider science fiction published before that, but I wasn't aware of any novels of consequence. 

The New Yorker has published an article about Symzonia, a novel published in 1820. that may be America's first science fiction novel. 

As literary landmarks go, it’s not quite Emerson greeting Whitman at the start of a great career. But this humble advert may herald the first American science-fiction novel. Although one might point to the crushingly dull “A Flight to the Moon,” from 1813, that text is more of a philosophical dialogue than a story, and what little story it has proves to be just a dream. “Symzonia; A Voyage of Discovery” is boldly and unambiguously sci-fi. The book takes a deeply weird quasi-scientific theory and runs with it—or, more accurately, sails with it, all the way to Antarctica.

“Symzonia” is narrated by Captain Seaborn, who outfits a steam vessel for Antarctic exploration and hires a crew for a voyage that he is worryingly unforthcoming about. As the sealer forges ever farther south, beyond the reach of maps, and the compass spins wildly, the crew passes a shipwreck of alien construction and becomes terrified by a mammoth beast on the shore. The rumblings of mutiny begin. “We shipped with you, sir, for a sealing voyage; not for a voyage of discovery,” his first officer complains. Seaborn presses onward anyway. “I could not tell him of my belief of open poles,” he admits, “affording a practicable passage to the internal world, and of my confident expectations of finding comfortable winter quarters inside; for he would take that as evidence of my being insane.”

But who was the real author? That turns out to be an interesting story.