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Also Published as: A Narrative of the Life and Astonishing Adventures of John Daniel, a Smith at Royston in Hertfordshire, For a Course of Seventy Years.

In which Daniel is shipwrecked on an Island south of Java, his industrious Robinsonade life being transformed when his companion turns out to be a woman, with whom he has eleven children; as the children grow, Sex issues are resolved by incest. Daniel's son, Jacob, invents a flying machine capable of Space Flight; father and son undertake a realistically-described Fantastic Voyage to the Moon, where they encounter an Alien civilization, and a ur-Food Pill in the shape of a leaf which relieves hunger and thirst. On their return to Earth, they discover on a Pacific Island a race of benign Monsters, the consequence of cross-breeding between humans and intelligent creatures from the deeps. Further adventures ensue, in Lapland and elsewhere; Daniel then returns to England to tell his tale to "Ralph Morris".

A Voyage to Cacklogallinia; With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners, of That Country

The novel itself is best understood as a Satire on British politics, commerce, and culture of the times (1727).

The novel takes Captain Brunt first to an unknown Caribbean Island inhabited by immense talking fowl and then to the Moon, a venue in which the spirits of humans from Earth await further passage, and act as god-wards.

Gulliver Joi: His Three Voyages; Being an Account of His Marvelous Adventures in Kailoo, Hydrogenia and Ejario.

Contents:

• Voyage to Kailoo - (1851) - novella
• Voyage to Hydrogenia - (1851) - novella
• Voyage to Ejario - (1851) - novella

The Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon, translated from the Lunar Language by Daniel Defoe.

The Consolidator is at once early science fiction in the form of an early voyage to the moon, a satire on the moral and intellectual currents of the time, a tongue-in-cheek praise of China's contribution to world knowledge, and a Whiggish version of the historical events of the previous 45 years.

"A Daring Trip to Mars", which traces with considerable engineering detail a stress-fraught voyage to the Moon and then Mars, which they able only to orbit due to fuel problems.

Lucian travels with fifty companions to the Moon, where they become embroiled in a space war; they then fly past the Sun and back to Earth, where they land in the sea and are soon swallowed by an enormous whale, from which they escape and visit various Islands, where Lucian's fertile imagination piles marvel upon lunatic marvel, and simultaneously mocks them.

Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World (1896), features an ambulatory Moon which after falling into the Pacific Ocean makes it possible for the narrator of the tale, with companions, to fly to Mars in a Balloon, where they discover a new defence of Christianity in the form of parallel Evolution and multiple incarnations of Christ.

The Conquest of the Moon: A Story of the Bayouda 1889), in which plans are made to drag the Moon from its orbit to land in the Sahara Desert, where its resources can be plundered; but the executors of the plan are drawn to the Moon instead.

The tale itself is divided into two parts.

In "The Voyage", the protagonists learn how to create a new Power Source - an Antigravity element capable of propelling the Spaceship they have had constructed by an eccentric Inventor - and travel to the Moon.

In part two, "The Ideal Life", they discover a Utopia inhabited by "amnesiac reincarnations of select Earthmen", four feet tall, communitarian, pacific. Transportation is via giant roc-like birds. The protagonists, in strong contrast to the behaviour of most visitors to other worlds in the nineteenth century, neither leave nor destroy the world they have discovered.

The protagonist of the SF novel, To the Moon and Back in Ninety Days: A Thrilling Narrative of Blended Science and Adventure (1922), hitches a ride on a spaceship powered by an Antigravity device, and goes to the Moon. The discovery of Selenites there turns out to be a hoax but the trip was real.

Told in a documentary style, it is profusely illustrated with photos and diagrams, including photos of the spacecraft and space-suited astronauts. Indeed, the books contains a remarkably detailed description of a working space suit (Including a photo!).

A mundain SF novel that sets the stage for the early rounds of the contact phenomenon.

Washington Gladden was a noted clergyman, theologian and social reformer whose many books on these subjects were highly respected. It may have come as a surprise to his admirers to find this delightful fantasy, first published in a children's magazine in 1880. And although Gladden was writing with tongue clearly in cheek, he displays a good knowledge of and appreciation for technology, science and astronomy. Indeed, this story contains one of the first mentions of the need of a life support system for lunar explorers.

Drowsy (1917), is a sentimental love story whose outcome is a child Telepath who, after maturing into an early Superman figure, discovers Antigravity and builds a spaceship, visiting the Moon and Mars, the latter of which is inhabited by humanoid Aliens.

The Moon Colony (1937), in which the protagonists, adventurously travelling to the Moon, find there a Planetary Romance-style colony, complete with giant grasshoppers which can be ridden like horses.

Julian Epworth the head of secret service for Atlantic Pacific Airlines and his co-pilot Billy pursue a huge sky pirate zeppelin about to steal 1 million dollars in gold.

A fast paced ultra modern sci-fi adventure: planes being shot out of the sky, air pirates in liquid fueled planes, a mad scientists Herman Toplinsky scheming to colonize the moon is the leader of the sky jackers. Toplinsky has captured Julian, Billy and stowaway Joan, Julian"s sister, they are all off to the Moon, only to be greeted by an army of mammoth cricket-shaped creatures in military formation, large as a man, with six legs and two sharp antennas, holding steel pointed lances. Riding on top of the cricket creatures are men-shaped humps, small bodies with legs and arms, and an enormous knotty projection for their heads, seeing through large wide eyes, and this is only the beginning.

"The Moon Conquerors" is a Space Opera implausibly involving the Moon, though the tale is notable for the suggestion of an electromagnetic drive to launch a Spaceship to the Moon.

Its companion piece, "The War of the Planets" is presented as the text of a work discovered on the Moon. It is the first novel describing the history of the solar system and how a black race established 'human' life on Earth about 30,000 years ago in Africa.

Romans' book is also a uniquely science fictional plea for racial tolerance.

To Mars Via the Moon: An Astronomical Story (1911) recounts the construction of a Spaceship capable of taking its bereaved solitary builder first to the Moon and then to Mars, which is described in accordance with the theories of Percival Lowell; here he finds a Utopia, and the Reincarnation of his dead son. He remains on Mars.

A group of scientific adventurers builds a space ship for the purpose of exploring Mars. The motor device is a shield that protects against earth's gravity while being attracted to Mars. On the return ship they discover a stowaway -- a Martian girl.

France, 1905. In a quiet Normandy village, amateur violinist Denis Borel meets a mysterious white-haired scientist known only as Doctor Omega, who is building an amazing spacecraft, the Cosmos. Doctor Omega invites Borel to accompany him on his maiden voyage - to Mars!

Doctor Omega: A Classic Tale of Space and Time, in which the ingenious, only seemingly scatterbrained Doctor and (after the pattern of Jules Verne) his contrasting companions travel by Antigravity machine to Mars, which is inhabited, most interestingly by the large-brained Macrocephales, who are clearly based on the Selenites in H G Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1900).

"The Brick Moon" is a short story by Edward Everett Hale, published serially in The Atlantic Monthly starting in 1869. It is a work of speculative fiction containing the first known depiction of an artificial satellite.

"The Brick Moon" is written as if it were a journal. It describes the construction and launch into orbit of a sphere, 200 ft. in diameter, built of bricks. It is intended as a navigational aid, but is accidentally launched with people aboard. They survive, and so the story also provides the first known fictional description of a space station.

Zero to Eighty: Being my Lifetime Doings, Reflections, and Inventions: Also my Journey Around the Moon comprises the slightly wooden memoirs of "Kad" Pseudoman, whose early life incorporates some elements of the Edisonade - he discovers a gold mine in the West from which he profits mightily; he creates various Inventions, usually to do with Transportation; and he saves a country from its enemies, though the country is not America but Switzerland - but who mainly concerns himself with technical and pictorial accounts of the building of an electric-pulse gun, a tube 200 kilometres long whose muzzle is located at the top of Mount Popocatapetl, launching a Spaceship in which Pseudoman circumnavigates the Moon in 1961. The memoir ends with a visit to the Lenin Underground Village, a vast Keep built two kilometres Underground beneath Moscow as an exercise in the engineering of Utopia.

Aleriel is a series of interplanetary fictions, featuring the travels around the solar system of the winged Venusian Aleriel, during the course of which Aleriel - who has been passing as a hunchback to disguises his wings - describes Venus as a Utopia of the unfallen; in the second part of the tale, Aleriel returns to Venus, and sends back missives describing life on further planets.

Contents:

• Aleriel: or A Voyage to Other Worlds - [Aleriel] - (1883) - novel
• Letters from the Planets: By Our Roving Commissioner - [Aleriel] - (1887) - shortstory
• Letters from the Planets: Letter the Second - [Aleriel] - (1887) - shortstory
• Letters from the Planets: From Our Roving Correspondent - [Aleriel] - (1887) - shortstory
• Letters from the Planets: IV. From Our Roving Correspondent - [Aleriel] - (1887) - shortstory
• Letters from the Planets: Canal Life on Mars - [Aleriel] - (1890) - shortstory

"Extracts From Captain Stormfield's Visit To Heaven" is the first-person account of a sea captain's trip to heaven after his death. First published serially in "Harper's Magazine" in December 1907 and January 1908 (though written 30 years earlier), then as a Christmas gift book. "Extracts" was the last book Mark Twain published during his lifetime.

Lenox, the Earl of Redgrave, has made the greatest scientific discovery in the history of the world: a flying ship with the power to break free of Earth's gravity and take to the stars. But before he uses it to expand humanity's understanding of the universe, he has some personal business to attend to--namely, wooing an old flame.

The lady in question is Zaidie, the daughter of Lenox's colleague Professor Rennick. With Zaidie about to be forced into a loveless marriage, Lenox knows he must do something drastic. He steals her away and takes her out of this world--literally.

Griffith's accounts of other planets are spectacularly engaging--from subterranean civilizations on the moon to the warlike Martians to the musical inhabitants of Venus. This remarkable adventure makes for a memorable honeymoon indeed.

A Trip to Venus (1897) is an account of a journey by Spaceship - powered by a new Antigravity as a sustaining Power Source - to an idyllic Utopia on Venus, with a brief excursion to Mercury.

First published in English in 1931, this novel for young adults is an accurate mirror of many of the space travel concepts that have been discussed by pre-war European experts. The author's imaginative theories about the history of the Earth--many of which presage those of Velikovksy and von Daniken--are explored.

A young German scientist and his uncle, with one mechanic, take off in a rocket-like device, and finally reach the moon. An egotistical young American news reporter succeeds in going with them as a stowaway.

First published in English in 1930, this remarkable science fiction novel details the fate of three astronauts whose Spaceship takes off accidentally from its mooring in the artificial Island of New Atlantis, just west of San Francisco. After a daring trip, they reach the Moon. Based on the pioneering work of Hermann Oberth, this suspenseful novel is an accurate mirror of the state of the art of astronautics of the time.

A turn of the last-century boys adventure, which takes the heros into space, to Mars, and the wonders there.

Adrift in the Stratosphere, aimed at a juvenile audience, has a young protagonists accidentally take off in a professor's experimental Spaceship and they soon find themselves attacked by irrationally hostile Martians with various Rays and a madness-inducing Basilisk radio broadcast; there are subsequent tours of Utopias set on space Islands.

The story starts with a comet called Gallia, that touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. The disaster occurs on January 1 around Gibraltar. On the territory that is carried away by the comet there remain a total of thirty-six people of French, English, Spanish and Russian nationality. These people do not realize at first what has happened, and consider the collision an earthquake. During a new collision of the comet with Earth two years later, the castaways return to earth in a balloon they put together.

This novel has has also been split into two parts: To the Sun? & Off on a Comet!

This is a lost race novel of an Atlantean Kingdom remnant, living beneath the ocean off the Azores, under a glass dome.

In the 'The End of Books', which is a transcript of an impromptu speech given in 1894, Octave Uzanne brilliantly anticipated the invention of the walkman, radio, TV, Ipods, hearing problems and anticipated the modern form of the 'demise of books argument' by a century.

(Good fun when read upon a kindle or any other ebook platform.)

Written for a younger audiance, a futurist submarine ventures to where no one has gone before: the North Pole.

Penguin Island (1908) has been called "the best social satire ever written" (Toni Ungerer).

The story takes place in Antarctica, where a fictional penguin population mirrors the foibles of human beings. With the devil's help, a missionary arrives in Antartica and baptizes the local penguins. With God's help, he then turns them into human beings. As a result, the penguins must now try to figure out how to live together and create a civilization. They experience their own barbaric Ancient Times and Middle Ages, and in their efforts to create a modern age, they undergo social conflicts and devastating wars.

Written in the spirit of rationalism and enlightenment,Penguin Island is a wickedly funny, incisive portrait of religious fanatacism.

The Earth-Tube (1929), a Yellow Peril sub-genre novel, in which Asians take advantage of their possession of the invulnerable metal undulal to tunnel under South America, which they soon conquer. After a young hero has penetrated the secret, catastrophic explosions close the tunnel, inundating South America but sparing the USA, which has transformed itself into a socialist regime in response to the free gold which the Asians have been raining from the skies in an effort to destabilize the great capitalist democracy.

Three go back... 25,000 years, to lost Atlantis! A tale mixing adventure, science, and sex in the search for solutions to our world's problems.

This a classic novel of adventure reflecting the tangled milieu of the Middle East just after World War I. It is a flying adventure story reflecting the enthusiasm for air travel and constantly improving technology of the period. The super aircraft of the Flying Legion, The Eagle of the Sky, could come, in effect, from the magazine covers of Science and Mechanics of the period.

If you like first rate derring do, cliff hanging situations, heroic characters fighting down to the last ditch against impossible odds, this is it!

This adventure classic tells the adventures of one man against the strange wonders of a not-so-deserted isle.

A stranded sailor is pitted against the strange wonders of a deserted island inhabited by the brutish and nearly inhuman decendents of a pirate crew as well as strange creatures from the mythology of the ancient Greeks---from satyrs to a mysterious Dryad...who speaks fluent French! And, of course, there's a beautiful woman to be won...

This little-known adventure novel is full of intrigue, adventure, lost cities and savages. A must-read for adventure pulp fans!

Anne Bedo is unhappily married. Her husband, Elias, is an abusive drunk who cruelly mistreats her, and she decides she can't take it any more. While traveling by ship, Anne decides to make her escape. Making it appear as though she has gone mad and thrown herself overboard, she instead disembarks in disguise with her friend, the Aboriginal youth Kombo.

Anne and Kombo venture through dangerous, unexplored country, braving the murderous tribes and cannibals, as she seeks to put distance between herself and her persecutor. During her travels, she meets up with Danish explorer Eric Hansen, and together, they make an astonishing discovery. Deep in the Australian wilderness lives a tribe of "Red Men," the Aca, part of the ancient Mayan race. Can Anne, Eric, and Kombo survive the myriad threats posed by savage cannibals, the Aca's "Death-Stone," and the vengeance of Elias Bedo?

Lentala of the South Seas: The Romantic Tale of a Lost Colony (1908) is a Lost Race tale set on a South Seas Island, where evidences of a lost white race is discovered.

Ted Dustin, an American inventor, seeks to win a prize of one million dollars by being the first person to touch the moon with an object launched from Earth. He devises a huge gun, which fires upon the surface of the moon. Shortly thereafter, the moon fires back, and war breaks out between the planet and its satellite. Using a videophone he invented, Ted hails communication with the moon. A beautiful woman and her guards first reply, but their transmission is cut off by warlike yellow aliens. Ted eventually heads to the moon in a spacecraft of his own design, and meets the titular character, who turns out to be the beautiful woman from the transmission, as well as a princess of one of the two groups that inhabit the moon.

A country farmer uncovers remnants of an advanced civilization that contain a woman, asleep in suspended animation for two thousand years.

Upon awakening, the woman, Earani, teleports herself into the office of the Australian Prime Minister and reveals her plans to take over the world -- through mind control!

Does the beautiful Earani mean to save humanity or destroy it?

Fantasy adventures.

From out of the dark and mystic Egypt comes The Beetle, a creature of horror, 'born of neither God nor man', which can change its form at will. It is bent on revenge for a crime committed against the devotees of an ancient religion. At large in London, it pursues its victims without mercy and no one, it seems, is safe from its gruesome clutches.

Richard Marsh's weird, compelling and highly original novel, which once outsold Dracula, is both a horror masterpiece and a fin de siecle melodrama embracing the fears and concerns of late Victorian society. Long out of print, The Beetle is now available in this Wordsworth edition, ready to chill you to the marrow and give you nightmares.

Carmilla is a Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. First published in 1871 as a serial narrative in The Dark Blue, it tells the story of a young woman's susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire named Carmilla. Carmilla predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by 26 years, and has been adapted many times for cinema.

Here are two great, neglected horror novels by Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, together in one volume for the first time. It is a double treat for lovers of blood-curdling fantasy fiction.

The Lady of the Shroud, published here in its full and unabridged form, is a fascinating and engrossing concoction of a vampire tale, Ruritanian adventure story and science fiction romance. The novel fully demonstrates the breadth and ingenuity of Stoker's imagination.

The spine-chilling The Lair of the White Worm features a monstrous worm secreted for thousands of years in a bottomless well and able to metamorphose into a seductive woman of a reptilian beauty who survives on her victim's life blood. The novel contains some of Stoker's most graphic and grisly moments of horror.

The story involves a mermaid who comes ashore in Edwardian England. Based on past knowledge gleaned from literature cast into the sea, and with the help of newly made human friends, she attempts to become part of well mannered society.

This is an exquisite 1914 feminist fantasy adventure novel, which went out of print without fanfare and then was "rediscovered."

It is an allegory about women's freedom and the restraint imposed by heterosexual pair-bonding.

A group of five men are shipwrecked on an uncharted island where they meet five shy but dazzling winged women. While they hammer and build and pass the time Robinson Crusoe style, the women silently flutter in and out of their days, teasing them with unattainable femininity.

The men devise plans to capture and woo the angel-like women, using "bait" such as mirrors and scarves. Finally they succeed, and in a terrible scene, cut the wings from each woman, forcing them to walk from then on.

The men hold a variety of viewpoints about the proper way to treat women which includes lots of dialogue about male/female relationships. A final surprise arrives with the new generation. Wings!!

The Future Eve (also translated as Tomorrow's Eve and The Eve of the Future; from the French) is a Symbolist science fiction novel by the French author Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Begun in 1878 and originally published in 1886, the novel is known for popularizing the term "android".

Villiers opens the novel with his main character, a fictionalized Thomas Edison, contemplating the effects of his inventions on the world and the tragedy that they were not available until his invention. Interrupted in his reverie, Edison receives a message from his friend Lord Ewald, who saved his life some years before and to whom he feels indebted.

When Ewald calls, he reveals that he is close to suicide because of his fiancée, Miss Alicia Clary. Alicia is described as being physically perfect but emotionally and intellectually empty. She will say whatever she believes others want to hear. Far from having any ambition or goals of her own, she lives her life based on what she believes is expected of her. Ewald describes his frustration with the disparity between her appearance and her self and confides that though he can have no other, she is so hopeless that he has resolved to kill himself.

Edison replies by offering to construct for Ewald a machine-woman in the form of Alicia but without any of her bothersome personality. He shows Ewald the prototype of the android, named Hadaly, and Ewald is intrigued and accepts Edison's offer. Edison reveals that he has invited Alicia to his residence at Menlo Park in order to set the process in motion. He then explains to the still somewhat doubtful Ewald how he will interact with the android and how natural it will all feel.

Ewald then presses Edison to tell him why he created Hadaly in the first place. Edison relates a long story about Mr. Edward Anderson who was tempted into infidelity by a young woman named Miss Evelyn. His indiscretion, brought about by the guile of Miss Evelyn, ruins his life completely. Edison then says that he tracked down Miss Evelyn only to discover that she was not as she appeared, rather she was horribly ugly and her beauty was entirely the work of cosmetics, wigs, and other accessories. Edison created Hadaly in an effort to overcome the flaws and artificiality of real women and create a perfect and natural woman who could bring a man true happiness. Edison then takes Ewald back to Hadaly and explains to him the exact mechanical details of her functioning: how she moves and talks and breathes and bathes, all the while explaining how natural and normal Hadaly's robotic needs are, comparing them to similar human actions and functions.

After the details of the android's functioning and construction are covered, Alicia arrives and is escorted in. Edison convinces her that she is being considered for an important theater role. Over the course of the next weeks, she poses for Edison and her exact physical likeness is duplicated and recordings of her voice are made. Eventually, Edison sends Alicia away and introduces Ewald to his android-Alicia without revealing that it is not the real thing. Ewald is very taken with her and she secretly reveals to him that she is in fact not simply an android but has been supernaturally endowed with the spirit of Sowana, Edison's mystical assistant. Ewald does not reveal this fact to Edison but instead leaves with Hadaly-Alicia-Sowana. However, before he can reach home to his new life with his new lover, Ewald's ship sinks and the android, who was traveling with the cargo, is destroyed.