Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Science Fiction Audiobook (Free)

Long before 1984, Superstar Wars, or The Hunger Games, Victorian writers imagined a future where new technology and systems reshaped the globe and world they knew. The fantastic themes of modern science fiction showed up remarkably early: space and period travel, dystopian societies, even dangerously independent machines, all uplifting the speculative fiction from the Victorian era.

In Frankenstein Dreams, Michael Sims has gathered many of the very finest stories, some by traditional writers such as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells, but many which will surprise general visitors. Dark visions of the human being psyche emerge in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s ‘The Monarch of Dreams,’ while Mary E. Wilkins Freeman offers a glance of “the fifth dimension” in her provocative story ‘The Hall Bedroom.’

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