Eleven years before Jules Verne took his readers to the Moon, 40 years before Wells devised the Time Machine, nearly a century before Tolkien published Lord Of The Rings, Charles Defontenay wrote the imaginary history of an entire star system located in the far off constellation of Cassiopeia. Long before science fiction writers dreamed of interstellar travels, alien races and the colonization of other planets, in 1854, on the eve of the Crimean War, Charles Defontenay penned the first modern "space opera". STAR is a treasure chest of alien lore, the history ...

The Wing, A Romance of the New Age (1911) is the story of the alerion, a flying machine capable of neutralizing gravity by harnessing Earth's telluric currents, powered by atomic disintegration and controlled by radio signals; but even more, it is the story of its inventors, their lives and loves, and the tragedies that bind them. Jean Richepin was a member of the French Academy, and the author of several notable collections of fantastic stories. The Wing is a significant text in the history of French scientific romance, being one of the few literary responses ...

“Instead of the lugubrious silence of a necropolis,” Miss Slow said, “there are songs and cries, a whole concert that gives the illusion of life in a magical city!” In The Perfume of Lust (1905), a ship is trapped in the waters of Atlantis when a submarine eruption returns the lost continent to the surface, and its crew and passengers are subjected to strange mental influences that stimulate their erotic impulses.Gaston Danville’s characters are haunted by memories, unconscious impulses and the poignant emotions provoked by ...

In The New World, the Arctic Utopian community founded at the end of The Human Microbes by Dr. Gaël, comprised of the victims of tyranny rescued by Captain Josiah and his "phantom brig," is threatened by the evil Judge Roll Wolff, intent on destroying it to cover his crimes... In 1883, the notorious anarchist Louise Michel (1830-1905) was sentenced to six years of solitary confinement; effectively deprived of communication, she had had no refuge but writing. It is during that time that she penned The Human Microbes (published in 1887), as a distraction ...

Aurore Lescure, the first woman astronaut, who starred in The Xenobiotic Invasion, returns in this ground-breaking novel about the first successful interplanetary flight to the planetoid Eros. There, the intrepid explorers discover that evolution on Eros has taken a different turn than on Earth, producing a species of intelligent dinosaurs... The notion of a Japanese-financed rocket piloted by a French female astronaut was a radical one in 1932, when this daring and original novel was written. With The Castaways of Eros, Théo Varlet hoped to promote ...

In The Mutilated Bacchus (1922), a young genius, severely mutilated after a plane crash, still manages through sheer willpower to turn his home valley into an Eden-like utopia dedicated to the search for Joy; but a twist of fate will lead to a cruel end, full of disillusionment. This volume also includes The Strange Tournament of Love (1924), a bittersweet chronicle of the manner in which André Arnyvelde escaped his once-cherished enslavement by the idea of Joy, by recasting the traditional fantasy tale of a competition between suitors to determine ...

The Chimerical Quest (1932) deals with an eccentric scientist, crippled during the Great War, who has discovered a method of converting lead into gold but wishes to give his secret away as soon as he has perfected it, so that anyone will be able to make gold, thus fulfilling his dream of turning society upside down by obliterating wealth. The Black Sun (1921) offers an account of the planet-wide catastrophe that overwhelms the world when a collision with an errant dark star causes the sun's radiation to flare up dramatically, and tells of the heroes' battle ...

Bel Demonio takes place in the Spoleto region of Italy between 1625 and 1655. Ercole Vitelli murders his cousin, Francis Vitelli, who is the legitimate heir of the wealthy Monteleone family, under the eyes of Francis’ son, Andrea. Fifteen years later, Andrea returns seeking revenge, posing as “Demonio,” the leader of a ring of bandits.  Bel Demonio (1850) and The Companions of the Silence (1857), were retroactively linked by Paul Féval to his saga of the Black Coats, functioning as the backstory of that vast criminal conspiracy. ...

This collection of nine proto-science fiction tales, translated and edited by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford, ranges from Louis-Sébastien Mercier's 1768 opening tale, in which the hero communicates with the dead through a beam that anticipates a modern-day laser, to an 1887 story by Guy de Maupassant that speculates on Martian life. In between, we have tales of a heart transplant, a device that can see through time and an alien dragon. The book also includes Albert Robida's classic novella "The Monkey King" in which Saturnin ...

Young Morgane Gorlyer works for a prestigious French fashion magazine, but she is also the descendant of the original, much maligned, Morgan Le Fey, an enchantress who was King Arthur's sister and heir to the secrets of Vivien, the Lady of the Lake, Queen of Avalon.   With her boyfriend, Faust (the son of Goethe’s character), who was cursed to spend his life as a black cat until Morgane freed him. she is forced to thwart the evil schemes of her jealous childhood friend Alecto and her deadly companion, Lord Raven, and face the awesome might ...