Free Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books to Read in March 2026

In H. G. Wells’s immortal novella, an unnamed Time Traveller builds a machine that hurtles him to the year 802,701 AD. He discovers a world divided into two species: the peaceful Eloi, who live in colossal, crumbling buildings and are childlike in size and demeanor, and the hulking Morlocks—pale, simian creatures who dwell below ground and prey on their terrestrial counterparts. When his time machine is stolen, the Traveller must outwit the Morlocks in order to retrieve it, escaping their clutches by skipping like a stone across the surface of time. On a frozen red beach thirty million years in the future, he bears witness to the planet’s terrible last days.

Britain is under attack, and winning at Dorking is the only way the empire can be saved.

It is the late nineteenth century, and a country much like Germany is on the move in Europe. It has already beaten its rivals on the continent and mobilized to the Netherlands, provoking the fear of British citizens. Then the nation strikes. Its powerful weapons destroy the Royal Navy, and invasion cannot be far behind.

Written as a hypothetical exercise to raise awareness among average British citizens about the potential danger that a resurgent Germany could pose, The Battle of Dorking earned its place in literary history as the forerunner to the invasion-novel genre, predating The War of the Worlds by almost twenty years. The novel’s drama, which culminates in a fight that will change the course of history forever, thrilled audiences when it was originally released as a serial, and it maintains its power today.

From one of the fathers of science fiction and the great-grandfather of steampunk—and purportedly coauthored by his son, Michel—this 1889 story covers a day in the life of a newspaper magnate a millennium into the future. The novel is replete with technological predictions both prescient and improbable, such as video telephones, pneumatic transportation tubes, air cars, built-in furniture, a managed climate, and scientifically prepared food.

An immediate bestseller upon its release in the early twentieth century, Deluge takes place in the English Midlands as a man struggles to save his injured wife and small children amid the destruction wrought by a catastrophic storm. He is then separated from his family by a sudden and terrifying surge of water. Numb and stunned, he proceeds through a world transformed, where those few who have remained alive against overwhelming odds, with neither the comforts nor the constraints of an orderly industrial society, attempt to survive. The basis of a 1933 film, Deluge is a riveting milestone in post-apocalyptic fiction.