A dystopian novel about the terrible oppressions of an American oligarchy at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and the struggles of a socialist revolutionary movement
A brightly appealing collection of inimitable comic essays by a whimsical master of American humor. Originally published in 1921, Of All Things! and a companion volume, Love Conquers All(published in 1922), were the first books by a true American original, one whose wry, befuddled, and gently exasperated outlook on life can never go out of date.
Lieutenant Gulliver Jones, U.S.N., arrived on Mars in a most unexpected fashion and promptly found himself head-over-heels in adventure. For Mars was a planet of ruined cities, ancient peoples, copper-skinned swordsmen, and weird and awesome monsters. There was a princess to be rescued, a River of Death to be navigated, and a strange prophecy to be fulfilled.
After a strange interstellar journey, Maskull, a man from Earth, awakens alone in a desert on the planet Tormance, seared by the suns of the binary star Arcturus. As he journeys northward, guided by a drumbeat, he encounters a world and its inhabitants like no other, where gender is a victory won at dear cost; where landscape and emotion are drawn into an accursed dance; where heroes are killed, reborn, and renamed; and where the lure of Shaping, who may be God, torment Maskull in his pilgrimage
A futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague, The Last Man is Mary Shelley's most important novel after Frankenstein. With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters.
Adam Jeffson, the last survivor of a doomed Polar expedition and, ultimately, the last man on Earth. For some inexplicable reason, the North Pole, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Garden of Eden in the Bible, has become associated with that place and the idea behind The Purple Cloud is that if anyone every reaches the Pole and enters the forbidden territory once again, then all of mankind will be wiped out.