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!
Out of This World Adventures
These three sci-fi novels from the dawn of the twentieth century are among the first works of fiction to imagine visiting other planets.
A Honeymoon in Space: Lenox, the Earl of Redgrave, has invented a flying ship with the power to break free of Earth’s gravity. But before taking to the stars, he has some personal business to attend to—namely, wooing an old flame. The lady in question is Zaidie, a woman about to be forced into a loveless marriage. Stealing her away, Lenox takes her out of this world. George Griffith’s accounts of other planets are spectacularly imaginative—from subterranean civilizations on the moon to the warlike Martians to the musical inhabitants of Venus.
A Journey in Other Worlds: This philosophical sci-fi novel by John Jacob Astor follows a stockholder of the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company across the solar system. On Jupiter, Astor creates a world of gushing volcanoes, crashing waterfalls, and otherworldly flora and fauna. In contrast, his Saturn is an introspective land. Astor’s vision of a future with levitating trains, a police force equipped with cameras, and an interconnected network of phones, solar power, wind power, and air travel is astonishingly prescient.
A Princess of Mars: An Arizona prospector, John Carter suddenly finds himself transported to Mars in the first novel of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series. The shift in gravity gives Carter superhuman powers—and he’ll need them! The red planet, called Barsoom by its inhabitants, is in the grips of civil war. To save the legendary Princess Dejah Thoris, Carter must defeat legions of giant, four-armed, green barbarians and travel thousands of miles across a landscape populated with monstrous flora and fauna.
The Airlords of Han
Second in the pulp science fiction series that inspired the popular comic, TV, and movie franchise, from the author of Armageddon 2419.
Anthony “Buck” Rogers burst onto the sci-fi scene in an explosion of futuristic weapons and rip-roaring adventure. In Armageddon 2419, after being overcome by radioactive gases, the World War I veteran existed in a state of suspended animation until he awoke to a whole new century and a completely different war . . .
Now, in the twenty-fifth century, the Second War of Independence against the not-quite-human Han has come to a deadlock, thanks to the heroic efforts of Buck, warrior woman Wilma Deering, and the rest of the Wyoming Gang. Shored up in the forests surrounding the Han city of Nu-Yok, Buck and his band learn that the Hans are ready to change strategy, taking the war to the ground. Buck knows no one can survive close combat with the Hans and their disintegrator rays, but centuries of oppression have spawned a hatred among the humans deadlier than any weapon. Still, their only chance of survival is to get to the Hans before they can get to them.
The hunters have become the hunted.
The Silver Key
A man searches for the line between past and present, truth and illusion, and sleep and waking, in this eerie story in H. P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle.
Randolph Carter has grown older, and lost the key to the gate of dreams. He yearns to return to the fantastical worlds of his childhood dreams, with their promises of wisdom and understanding that he could not access while he was awake.
Now Randolph lives in the so-called real world, but he wonders which dream realm truly represents reality. He intends to find out, and embarks on a journey that will take him to places both familiar and deeply strange . . .
