Opening the virtual covers of "The World Below," by S. Fowler Wright, a science fiction novel generally considered to be a late scientific romance. The author planned a trilogy but never completed it, so I'm not expecting a perfectly satisfying conclusion. Wright is possibly best remembered today for "Deluge," adapted loosely to film in 1933.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/s-fowler-wright/the-world-below
Not to be confused with the very different scientific romance, "Hartmann the Anarchist or The Doom of the Great City" by Edward Douglas Fawcett, in which London undergoes a rather more conventionally violent assault.
#Books #ScientificRomance #Fiction #Victorian https://mastodon.social/@publicdomainrev/116590930990213290
"The Wreck of a World" looks to have been republished as part of this series:
https://www.routledge.com/British-Future-Fiction-1700-1914-Volume-3/Clarke/p/book/9781138117440
Not an especially cheap option, though, even in ebook form.
"A Mexican Mystery" is even more elusive, although this gives me some hope despite the schedule looking to have slipped:
https://www.tim-taylor.com/news/posts/2025/07/11/a-quick-update-on-various-projects.html
I'm rather enjoying the hunt, mind you. When I first started reading scientific romance fiction it was quite hard to find anything other than the major and more mainstream works, such as H.G. Wells' stories. These days many previously exceptionally obscure books have been republished or converted into (often free) ebooks, so locating something can be as easy as going to Project Gutenberg or buying an anthology. Rarities like "A Mexican Mystery" stop me from growing complacent 😁
This set of eight volumes presents the reader with selected primary texts in the genre now generally known as future fiction. The chosen texts are designed to explore the dominant characteristics of the genre and examine how it changed over the 18th and 19th centuries.
Using this device I successfully tapped into the Zero-Point-Energy of the Gaping Void. Perpetua Mobilia nunc habemus!
The Age Of Abundance is upon us!!!! It is for the philosophers to argue how to deal with the abundance of free energy!!!
Slightly sidetracked from reading some Victorian science fiction by trying to open a folder of Forgotten Futures files on my iPad. This seems to be trickier than reasonably necessary.
As noted (and linked) on https://www.forgottenfutures.co.uk/cd-rom/cdrom.htm the final Forgotten Futures release and some additional extras can now be freely downloaded from the Internet Archive. Once downloaded and unzipped, on a desktop machine everything can be accessed by clicking on the HTML index file, which pops open in the browser. Safari won't do the same on the iPad (nor will any other browser, as far as I can tell) so instead I get to see the page without images and with inactive links, which makes navigating a bit of an arse. I was hoping to easily access everything offline, but seem to have fallen at the first "easily" hurdle.
Might aim for a spot of reading today, if my brain will allow it.
The 1920s Channel: "Futuristic Vehicles in the 1920s"
Meme-Free Zone and Other Lies by Marcus L. Rowland: "Forgotten Future - A Scheme for a Great National Monument"
Marcus L. Rowland has put the contents of the Forgotten Futures "CD-ROM" file on the Internet Archive:
https://ffutures.dreamwidth.org/2405753.html
Free to download, it remains a remarkable collection of stories, articles, illustrations and game material related to the scientific romances of Victorian and Edwardian fiction. A really great RPG, too.
#RPG #Games #ScientificRomance #ScienceFiction #Victorian #ForgottenFutures
Michael Surbrook's H.G. Wells sourcebook for the Hero System, "The Shape of Things to Come," is out now in PDF:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/534645/the-shape-of-things-to-come-hero-6e
Jon Hancock
Alexander Shendi