Long before 1984, Celebrity Wars, or The Craving for food Games, Victorian writers imagined a future where new research and systems reshaped the globe and universe they knew. The fantastic themes of modern science fiction showed up amazingly early: space and period travel, dystopian societies, even dangerously independent devices, all motivating the speculative fiction from the Victorian era.

In Frankenstein Dreams, Michael Sims has gathered lots of the very finest stories, some by classic writers such as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells, but many that will surprise general readers. Dark visions of the human psyche emerge in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s ‘The Monarch of Dreams,’ while Mary E. Wilkins Freeman offers a glance of “the 5th dimensions” in her provocative tale ‘The Hall Bedroom.’

With contributions by Edgar Allan Poe, Alice Fuller, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many more, each introduced by Michael Sims, whose elegant introduction provides valuable literary and historical context, Frankenstein Dreams is a treasure trove of tales known and rediscovered.