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In The Misfortunes of John Bull (1884)a spurned lover seeking to avenge an insult by an English nobleman, becomes a billionaire and turns an improvised nation into a global empire, ultimately defeating and conquering England. This significant future war story anticipates warfare on a global scale, especially naval warfare, featuring battles between ironclad warships assisted…
After fifteen years of absence at the North Pole, a man rediscovers Europe on the verge of war in 1929. Written in 1919, four years after World War I, The Engineer von Satanas is a classic of futuristic fiction, thirty years ahead of its time, and still relevant today because the threats it describes still…
Jules Hoche’s The Maker of Men and His Formula (1906) was amongst several notable novels inspired by H. G. Wells, in this case The Island of Doctor Moreau. In it, Hoche tried to go further than Wells, featuring a much bolder project in the manufacture of human beings, with more complex results. Whereas Moreau confined…
The Ark (1920) was begun shortly after Arnyvelde was conscripted during the Great War and finished after he was demobilized. A deliberately extravagant fantasy, it is a psychological Ark meant to carry him through the Deluge of the war, permitting him-as long as he avoids being killed-to endure the devastation of his personal happy valley….
In The Mutilated Bacchus (1922), a young genius, severely mutilated after a plane crash, still manages through sheer willpower to turn his home valley into an Eden-like utopia dedicated to the search for Joy; but a twist of fate will lead to a cruel end, full of disillusionment. This volume also includes The Strange Tournament…
Five utopian fantasies: * The Aerial Valley (1810) proves that a utopian society can only maintain stability if it remains technologically limited and isolated from outside influences; it is a sensitive challenge to the philosophy of progress as an instrument of perfectibility. * The Year 2800 (1829) bases its anticipations of future improvement on bold…
Jim Click invents a robot in the image of his friend, Admiral Horatio Gunson, on the eve of a great battle. Everything starts going wrong when the robot kills his model. Frightened, the inventor then sets up a fabulous hoax, in which his automaton will act as if he were the real admiral. And after…
The New Moon (1770) follows in the footsteps of Cyrano de Bergerac’s History of the States and Empires of the Moon, describing the epic journey of a lunar native, which takes him on a tour of the nations of the Moon, ending on the island of Eutoquia, the fictional equivalent of Utopia. A Journey from…
This is the twelfth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique. The eleven stories collected here were published between 1832 and 1932. They include three remarkable tales about automata and homonculi, including one in which the manufacture of an artificial human being is credited…
The Voyages of Lord Seaton to the Seven Planets (1766) is an interplanetary romance in the tradition of Cyrano de Bergerac’s History of the States and Empires of the Moon. In it, the eponymous hero and his sister Monime travel to the seven planets of the Solar System on the wings of the genie Zachiel….
A flamboyant adventure featuring swords and sorcery, heroic barbarians and evil priests avid for human sacrifices, monstrous Guardians at the Threshold and the Fountain of Youth, The Last Days of Atlantis (1905) is a direct ancestor of such spectacularly successful modern fantasy works as The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. It helps…
Three exciting novels by the author of ETHEL KING, THE FEMALE NICK CARTER! An International Mission to the Moon (1926) is one of a group of novels produced in different countries in the 1920s that attempted to produce realistic accounts of a voyage to the moon effected by means of rocket propulsion. It boasts the…
The Second Life of Doctor Albin (1902) belongs to a set of fictions that explore the supposed psychology typical of scientists with considerable analytical intensity. One of the central tenets of these is that scientific genius is incompatible with, and perhaps antithetical to, love between the sexes. The novel provides what is perhaps the most…
The enigmatic immortal Axel Rathenius has been commissioned to paint a triptych illustrating the life of Orpheus. Meanwhile, an enigmatic legacy propels him, his agent Myrica Mavor, Madame Vashti Savage the medium, and the mournful poet Hecate Rain in the midst of a conflict between the rival cults of Orpheus and Dionysus. Brian Stableford’s latest…
This is the thirteenth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique. The seven stories collected here were published between 1784 and 1928. They include two remarkable tales about Future Paris, the first story to seize upon the potential of air balloons as imaginative devices,…
The Mirror of Present Events (1790) is an irreverent political allegory in which a Syracusan beauty, following Archimedes’ death, offers her hand in marriage to the inventor who can produce the most innovative homage to the great man’s mechanical genius. A series of suitors comes forward, each offering a mechanical device ostensibly more marvelous than…
