Garrett P. Serviss

Reproduction of the original: Other Worlds by Garrett P. Serviss

Reproduction of the original: Other Worlds by Garrett P. Serviss

Extraordinary voyages, fantastic inventions, and challenging questions about technology, race, gender, the future, and the meaning of the United States of America. The period between the Civil War and the Great War - dubbed the "Gilded Age" by Mark Twain - was the crucible of modern America and few genres were as suited to grapple with its troubles and opportunities as speculative fiction. This volume features rarely reprinted stories by such authors as Mark Twain and fellow humorist Ellis Parker Butler, pioneering feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, African American activist Sutton E. Griggs, science writer Garrett P. Serviss (the Neil deGrasse Tyson of his day), Jack London, dime novelist Edward S. Ellis, and John Jacob Astor IV, the richest man to die aboard the Titanic. "Science Fiction of America's Gilded Age" also includes a new introduction by editor C. W. Gross, creator and writer of "Voyages Extraordinaires: Scientific Romances in a Bygone Age," (http: //voyagesextraordinaires.blogspot.com/) the preeminent weblog dedicated to Victorian-Edwardian science fiction, horror, fantasy, history, and retro-futurism.

Astronomy with an Opera-Glass: The Stars of Winter by Garrett P. Serviss. I HAVE never beheld the first indications of the rising of Orion without a peculiar feeling of awakened expectation, like that of one who sees the curtain rise upon a drama of absorbing interest. And certainly the magnificent company of the winter constellations, of which Orion is the chief, make their entrance upon the scene in a manner that may be almost described as dramatic. First in the east come the world-renowned Pleiades. At about the same time Capella, one of the most beautiful of stars, is seen flashing above the northeastern horizon. These are the sparkling ushers to the coming spectacle. In an hour the fiery gleam of Aldebaran appears at the edge of the dome below the Pleiades, a star noticeable among a thousand for its color alone, besides being one of the brightest of the heavenly host. The observer familiar with the constellations knows, when he sees this red star which marks the eye of the angry bull, Taurus, that just behind the horizon stands Orion with starry shield and upraised club to meet the charge of his gigantic enemy. With Aldebaran rises the beautiful V-shaped group of the Hyades.

Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. It is impossible that the stupendous events which followed the disastrous invasion of the earth by the Martians should go without record, and circumstances having placed the facts at my disposal, I deem it a duty, both to posterity and to those who were witnesses of and participants in the avenging counterstroke that the earth dealt back at its ruthless enemy in the heavens, to write down the story in a connected form. The Martians had nearly all perished, not through our puny efforts, but in consequence of disease, and the few survivors fled in one of their projectile cars, inflicting their cruelest blow in the act of departure. Their Mysterious Explosive. They possessed a mysterious explosive, of unimaginable puissance, with whose aid they set their car in motion for Mars from a point in Bergen County, N. J., just back of the Palisades. The force of the explosion may be imagined when it is recollected that they had to give the car a velocity of more than seven miles per second in order to overcome the attraction of the earth and the resistance of the atmosphere. The shock destroyed all of New York that had not already fallen a prey, and all the buildings yet standing in the surrounding towns and cities fell in one far-circling ruin. The Palisades tumbled in vast sheets, starting a tidal wave in the Hudson that drowned the opposite shore. Thousands of Victims. The victims of this ferocious explosion were numbered by tens of thousands, and the shock, transmitted through the rocky frame of the globe, was recorded by seismographic pendulums in England and on the Continent of Europe.

In the aftermath of the Martian invasion described in H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, the greatest minds of the Victorian Era-led by inventor Thomas A. Edison-mount a counterstrike on the Red Planet. Armed with disintegrator guns of Edison's invention, space suits, telephonic communication and electrically powered spacecraft, their mission is to insure that Mars never threatens Earth again Written in 1898, Edison's Conquest of Mars was among the first stories to depict spacecraft, space suits, laser-like weapons, hand to hand battles with aliens, and other staples of 20th-century sci-fi.