Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Science Fiction

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.

Michael Sims is the author of The Story of Charlotte's Web, which the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and other venues chose as a Best Book of the year; The Adventures of Henry Thoreau; and Arthur and Sherlock, among other books. He edits The Connoisseur's Collection series of Victorian anthologies, including Dracula's Guest, The Dead Witness, and The Phantom Coach. He lives in western Pennsylvania.

Brilliant ... Entertaining ... Wonderful, over-the-top atmosphere. -- starred review Library Journal on DRACULA'S GUEST Barzun considered the ghost story 'more artful -- and more productive of shivers -- than the straight tale of horror,' an assertion that is abundantly substantiated by Michael Sims's delightful anthology of Victorian ghost stories. Washington Post Book World on THE PHANTOM COACH Just in time for All Hallow's Eve, Sims has released The Phantom Coach, a collection of classic Victorian ghost stories published by Bloomsbury in a softcover edition. The book includes creepy tales from Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Ambrose Bierce, among others. Christian Science Monitor on THE PHANTOM COACH