

This book is a longstanding personal favorite, a tale of explorers who follow a series of caverns down to a prehistoric wonderland in the core of the Earth. This was just the first part of the Lensman series, an expansive set of books that spans billions of years.Ī Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne The pulpy space opera tale has aliens who secretly shape humanity's destiny, nuclear war, space travel, genetic engineering, stellar pirates, and more.

(In the story, however, much of the technology here relies on anti-gravity mechanisms rather than combustion.)Ī true classic from the Golden Age of science fiction, written by a science fiction great.

Munro is largely forgotten today, but A Trip to Venus is important for what it predicted all the way back in 1897: that the best way to get between planets in the solar system might be to get there by rocket.

Still, this was the start of one of the most influential heroes of the pulp era. The Buck Rogers we came to know was a swashbuckling space opera hero this novel is definitely terrestrial, though filled with fabulous flying weapons of mass destruction and other far-future technologies. He becomes a freedom fighter in a hellish world five centuries from his own. Anthony is a World War I veteran thrust into the future after exposure to a mysterious gas left him in a prolonged coma. This novel marks the first appearance of Buck Rogers, then called Anthony. While post-Apocalyptic science fiction is nothing new, this is definitely an excellent example, and like much of Hodgson's work, is bizarre and incredibly imaginative.Īrmageddon – 2419 A.D. Outside the fortress lie creatures descended from humanity but twisted by the desolate atmosphere outside. All of humanity lives in one gigantic fortress. The sun has long since gone out, and the only light on Earth comes from volcanoes. The novel straddles a line between horror and science fiction and includes elements of time travel and dimension hopping. House on the Borderland and The Night Land by William Hope HodgsonĪnother set of stories planted firmly in the weird fiction genre, House on the Borderland tells the tale of two men staying in a house that opens to a hellish other dimension from which gruesome pig-men continually escape. Or you can dive into the schlocky goodness that is The Monster Men, which is exactly what it sounds like and involves mad scientists and genetic engineering. There's also the Land that Time Forgot series, showing a further obsession with untapped wildernesses, relict animals, and more. But you can also delve into some of his lesser known properties, like At the Earth's Core, which has more than a passing resemblance to a certain Jules Verne book. There are also a whole lot of Tarzan books to choose from. There's of course A Princess of Mars and its four sequels, featuring the stories of John Carter of Mars. Yes, this is simply a link to a whole lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs, because a lot of his work is in the public domain and is serialized. It has fewer horror overtones and is more geared toward telling adventure stories of secret lands and hidden species. Chambers was, after all, a huge inspiration for the first season of True Detective about his "King in Yellow" stories, a narrative woven of a play that drives those who read it mad by the second act.īut In Search of the Unknown is about a search for rare animals, cryptids, and out-and-out monsters from the perspective of a world-traveling zoologist. Chambers belongs more in weird fiction – that sort of gray area of dark fantasy and horror that H.P. The novella also serves as a primer in geometry, concisely explaining the first, second, and third dimensions while also critiquing Victorian culture's narrow-mindedness. This is the tale of a two dimensional square who makes a new friend – a three dimensional sphere. Here are a few available there, as well as a couple from, which similarly collects public domain works. Project Gutenberg seeks to make many of these works available.
#Sci fi epub collection free#
That's such a long time that many of the greatest works have fallen into the public domain, providing a way to get free and easy access to many of these timeless works (and a few that time has forgotten.) Science fiction has been around as a genre for more than 200 years.
