Frankenstein Dreams
Victorian authors saw a future when new technology and technologies transformed the world and cosmos they knew long before 1984, Star Wars, or The Hunger Games. The main themes of modern science fiction appeared unexpectedly early: space and time travel, dystopian civilizations, and even dangerously autonomous robots, all of which influenced Victorian speculative fiction.
Michael Sims has compiled many of the best stories in Frankenstein Dreams, some by renowned authors like Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells, but many that will surprise average 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.'
Frankenstein Dreams is a treasure trove of stories known and rediscovered, 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.
