High above the night-shrouded street, whose silence was only broken by the occasional tramp of the military patrol or the gruff challenges of the sentries on the fortifications, a man was walking, with jerky, uneven strides, up and down a vast attic in an ancient house overlooking the old Fisher's Gate, close by where the River Ill leaves the famous city of Strassburg. The room, practically destitute of ordinary furniture, was fitted up as a chemical and physical laboratory, and the man was Doctor Emil Fargeau, the most distinguished scientific investigator that the lost province of Alsace...
Interplanetary commerce, if and when it begins, will be fraught with all of the dangers that accompany pioneering expeditions. There will be the terrible climatic conditions on other worlds to be faced, strange beasts and plants; and perhaps desperate and greedy men. That was the case when every new land was opened on Earth and it may be expected to be true when we conquer the solar planets....
A short story that takes place in the Venus Colonization. Man has been asked to create a new colony on the planet "next door" to earth and a new adventure is about to begin....
The story is described as a "space mage duel". It involves two witch doctors who instigate ghosts and demons against each other and may seem like a fantasy. But Norton bases the magic of magicians on the use of mildly hallucinogenic drugs, psychological manipulations and hidden telepathy, which put history into the realm of science fiction....
On January the Fifth, 1888--that is eleven months and four days after-my uncle, Edward Prendick, a private gentleman, who certainly went aboard the Lady Vain at Callao, and who had been considered drowned, was picked up in latitude 5 degrees 3' S. and longitude 101 degrees W. in a small open boat of which the name was illegible, but which is supposed to have belonged to the missing schooner Ipecacuanha. He gave such a strange account of himself that he was supposed demented. Subsequently he alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment of his escape from the Lady Vain. His case was...
The name of Bram Stoker needs no introduction - for more than a hundred years, the novel "Dracula" has not left the lists of best-sellers of different countries in the category "mysticism". And only true connoisseurs know that Stocker is also the author of small prose, written in the best traditions of classical English literature of the turn of the century. Bram Stoker in little prose showed himself no less creatively, vividly and mysteriously than in his most famous novel. Who in their right mind decides to take a night walk during Walpurgis Night, when there is a “great Sabbath” on Brocken...
A natural pause appears to have come in the career of Mr. H.G. Wells. After so many years of travelling up and down through time and space, familiarizing himself with all the various parts of the solar system and presenting himself imaginatively at all the various geological epochs, from the Stone Age to the end of the world, he has for good and all domesticated himself in his own planet and point of time. This gradual process of slowing down, so to speak, had been evident from the moment of his first appearance. The most obvious fact about his romances of science, considered as a series, is...
Here is a story that has been at rest for seven hundred years. It was first suppressed by one of the English kings of Plantagenet. It was later forgotten. I happened to dig it by accident. The incident was the relationship of my wife's cousin with a certain abbot of a father in a very ancient monastery in Europe. He let me figure out the number of moldy and musty manuscripts, and I came across this. This is very interesting - partly because it is a bit of an unwritten story, but mainly because it records the story of the most remarkable revenge and adventurous life of her innocent victim -...
A man may be a scoundrel, a crook, a high-phased confidence man, and still work toward a great dream which will be worth far more than the momentary damage his swindles cost....
