First published in 1870, Danish author Vilhelm Bergsoe's "Flying Fish 'Prometheus'" is a long-lost 19th Century science-fiction story with Jules Verne flair. A Danish engineer makes a journey by airship to attend the opening of the Panama Canal in the far future year of 1969, but it's 37 hours from Denmark to Central America and anything can happen along the way. Little known outside of Denmark up to now, the story was translated into English for the first time in 2010 and published in a steampunk anthology. Besides the story itself, this standalone edition includes an introduction with a...

Is it a theme park or a model railroad? Or a mad billionaire's ultimate self-indulgence? It's the year 2037. Sixty thousand miles out in space orbits the asteroid called Vesper, Earth's new second moon and the private property of the richest man in history. No one knows what he has been building there, but suddenly the future of the human race depends on finding out - and fast. For fifteen-year-old Ronn Evans, what begins as another ordinary day in school winds up very differently when he and his cousins are all but kidnapped by their own government to be sent into space. To their amazement,...

From Mermaid-Land to Poughkeepsie... Daft professors and their put-upon students roam this world and others in these six stories, training the gimlet eye of Science on history's stranger mysteries and legends, and answering questions no one ever thought to ask before... Are Gingerbread House-Building Witches really apex predators following instinctive behavior patterns something like trapdoor spiders? When a UFO contactee cult builds a landing field for flying saucers, will anybody show up? Is it possible to bring a dead king back to life when he probably never existed in the first place? Was...