Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Guy de Maupassant, Edward Bellamy, and Jack London#these and other writers fused the startling scientific facts of the era with fantasy to explore the often terrifying realm of the newly possible, Scientists were fast redefining the world and everything in it. Writers, in turn, were developing a new genre to probe the human possibilities of their discoveries. The result, in literature, was some of the classics of science fiction.

Here is the definitive collection of 19th-century science fiction writing-selected by a team who are master writers themselves. In these thrilling tales, man tampers with nature, swallows immortality, flaunts destiny, battles dark powers, loses his soul, travels through time, and encounters quasi-human civilizations.
Above all, here is a chronicle of man's search to control his fate in a new world where nothing was absolute, and everything contradicted what had gone before it.