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    Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Science Fiction
    Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Science Fiction
    Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Science Fiction
    Audiobook13 hours

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

    Written by Michael Sims

    Narrated by Tim Campbell

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateSep 5, 2017
    ISBN9781681687940
    Author

    Michael Sims

    Michael Sims's six acclaimed non-fiction books include The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, The Story of Charlotte's Web, and Adam's Navel, and he edits the Connoisseur's Collection anthology series, which includes Dracula's Guest, The Dead Witness, The Phantom Coach, and the forthcoming Frankenstein Dreams. His writing has appeared in New Statesman, New York Times, Washington Post, and many other periodicals. He appears often on NPR, BBC, and other networks. He lives in Pennsylvania. michaelsimsbooks.com

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    Reviews for Frankenstein Dreams

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      So what did science fiction look like when modern science was still in its infancy? Michael Sims has put together a collection of 19th century short science fiction stories that illustrate not only the breadth and the creativity of the field prior to the turn of the 20th century, but also the creepy prescience of some of the writers (if not for strict scientific fact, then for topics that would remain scifi staples into the current day).In this collection we find mechanical brides made to order, vicious monsters awaiting daring pilots in the upper levels of the atmosphere, superhuman senses, alternate dimensions, strange aliens, time travel, and apocalyptic plagues and disasters. The stories, which include samples from authors like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, and Rudyard Kipling, range from chapter excerpts to short stories to stories fashioned so like news items that, War of the Worlds-style, many people accepted them as fact.My biggest complaint is that for the bigger names in the collection, clearly selected for their name recognition to the larger public, Sims has largely chosen to include only bits of chapters from their most famous works. As someone who looks to these collections to find little known authors or stories, this was a bit frustrating. I would have preferred something a little more off the beaten path. Fans of Victorian literature and scifi buffs should check this volume out. In these stories, we can see the seed of inspiration for a number of modern tales.A copy of this book was provided by the publisher via Goodreads Giveaways in exchange for an honest review.
    • 3/5
      Sims' capsule introductions to the various pieces included here are to the point and well done, and there are some excellent stories here, but quite a few not-so-great ones too. If you've any interest in the topic at all, you've likely read most of the good ones elsewhere, too, which doesn't help. Nor does the use of extracts from longer works here, which didn't work well at all for me. Overall, then, a bit of a miss with this one, I'm sorry to say.