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Classic Science Fiction Stories
A curated collection of twenty classic science fiction stories, from Gothic experiment and lunar adventure to artificial satellites, machine futures, alien ruins, and interstellar freedom.
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About the book
About Classic Science Fiction Stories
A curated collection of twenty classic science fiction stories, from Gothic experiment and lunar adventure to artificial satellites, machine futures, alien ruins, and interstellar freedom. Before science fiction became a settled genre, it was already taking shape in laboratories, observatories, air routes, lost valleys, strange machines, and impossible journeys. Classic Science Fiction Stories: 20 Tales of Imagination, invention, and the Future brings together a wide-ranging selection of early speculative fiction, tracing the form from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Fitz-James O'Brien through H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Francis Stevens, Murray Leinster, H. Beam Piper, and others. These stories imagine immortality, lunar travel, artificial satellites, altered time, aerial networks, technological dependence, unknown life in the upper air, alien archaeology, deep time, and the political pressures of worlds beyond Earth. Some are comic, some severe, some adventurous, some quietly unsettling. Together they show science fiction emerging from older traditions of Gothic romance, scientific curiosity, satire, imperial adventure, and magazine-era wonder. This Kinloch House Classics edition includes: 20 public-domain science fiction stories A curated chronological and thematic sequence Original story notes for each selection A new introduction and afterword Authors including Shelley, Poe, Hawthorne, Wells, Forster, Doyle, London, Stevens, Leinster, Piper, and more Selected and introduced for readers who want the roots of science fiction in a readable, carefully framed edition.
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