In this unofficial sequel to Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, astronomer Francois Mathieu-Rollere, Lord Douglas Rodilan and two Frenchmen, Marcel and Jacques, purchase the giant cannon and shell used by the Gun Club to send the first men into space and launch their own expedition to the Moon. Once there, they encounter the advanced, utopian civilization of the Meolicenes who live inside our satellite. Written in the 1880s, A World Unknown is remarkable because of the author's ardent desire to imagine and describe things that no one had ever imagined or described before, in the quest...

Edgar Quinet's Merlin (1860) is an epic masterpiece and one of the first works to revisit the myth of Merlin in the 19th century. In it, Merlin is created by the King of Hell to spread evil on Earth, but his love for the fey Viviane turns him instead into a force for good. Forced to separate from her, the Enchanter wanders the Earth, encountering other legendary figures such as Robin Hood and Prester John before challenging his father and destroying Hell itself. The two lovers eventually reunite for all eternity in mutual imprisonment. In Merlin, Quinet deploys both its mystical vision of...

Before writing The Enchanted City: A Journey to Lake Tanganyika (1885), Eugene Hennebert consulted Jules Verne; the result is a novel that combines exotic adventures with scientific discovery, with a buoyant tone and an action-packed narrative. Following on the trail of past heroic expeditions, a disparate band of French explorers, embark upon the quest for Kisimbasimba, the eponymous "enchanted city" of Central Africa. During their epic journey, they will face dangerous native tribes, legions of hostile animals, trek through mysterious underground caverns before they finally reach their...

Leonie Rouzade, angry, combative, and prominent in the feminist cause, delivered a scathing social commentary in this pair of tales from 1872. When a shipwreck strands a man in a perfect island civilization in A Voyage to the Isle of Utopia, he, after confronting a parade of didactic lectures, accepts that the rigors of logic have rendered obsolete human individuality. The World Turned Upside Down is the earliest fantasy of gender role reversal ever penned. An idealized woman, Celestine, climbs out of her circumscribed existence to rule a foreign kingdom, only to mandate the subjugation of...

Meet Dr. Marc Vanel, son of a scientist and a beautiful exotic spy, polymath, engineer, gifted with prodigious strength and intelligence, trained by the Brahmins of India. When Vanel acquires the power of invisibility, he becomes Homo-Deus, invisible but for his emerald green eyes, haunting the dreams of evil men and lovely women alike. Felicien Champsaur's Homo-Deus (1924) is a ground-breaking novel which combines biomedical and superhero speculative fiction. It is a milestone in the evolution of the superhero, dealing with its fundamental problem: to what extent a person who can act with...

Edmond Haraucourt's Daah: The First Human (1914) begins with the proto-humans Dah and his wives, Hock and Ta, living a solitary existence, and then sketches, episodically, an account of their slow ascent towards civilization. With Daah serving as a kind of "collective hero," the novel proceeds through a sequence of epiphanies that includes the invention of families, the axe, clothes, religion, fire and, ultimately, a burgeoning awareness of what will someday become our world. Daah is a milestone in the genre of prehistoric fantasy, taking into account the then-new discipline of physical...