Frankenstein Dreams
A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Science Fiction
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From Mary Shelley to H.G. Wells, a collection of the best Victorian science fiction from Michael Sims, the editor of Dracula's Guest.
Long before 1984, Star Wars, or The Hunger Games, Victorian authors imagined a future where new science and technologies reshaped the world and universe they knew. The great themes of modern science fiction showed up surprisingly early: space and time travel, dystopian societies, even dangerously independent machines, all inspiring the speculative fiction of the Victorian era.
In Frankenstein Dreams, Michael Sims has gathered many of the very finest stories, some by classic writers such as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells, but many that will surprise general readers. Dark visions of the human psyche emerge in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "The Monarch of Dreams," while Mary E. Wilkins Freeman provides a glimpse of "the fifth dimension" in her provocative tale "The Hall Bedroom.'
With contributions by Edgar Allan Poe, Alice Fuller, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many others, each introduced by Michael Sims, whose elegant introduction provides valuable literary and historical context, Frankenstein Dreams is a treasure trove of stories known and rediscovered.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a prefatory note, Sims credits Jules Verne for having "woke up our attention to the real world by animating it with fantastic stories," but he could just as easily be talking about the 18 other authors whose work appears in this thoughtfully compiled anthology of Victorian-era science fiction. To illustrate "the cross-fertilization occurring between science and literature" that distinguished popular fiction in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Sims collects 15 stories and five novel excerpts whose themes include brain transplants, time travel, and robotics. Several are written in a faux journalistic style to heighten their plausibility. In addition to such well-known works as Edgar Allan Poe's tale of postmortem mesmerism, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," and Arthur Conan Doyle's speculation about monsters of the upper atmosphere, "The Horror of the Heights," Sims includes little-known stories by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Rudyard Kipling, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, who were known primarily as mainstream writers. Even the most devoted science fiction reader will find unfamiliar treats in this assemblage of foundational fiction.
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