When today’s top science-fiction and fantasy authors look for inspiration, they turn to the classics. We continue reading those same books (year after year) because they stand the test of time. For a limited time, you can download these beloved science fiction and fantasy books for free!
Triplanetary
Nevia, located many light years from the Earth’s sun, is running out of iron, the primary source of energy for the planet’s dominant amphibious race. Armed with technology that can extract iron atoms from anything it encounters—rock, machinery, man-made structures, even human blood—the Nevians set their sights on a rich lode of the precious element: the planet Earth. Descending on its unsuspecting target, the Nevian space-ship destroys the city of Pittsburgh and its defenseless inhabitants before heading home with three human specimens in its hold. Among them is Conway Costigan, an undercover intelligence operative for the Triplanetary Patrol. From deep within the bowels of the enemy ship, Costigan must do the impossible: find a way to defeat the Nevians before every man, woman, and child on Earth is annihilated.
Known as the “father of space opera,” E. E. “Doc” Smith imagined remarkable future worlds and breathtaking intergalactic battles before the heyday of Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, and decades before Star Wars and Star Trek became part of the popular culture. His best-known work, the Lensman series, was one of five finalists for the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series.
The Coming Race
The story of the Vril-ya—a superior race of telepathic beings who dwell beneath Earth’s surface and are accidentally discovered by a young man exploring a mine shaft—was written by English writer and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Bulwer-Lytton has been dismissed by many literary critics (a “bad writing” competition has even been named for him), yet he enjoyed major bestselling success in his day, and he is the originator of several enduring phrases including, from this very book, “pursuit of the almighty dollar.”
Bulwer-Lytton had many devoted readers, but The Coming Race in particular attracted the attention of occultists such as Helena Blavatsky. “Vril” was even incorporated into the brand name of the British food product Bovril.
The Fixed Period
Set in 2073, this classic science fiction novel begins sixty years after a devastating epidemic wipes out most of humanity. James Howard Smith, one of the only survivors from the San Francisco area who remembers life before the plague, tries to impart the value of his wisdom to his grandsons as his time on Earth grows ever shorter.
Knowing only the savage world in which they have been raised, the feral boys cannot comprehend the scientific and technological wonders of a time before the Red Death and they mock their grandfather’s indecipherable babble. A despairing Smith can only fear for the future of humanity...
Tales of Troy and Greece
One of the founding fathers of science fiction, H. G. Wells is known for such landmark novels as The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau. In When the Sleeper Wakes, he sends a nineteenth-century man hurtling into an unfamiliar dystopian future...
In 1890s England, Graham, a fanatic socialist and author of prophetic writings, takes medication for his insomnia and is plunged into a deep sleep that lasts two hundred years. He awakens in a domed twenty-second-century London in which he has become—due to the compound interest on his bank accounts—the richest man in the world.
But as a nightmarish caste system is revealed, Graham realizes all his worst fears for the future have come to fruition, especially when he discovers a lower class of workers who spend their entire lives underground—a species that will soon evolve into the Morlocks of Wells’s The Time Machine.
