Ever Smaller

In Albert Bleunard’s Ever Smaller (1893), the first modern novel on the theme of the “Shrinking Man,” a group of scientists are shrunken down, first to insect-size, to explore an ordinary garden, which becomes as perilous to them as an alien world; then, to microbe-size inside a drop of water and, finally, into a rose bush. The book also includes The Reluctant Spiritualist, an 1889 novella about a mysterious and seemingly blank canvas which when photographed reveal the face of a man. “Ever Smaller is a significant landmark in the history of scientific romance. Not only does it go where no writer had gone before, in extending its thought-experiments beyond those of Jean-Henri Fabre and S. Henry Berthoud, it does so boldly.” Brian Stableford.