VOYAGE BENEATH THE WAVES was published two years prior to Jules Vernes Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne, when he became aware of Jules Rengades serial version, felt obliged to write the magazine editor to set the record straight--HED developed the idea independently! In fact, the influence was very much the other way around: although Rengade had come up with the idea of an imaginary voyage of submarine exploration separately, hed modeled his narrative style on Vernes, thus producing the first "Vernean" novel written by someone other than the great man himself. This is the first...

""Ever Smaller" (1893) 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. 224 pp.

In the 40 stories assembled in this collection, originally published in 1901, journalist Paul Vibert explores such ground-breaking concepts as the artificial insemination of elephants with the seed of prehistoric mastodons found preserved in ice, the artificial production of microbe-sized humans, the existence of an underwater world inhabited by Ancient Jews, communication with Mars and other worlds via light signals, the power to look into the past, the electrical nature of the soul, the strange chemical lifeforms of the future, artificial Metempsychosis and the conquest of space. Paul...

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-Utopian worlds such as New Alexandria to vermin-infested slums like Old Earth, the Star-Pilots have become the great heroes of the day. Grainger has become a legend in his own time, flying the prototype vessel of a new starship.... Having escaped from his contract with Charlot, Grainger is hounded by the Caradoc Commpany, who wants to extract everything from his brain about his former employer. But Charlot has other plans, and Grainger suddenly finds himself back on the Hooded Swan, leading a rescue mission for the Swan's sister ship in the...

Henri Allorge's The Great Cataclysm (1927) takes place in the Age of Science in the year 9978 when Earth has cooled down and a population of scientists and artists live in a handful of great cities scattered across the globe. They spend their time studying the ruins of the great cities of the past and are served by a population of advanced apes. But the stability of this utopia is threatened when all their electricity suddenly vanishes... "The Great Cataclysm might well owe the fact that it won a literary award to the stridency of its pacifism, but the more interesting aspect of its...

They call them the "rat-catchers." Theyre the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, which an economically destitute Earth has dispatched on a mission to re-establish contact with its far-flung, long-lost space colonies. Alex Alexander, ships biologist, must help solve the mysteries of human and alien ecosystems that he encounters light-years from home. The planet Floria initially appears to be one of the few Earth colonies thats actually prospered since its initial settlement. But underneath the surface of the society, the "Planners" keep a strict, repressive rule over the Florians, while the...

Despite the development of a faster-than-light drive, Earth's space program has been in the doldrums for centuries, as has the Earth itself. Hyperspace being impossible to navigate without beacons at which to aim, there is no alternative but to wait for vessels sent out at sub-light speed decades previously to find somewhere worth going. Unfortunately, when one finally does, it doesn't take long for political conflicts to materialize over the exploitation of the few seemingly-Earthlike world in question. When an entire survey team dies, the problems intensify. Lee Caretta is the man most...

Illa's End (1925) begins with the emergence of a new island on which are found a cache of ancient documents and a small fragment of "zero-stone." A scientist manages to decypher the documents, which tell the tale of the apocalyptic clash between the lost Gondwanan cities of Illa and Nour. Illa's End features an array of impressive technological predictions, such as atom bombs, solar-powered cities, force fields, and flying saucers, but also a grim catalog of social predictions. The Illans are served by genetically-augmented apes and live under a war-like fascist dictatorship. Jose Moselli not...

In Amilec (1753), Charles-Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche conceived the concept of journeys through the Solar System. His extrapolation of the manner in which human seeds are used to populate other planets may seem primitive, but it is a fascinating prediction of what will eventually become cosmology and embriology. In 1760, Tiphaigne sent his characters to explore the secret land of Giphantie located deep in Africa, where a race of secret supermen live in majestic isolation watching a medium remarkably similar to television. Finally, in 1761, in The Empire of the Zaziris, Tiphaigne predicted...

During a tropical storm over the Pacific, French Air Force Captain L'Herbaudiere is mysteriously transported to a utopia-like society of free love which rejected money and technology two thousand years earlier. But even that utopia has its dark side: the Accursed, a prison-state locked behind an impregnable magnetic barrier, where those who refuse to live in utopia are condemned to remain. The arrival of L'Herbaudiere threatens the very foundations of the Inverted World... Labelled "one of the most imaginatively ambitious works of its era" by Brian Stableford, Marcel Rouff's Journey to the...