The people of the Euchronian Millennium had been reminded of the Underworld that existed beneath the platform on which they had constructed their better, cleaner, safer world--leaving the original surface of Earth a dark, dreary, and forgotten place. That awareness had become a political pawn, which many different people were trying to manipulate in their own interests. In the meantime, the search for more information about what actually existed in the Underworld went on, tentatively and ineptly. The hunter sent to help clarify the situation brought back a sensational prize, and revealed it to the world--but in so doing, he triggered an unexpected and unprecedented reaction, which changed the whole nature of the game, gave the people of Heaven a vision of Hell, and threw the fate of both worlds into the balance. The second novel in the exciting Realms of Tartarus series!

This volume assembles 10 science fiction stories by Brian Stableford, including: "Complications," "Alternate Worlds," "The Flowers of the Forest," "Layers of Meaning," "The Oedipus Effect," "Sorillege and Serendipity," "Skinned Alive," "Taken for a Ride," "Virtuous Reality," and "Wildland."

Alastor, the son of an iron-master, has no inclination to follow his father's trade, preferring to work with wood. He and his musically-talented sister Catrianne leave the foundry to go and live in a town, where Alastor soon begins to specialize in making musical instruments. One day, while delivering an unusual musical instrument to a hamlet high in the mountains, he is thrown by his horse during a storm. Temporarily lame, he is forced to take refuge in a strange cabin in the forest, where the mysterious Melusine lived with her daughter Lucinia. When Alastor returns to the town, he takes Lucinia with him and marries her. They have two children, Handsel and Chanterelle. Everything goes well with the family until disaster strikes, leaving Catrianne in sole charge of the children, obliged to seek shelter first at the iron-master's foundry and then at the cabin in the mountains, where a great many surprises await them regarding their own identity and the peril overhanging the...

Science Fiction/Fantasy. 69274 words long.

This is a new collection of 12 French proto-science fiction tales penned between 1757 and 1924, translated and annotated by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford. From a pioneering venture on the exploration of "inner space" by renowned Swiss philosopher Emerich de Vattel to visions of Paris in ruins being explored by future antiquarians; from interplanetary communication with the planet Mars to the discovery of a spaceship from Mercury, which crashed in the Antarctic, and the moving saga of the Earthmen who tried to save its alien pilot, this fifth collection provides an unparalleled view of the evolution of French scientific romances. In the title piece, Quebec helped to make up for France's lack of female genre writers with Emma-Adèle Lacerte's 1917 sequel to Jules Verne's classic tale, Twenty Thousands Leagues Under the Sea.

This collection of 18 proto-science fiction tales, translated and edited by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford, includes such ground-breaking tales as Charles Cros' An Interastral Drama (1872), about an unlawful love between an Earthman and a Venusian woman, Victorien Sardou's The Black Pearl (1862), the first romance of forensic science, Eugène Mouton's The End of the World (1872), depicting an ecocatastrophe precipitated by global warming generated by human industrial activity, and Louis Mullem's The Supreme Progress (1890), an imaginative tour de force of unprecedented scope predicting ideas that were later to be popularized by writers such as Olaf Stapledon. All the stories included in this volume predate the first translation into French of H.G. Wells. They are representative of a distinct tradition of romans scientifiques whose cardinal influences included astronomer Camille Flammarion and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. This edition includes a historical introduction and notes by Stableford.

Meet the enigmatic immortal Axel Rathenius, the mournful Hecate Rain, the mysterious Nicodemus Rham, keeper of the Lucifer's Light on Devil's Rocks, the flamboyant antiquary Ragan Barling, the necromantically-inclined Madame Vashti Savage, Eirene Magdelana, the morpheomorphist who lives on Snowspur Mountain communing with the winds, Myrica Mavor whose Galley walls exhibit the sacred and the profane, physician Fion Commonal, funeral director Emmaus Partibus, and all the other artists living on the island of Mnemosyne in the Everlasting Empire, 2,000 years after the birth of the Divine Caesar...

1821. Thanks to the technique recently discovered by Victor Frankenstein, it is now possible to resurrect the dead. The British Crown put their best man, former Scotland Yard Superintendent Gregory Temple on the trail of criminal mastermind Henri de Belcamp, a.k.a. John Devil, who plans to use such technology, and the "Grey Men" it produces, to reshape the world. But behind the scenes, another faction is secretly at work: an esoteric secret society of immortals led by the alchemist Joseph Balsamo who also seek Frankenstein's secret... The Shadow of Frankenstein is the first volume in a prodigious Alternate History saga which embraces the works of Mary Shelley, Paul Féval, Alexandre Dumas and others, written by Brian M. Stableford, an acknowledged master of the genre, author of the critically acclaimed The Plurality of Worlds.

By the gloom of electric lights, stunted and misshapen beasts scrabble for their lives in blasted landscapes of poisoned canals and grotesque vegetation. But this is no alien world. This is Earth, or used to be.Now it is Tartarus, shut off from the face of heaven, from the sky and the stars, by a huge platform which completely envelops the world. Living in a technological utopia, the inhabitants of the platform have long forgotten that other men still live in the grim underworld that they abandoned.But one man descends to the depths. He discovers that under the accelerated evolutionary conditions of this hothouse underworld a whole new ecology of grossly mutated life-forms has emerged. Now the True Men share their environment with rat-men, cat-men and gigantic waterworms ……

At last, the true story can finally be told of my participation in the investigation of a haunted bookshop in Barry, South Wales, organized by my good friend and fellow science fiction writer Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe. As a result of the haunting in question, or perhaps the abundant coal dust that accompanied it, I was enabled to meet the Devil and make a mutually rewarding pact with him. The story also relates my subsequent close encounter with the Devil's opposite number while participating as a volunteer in a psychology experiment at the University of Glamorgan, intended to open up a more effective conduit between the conscious and the unconscious mind. That one did not go as well, perhaps understandably given the inevitable conflict of interests, but was, and remains, no less intriguing.

Four French utopian fantasies by Paul Adam, Victor Considérant, Joseph Déjacque & Fernand Giraudeau. This collection, the fifteenth in this series, presents four French "utopian fantasies" which were all ground-breaking in their day. Victor Considerant's The Complete News from the Moon (1836) is a utopia in which the society described is only related to existing societies in satirical terms, and very subtly. Fernand Giraudeau's The New City (1868) and Joseph Déjacque's The Humanisphere (1899) are both set in future Paris, one imagining the ideal society that might result from the politics of Anarchism, the other a dystopia arguing the opposite viewpoint. Paul Adam's Letters from Malaisie (1898) presents a society that, although founded by eutopians, has produced a compromised result, in which eutopian and dystopian elements are fused, thus raising the question of whether any program of political reform could possibly produce the intended results, given the vagaries of human nature.

The Revolt of the Machines translated and annotated by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford, features eight stories written between 1865 and 1918, providing a cross-section of the early development of what the editor of the 19th century magazine La Science Ilustrée, Louis Figuier, called roman scientifique [scientific fiction]. Expanding upon the scientific speculations of the day, the stories in this volume often adopt philosophical or moral tones when conceptualizing the consequences of the discovery of anti-gravity; the breakthrough finding that life is possible after death; the mass suicide of technology; a cautionary tale of the dangers of telepathy; humans being dominated by a sub-species; a man who gets lost in history; and the exploration of Earth's newest moon, the wandering planetoid Anthea. In every case, these scientific romances use scientific conjecture to tackle the eternal theme of what it means to be human.