Out-of-Copyright Sci Fi Classics Free on Kindle

Feel free to argue with the way I've broken up the authors below, but first hear me out:-) In the "Old Classics / Historical" column, I included the classic authors who most would agree have written a least one science fiction novel, but only when the free books on Amazon were transcribed from a published book version. With the exceptions of Burroughs, London and Rider, these are mainly from the Victorian age. The "Pulp Magazines" column includes many classic Sci Fi authors, but the free versions of their novels on Amazon are mainly from pulp magazines with expired copyrights. The "Historical Development" column includes early Sci Fi, mainly before the Great Depression. I did quite a bit of sleuthing to put this list together, and I think you'll find it contains some real gems (along with some real duds).

In honor of being shut up at home, I've recorded an audiobook version of Turing Test, Book One of A. I. Diaries. It's available on iTunes and Google Play, or from my podcasting page:

Turing Test Podcast

Arnold, Edward L. L.

Gulliver of Mars

An American Navy Lieutenant named Gulliver Jones is transported from New York city to Mars by a magic carpet. Mars turns out to be peopled, covered with canals and kingdoms, and women "clad in little more than her lovlieness and the gauziest filaments of a Hither girl's underwear." It was published in 1905, before Edgar Rice Burroughs much more famous John Carter series, but it's not clear that Burroughs did much borrowing from this lighthearted tale.

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Astor, John Jacob

A Journey into Other Worlds

An early "In the year 2000" novel from a wealthy businessman/inventor with a optimistic eye for the future. Astor believed in the ability of both technology and business to improve lives for common people and create new frontiers for exploration. It's also a romance:-)

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Bellamy, Edward

Looking Backward

A man from 1887 awakens in 2000 and finds himself in a Socialist paradise - with credit cards!

Equality

Sequel to Looking Backward.

Miss Luddington's Sister

This novel builds to an event that can only be described as science fiction, even though it has its roots in the spiritualist world. Think something like "being John Malkovitch."

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Benson, Robert

Benson was a priest in the Church of England who converted to Catholicism, and it shoes in his writing.

Lord of the World

It's hard to say whether this is true science fiction or apocalyptic fiction only, but since it deals with the future and many other people call it early science fiction, I included it.

Dawn of All

The Dawn of All is a sequel with a sort of Catholic utopia to replace the dystopian Lord of the World..

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Bone, Jesse

A Prize for Edie

A Question of Courage

Assassin

Insidekick

Noble Redman

Pandemic

The Issahar Artifacts

The Lani People

To Choke an Ocean

I thought The Lani People was very innovative, and I'm surprised I didn't see it on paper as a kid. Bone is at his strongest writing about interactions between aliens and humans, and pointing out that it may not be easy for us to recognize the humanity of aliens. All his stories were well written, I'm not sure why he didn't write more, but I'm guessing he had a good day job.

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Brackett, Leigh

A World is Born

Black Amazon of Mars

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Bradley, Marion Zimmer

The Colors of Space

The Door Through Space

The Planet Savers

Year of the Big Thaw

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Budrys, Algis

Citadel

Riya's Foundling

The Barbarians

The Stoker and the Stars

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Bulwer-Lytton, Edward

The Coming Race

Published in 1871, this is the only science fiction works by one of the more prolific authors of the Victorian age. Bulwers's style was at times overwrought, he is often remembered for the opening line, "It was a dark and stormy night." It was an early work in the "Hollow Earth" genre, though the people live in extensive caverns rather than a truly hollow earth. Other works by the author dabble in the occult, but this novel, published in 1871 after the Bulwers' death, is legitimate science fiction.

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Burroughs, Edgar Rice

John Carter on Mars series, first five books. This is the grandfather of the serial "human transported to another planet with lots of sword fighting" genre. The plots are largely driven by men racing around unknown parts of mars and meeting (and fighting) various life forms to rescue their lady loves. I just reread all of these books for the first time since I was a teenager, and they still move right along. It's also interesting to realize how many later authors copied large chunks of Burroughs.

A Princess of Mars

The Gods of Mars

Warlord of Mars

Thuvia, Maid of Mars

The Chessmen of Mars

The Pellucidar series, of which only the first two books are available free, is Burroughs hollow earth series. It's not that different from his earth surface adventure stories, in fact, later in the series, Tarzan finds his way into these strange lands.

Pellucidar

At the Earth's Core

These three books are the complete Caspak trilogy, where Caspak is a hidden land that still supports dinosaurs, Neanderthals, and other life that doesn't exist in the greater world. The discoverers arrive on a World War One U-boat, manned partially by the original crew and partially by sailors from ships the U-boat sank. They take turns fighting for their lives and fighting for control of the U-boat so they can return home and yes, there's a romance.

The Land That Time Forgot

The People That Time Forgot

Out of Time's Abyss

The Lost Continent

This future fiction has nothing to do with the trilogy above, the Lost Continent here is Europe in the year 2137, which has reverted to barbarism after the World War.

The Monster Men

One of the strangest science fiction romances you could ever hope to read. It includes entirely artificial life forms, and a scientist who is so whacked that he aspires to marry his daughter to his own creation.

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Butler, Samuel

Erewhon Revisited

A sequel to the novel Erewhon, which is not available free from Amazon. The books are written as if the place really exists on the same earth and time that the author is writing. The sequel begins "I forget when, but not very long after I had published "Erewhon" in 1872, it occurred to me to ask myself what course events in Erewhon would probably take after Mr. Higgs, as I suppose I may now call him, had made his escape in the balloon with Arowhena. Given a people in the conditions supposed to exist in Erewhon, and given the apparently miraculous ascent of a remarkable stranger into the heavens with an earthly bridewhat would be the effect on the people generally?"

The Erewhon books may be the first in science fiction to discuss a government ban on machines. Both books are intended as satire of Victorian England.

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Campbell, John Wood

Invaders from the Infinite

The Black Star Passes

The Last Evolution

The Ultimate Weapon

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Centennius, Ralph

The Dominion in 1983

A very short book that contrasts Canada in 1883 (the year of publication) to the Canada of one hundred years later. There is no plot, it's written in the style of a report with a few digs at the non-Canadian world.

"From Toronto to Winnipeg in thirty minutes! From Winnipeg to the Pacific in forty minutes! Such is our usual pace in 1983. By hiring a special car the whole distance from Toronto to Victoria can be accomplished in fifty minutes. A higher speed still is quite possible, but is not permitted because of the risk of collision with other cars. Collisions have never yet occurred on account of the rigid adherence to very strict regulations. Cars that take short trips of 50 to 100 miles between stations, seldom travel more than 500 feet from the earth, but for long distances about 1,500 feet is usual."

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Chambers, Robert W.

The Green Mouse

I enjoyed the premise behind the green mouse where a young gentleman in need of an income turns to doing magic with the aide of technology. It's the technology that's legitimate science fiction, but I don't want to ruin it by explaining. The idea of building a business around the invention was pretty novel, and given that many Internet sites a hundred years later are dedicated to achieving the same result in a different way, it might even have been prescient.

The King in Yellow

King in Yellow is a collection of intertwined stories that could be called supernatural or fantasy.

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Cooper, James Fenimore

The Crater

I included The Crater because I'm a big Cooper fan and because some literary scholars see it as a proto-science fiction novel. It's a story of a man wrecked on an island, eventually left alone, trying to survive and live a meaningful life. The science fiction elements have more to do with the response of the land (and the creation of new land) then with technology.

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Cummings, Ray

Beyond the Vanishing Point

Brigands of the Moon

Tarrano the Conquerer

The Fire People

The Girl in the Golden Atom

The White Invaders

The World Beyond

Wandl the Invader

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Dick, Philip K.

Beyond Lies the Wub

Beyond the Door

Mr. Spaceship

Piper in the Woods

Second Variety

The Crystal Crypt

The Defenders

The Gun

The Skull

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Doyle, Arthur Conan

The Poison Belt

The poison belt in question by the creator of Sherlock Holmes is not a murder weapon, but a belt of ether in space which the earth is about to pass through. This book reunites the characters from The Lost World (which isn't available for free on Kindle) in a Victorian look at the survival of the best prepared.

The Captain of the Polestar

The Captain of the Polestar is a collection of short stories, only one of which is classic science fiction about a man who cannot die, but a couple of the stories include fantastic spiritual elements, which were quite fashionable in nineteenth century society.

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Dunn, Jonathan

The Revolutions of Time

Many early science fiction books are presented as a manuscript of somebody from a different place or time that has fallen into the hands of the nominal author. That's how Revolutions of Time starts out, with the hero being a air force pilot who get's pulled into a mythical past by Onan, the Lord of Time. I don't know if Dunn hit on Onan for the name of the time lord by accident or as an inside joke, but anybody who is familiar with the Bible should know about Onan and his particular crime. The history of the book goes back to Earth before man appears on the scene.

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Dunsany, Lord (Edward Plunkett)

The stories and novellas of the following six volumes by Dunsany are of the sword and fantasy genre. I include them mainly because they were incredibly influential on later authors who mixed adventure and science fiction. According to Wikipedia, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, J.R.R.Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Moorcock and Ursula K. Le Guin, all acknowledged the influence of Dunsany, and several corresponded with him during their lives.

A Dreamer's Tales

Fifty-One Tales

The Book of Wonder

The Gods of Pegana

The Sword of Wellerian

Time and the Gods

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England, George

Darkness and Dawn

Trilogy about survivors of a wrecked earth. But who wrecked the earth and when in time is the story taking place?

The Air Trust

The air trust in this case is not about airplanes, it's about air, and the desire of wealthy industrialists to corner the market and thereby enslave the earth. Social commentary doesn't come any clearer.

The Flying Legion

An international crew goes to war on an airship in what must have been intended as a pun on the French Foreign Legion.

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Farmer, Philip Jose

Rastignac the Devil

They Twinkled Like Jewels

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Flint, Homer Eon

The Devolutionist and the Emancipatrix

What would a space faring race of men do if not explore new worlds and mine for gold? Mix in some mind control and politics, and you have some adventure/social commentary going on. The Devolutionist and the Emancipatrix is actually two books in one, but Amazon only has the Emancipatrix listed separately, so I went with the combined copy.

The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life

The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life is about explorers on Mercury stumbling on the archives of an ancient civilizations, and what those archives contain.

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Gallun, Raymond

Asteroid of Fear

Big Pill

Stamped Caution

The Eternal Wall

The Planet Strappers

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Garrett, Gordon Randall

Another science fiction writer from the 1950's, it's unclear how these books ended up in the public domain collection.

But I Don't Think

A short story or novella, originally from "Astounding Fiction" magazine.

"The great merchantship Naipor settled her tens of thousands of tons of mass into her landing cradle on Viornis as gently as an egg being settled into an egg crate, and almost as silently. Then, as the antigravs were cut off, there was a vast, metallic sighing as the gigantic structure of the cradle itself took over the load of holding the ship in her hydraulic bath."

The Destroyers

A war story in an agrarian world. I didn't get if it was supposed to be an alternate earth, a colony, or just another world.

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Godwin, Tom

-And Devious the Line of Duty

Cry from a Far Planet

Space Prison

The Helpful Hand of God

The Nothing Equation

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Greg, Percey

Across The Zodiac

A long novel that starts out with an ex-Confederate Civil War officer fleeing the failed Mexican take-over and ending up on a desert island where an out of control spaceship come in for a smash landing. He recovers a manuscript from the ship, and the story begins...

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Griffith, George

A Honeymoon in Space

A rich guy builds a spaceship to take his young wife on a honeymoon. On their travels, they find a Nazi-like civilization living on Mars. Some honeymoon.

The Mummy and Miss Nitocris

The subtitle is "A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension" - the mummy part is a giveaway that it's about horrors from the past coming into the present time.

The Romance of Golden Star

An Inca Mummy is discovered, with unexpected results.

The World Peril of 1910

A future war (it was published in 1907) with flying ships, et al.

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Grisewood, R.

Zarlah the Martian

Perhaps the original story about a lone inventor discovering a way to communicate with another world. I don't recall any other SciFi author taking the approach to interplanetary travel that Grisewood adopts. There's a lot of potential for things to go wrong, but you'll have to read it to find out.

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Haggard, H. Rider

I hesitated over including any Haggard, his books are primarily adventure stories, although all the lost lands get into speculative fiction. But like Burroughs, it's clear that many modern science fiction writers read his books (or saw the movies) and adopted his adventure plots to other worlds. I included a few just to give the flavor, the most famous of the bunch is "Solomon's Mines."

A Yellow God: an Idol of Africa

Ayesha, the Return of She

King Solomon's Mines

She and Allan

The Ghost Kings

The People of the Mist

When the World Shook

The Wizard

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Hamilton, Edmond

The Door Into Infinity

The Legion of Lazarus

The Man Who Saw the Future

The Sargasso of Space

The Stars My Brothers

The World with a Thousand Moons

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Harben, Will

The Land of the Changing Sun

Another adventure of the "Hollow Earth" genre that was so popular in the 19th century. In this case, the inside of the earth is populated by people who are more advanced than those living on the crust, and they've created a society that some might call a utopia. Here's what the king has to say to the captives from the surface:

... returned the king, playing with the jewels on his robe, "that is because you have been reared as you havein your unsystematic world. Here we make life a serious study. It is our object to assist nature in all things. The efforts of your people amount to nothing because they are not carried far enough. Your scientists are dreaming idiots. They are continually groping after the ideal and doing nothing with the positive. It was for us to carry out everything to perfection. Show me where we can make a single improvement and you shall become a prince."

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Harrison, Harry

Arm of the Law

Deathworld

Navy Day

Planet of the Damned

The Ethical Engineer

The K-Factor

The Misplaced Battleship

The Repairman

Toy Shop (with Brey)

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Hastings, Milo

City of Endless Night

Future fiction, set in 2151, when a great part of the world is warring with another German empire. This book, published just a year after World War One, predicts a sort of unending World War Two with a new German empire, though not as soon as the real World War Two took place. Some of it's descriptions of a German society on war footing driven underground, high regimented with selective breeding, echo the later goals of the Nazi party, and the way the hero of the novel penetrates this closed society is extremely novel.

In The Clutch of the War-God

Another future fiction, this one published in 1910. A brief excerpt:

"Only the rich who owned aeroplanes could afford to live in the country. The poor had been forced to the cities where they could be sheltered en masse, and fed, as it were, by machinery. New York had a population of twenty-three millions. Manhattan Island had been extended by filling in the shallows of the bay, until the Battery reached almost to Staten Island. The aeroplane stations that topped her skyscrapers stood, many of them, a quarter of a mile from the ground.

As the materially greatest nation in the world, the United States had an enormous national patriotism based on vanity. The larger patriotism for humanity was only known in the prattle of her preachers and idealists. America was the land of libertyand liberty had come to mean the right to disregard the rights of others. "

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Hodgson, William Hope

Carnacki the Ghost Finder

A sort of pre-Ghost Busters story mixing science fiction and supernatural.

The Boats of the "Glen Carrig"

Survivors of a sunken ship plagued by sea monsters.

The House on the Borderland

A manuscript discovered in an ancient house describes a battle with monster from another dimension. This book was the model for many later writers of interdimensional conflicts.

The Night Land

Millions of years in the future under a fading son, the survivors of humanity cling to life with cities that follow the sun (the earth's rotation has slowed), and other imaginative elements. But the core is a basic romance, and some people find the language, intentionally altered from English of the period, too difficult.

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Howard, Robert E.

Red Nails

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Hudson, W. H.

A Crystal Age

A man awakens in Rip Van Winkle fashion in a different sort of future Utopia novel, one without any technology at all!

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Hyne, Charles

The Lost Continent

Another novel based on an ancient manuscript. This one is found in the Canary Islands, along with some Egyptian Mummies. The whole mummy tie-in was very common in turn of the century SciFi.

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Jefferies, Richard

After London

The title pretty much describes the book. First, London is decimated (along with England) and civilization falls apart. Some years later, a new and unlikely society has rises on the ruins.

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Jones, Raymond F.

Cubs of the Wolf

Human Error

The Colonists

The Memory of Mars

The Unlearned

Old school, big picture Science Fiction shorts with surprise endings. Jones reminds me of some of the early Star Trek writers in that he likes to find broad human themes (even among aliens) that bring us all together.

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Kornbluth, C. M.

The Adventurer

The Altar at Midnight

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Kuttner, J. A.

Ego Machines

The Secret of Kralitz

Where the World is Quiet

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Lafferty, R. A.

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

The Six Fingers of Time

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Laumer, Keith

Gambler's World

Greylorn

It Could Be Anything

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Leiber, Fritz

Bread Overhead

No Great Magic

The Big Time

The Creature From Cleveland Depths

The Moon is Green

The Night of the Long Knives

What's He Doing in There

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Leinster, Murray

A Matter of Importance

Attention Saint Patrick

Invasion

Long Ago, Far Away

Morale: A story of the War of 1941-43

Operation Outer Space

Pariah Planet

Sam, This Is You

Sand Doom

Scrimshaw

Space Platform

Space Tug

Talents Incorporated

The Fifth Dimension Tube

The Hate Disease

The Leader

The Machine that Saved the World

The Mad Planet

The Pirates of Ersatz

The Runaway Skyscraper

The World is Taboo

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Lindsay, David

A Voyage to Arcturus

Too philosophical for me, this book was written to make certain arguments in the guise of being a science fiction novel.

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London, Jack

Before Adam

Real or imagined transference of mind (or soul) to a prehistoric period.

The Iron Heel

Future fiction with Socialism, par for the course with London.

The Jacket (Star-Rover)

First sentence: "All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me." This from a man imprisoned in a dungeon.

The Scarlet Plague

Post apocalyptic story set in the U.S. after civilizations has been wiped out by a plague.

The Strength of the Strong

Another post apocalyptic story.

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Lucian, of Samosata

Trips to the Moon

Ancient ScFi from 100 A.D. Included just because if I left it out, somebody would complain.



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McGuire, John

Hunter Patrol (with Piper)

Lone Star Planet (with Piper)

Nul-ABC (with Piper)

Take the Reason Prisoner

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Meek, S.P. (Sterner St. Paul)

B. C. 30,000

Giants on the Earth

Poisoned Air

The Great Drought

The Solar Magnet

Meek, an engineer and former Army officer, was an early writer of pulp SciFi stories who is better known for the two dozen or so children's novels he later wrote, all featuring animals. These five novellas or short stories touch all the different bases of early pulp fiction, and you can see reminders of both his engineering and military background in the descriptions. Added thanks to suggestion from Matthew G.

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Meridith, George

The Shaving of Shagpat

This novel is a play on Arabian Nights, but it's very funny and I'm sure it served as a model for some of the more humorous fantasy writers whose heroes suffer from feet of clay.

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Merrit, Abraham

The Metal Monster

The Moon Pool

The Moon Pool is one of the most imaginative early SF novels I've read. It's not a hollow earth novel, though it includes a hollow earth, and it's not an alien novel, though it includes plenty of non-humans. The author does a phenomenal job describing things that simply don't exist, sort of like a word picture of somebody beaming down in Star Trek. Well worth the slow beginning.

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Merwin (Samuel) -Webster (Henry)

Calmuet "K"

The sort of early science fiction an engineer might enjoy. It's not about far-out technology or worlds, it's about a man solving technological challenges ahead of his time, but well behind ours.

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Mitchell, John Ames

The Last American

In a future world, ruled by Persians (modern day Iran), explorers discover the ruins of America.

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Moore, C. L.

Song in a Minor Key

The Tree of Life

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Morris, William

These are fantasy novels which are included because the author invented the worlds in which they take place. They are primarily of interest as precursors to later fantasy writers, like Tolkein and Lewis.

The Hollow Land

The Sundering Flood

The Water of the Wondrous Isles

The Well at the World's End

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Munro, John

A Trip to Venus

Reminds me a little of Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days" except they travel in space instead. Not laugh a minute, but humor is definitely there.

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Niemann, August

The Coming Conquest of England

This future fiction was written to warn the English of the author's worries about Germany (which turned out to be correct) as opposed to simple entertainment.

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Norton, Andre

All Cats are Gray

Key Out of Time

People of the Crater

Plague Ship

Ralestone Luck

Rebel Spurs

Ride Proud, Rebel!

Star Born

Star Hunter

Storm over Warlock

The Defiant Agents

The Gifts of Asti

The Time Traders

Voodo Planet

This future fiction was written to warn the English of the author's worries about Germany (which turned out to be correct) as opposed to simple entertainment.

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O'Brien, Fitz James

The Diamond Lens

More of a novella than a novel, The Diamond Lens mixes science fiction with a little horror and occult. It also reminded me of some of those stories collected by Asimov in "The Golden Age of Science Fiction" in the focus on the worlds that might exist if we could only see them.

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Piper, H. Beam

A Slave is a Slave

Day of the Moron

Dearest

Flight from Tomorrow

Four-Day Planet

Genesis

Graveyard of Dreams

He Walked Around the Horses (with Cartier)

Hunter Patrol (with McGuire)

Last Enemy

Little Fuzzy

Lone Star Planet (with McGuire)

Ministry of Disturbance

Naudsonce

Nul-ABC (with Dongen)

Omnilingual (with Freas)

Oomphel in the Sky

Operation R.S.V.P

Police Operation

Rebel Raider

Space Viking

The Answer

The Edge of the Knife

Temple Trouble

The Cosmic Computer

The Keeper

The Mercenaries

Time and Time Again

Time Crime

Uller Uprising (with Carr and Clark)

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Pohl, Fredrick

Pythias

The Day of the Boomer Dukes

The Hated

The Knights of Arthur

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Raspe, Rudolph

The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen

You may have seen the movie of this book fifteen or twenty years ago. Anything to do with flying was science fiction at the time it was written.

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Rey, Lester Del

Badge of Infamy

Dead Ringer

Let'Em Breath Space

No Strings Attached

Police Your Planet

Pursuit

The Sky is Falling

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Reynolds, Mack

Adaption

Black Man's Burden

Border, Breed nor Birth

Combat

Dogfight-1973

Expediter

Freedom

Frigid Fracas

Gun For Hire

Happy Ending

I'm a Stranger Here Myself

Medal of Honor

Mercenary

Off Course

Revolution

Status Quo

Subversive

The Common Man

Ultima Thule

Unborn Tomorrow

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Serviss, G. P.

A professional astronomer by trade, Serviss apparently wrote science fiction both to popularize science and to make a little extra money. It's genuine science fiction, though it's strange to read about spaceships fighting off Mars and signaling each other like Civil War cavalry because they didn't have radios. Edison on Mars introduces the first phaser, really a disintegrator ray.

A Columbus of Space

Curiosities of the Sky

Edison's Conquest of Mars

The Moon Metal

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Sharkey, Jack

Minor Detail

Old Friends are Best

The Dope on Mars

I read all three of these short stories at the laundromat this morning and I laughed so much that the other patrons must have thought I was nuts. Sharkey has a wicked sense of humor, primarily focused on the unintended consequences of human actions, but he also has an eye for the humor of professional relationships, especially of men cooped up in a space capsule for months.

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Sheckley, Robert

Ask A Foolish Question

Beside Still Waters

Cost of Living

Death Wish

Diplomatic Immunity

Forever

One Man's Poison

The Hour of Battle

The Leech

The Status Civilization

Warm

Warrior Race

Watchbird

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Shelley, Mary

Frankenstein

The Last Man

Published in 1826, The Last Man is a very early example of "Last Man On Earth" science fiction. It's also an early example of a science fiction novel premised on the discovery of a memoir manuscript from the future with no scientific explanation of how it got there. I'm sorry I took the time to read it, my advice is to skip the first two books (a very lame romance) and start two thirds of the way through.

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Shiel, M. P.

Prince Zaleski

Supernatural detective stories. Shiel was a nutcase, but he could write.

The Purple Cloud

It takes a some patience to read through The Purple Cloud and the ravings of its misanthropic antihero, but the ending is worth it. Who knew that the North Pole was forbidden ground?

The Lord of the Sea

I just found out about this novel and downloaded it, I'll have something to say in the next update:-)

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Silverberg, Robert

Postmark Ganeymede

Starman's Quest

The Happy Unfortunate

The Hunted Heroes

The Judas Valley

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Simak, Clifford D.

Empire

Hellhounds of the Cosmos

Project Mastodon

The Street That Wasn't There

The World That Couldn't Be

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Stevenson, Robert Lewis

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

I think everybody knows this one.

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Smith, E. E. "Doc"

What I remember about this series from reading it thirty odd years ago is that the evolution of the key characters and their ability to make things happen with their minds was believable, at least to a young teenager.

Masters of Space

Skylark Three

Spacehounds of IPC

Subspace Survivors

The Galaxy Primes

The Skylark of Space

The Vortex Blaster

Triplanetary

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Stockton, Frank

Stockton is best known for his "Lady or the Tiger" story that we all read in Jr. High School, but he was well ahead of his time in both science fiction and fantasy. I read his complete collected works a couple years ago with great pleasure, though I had to cut the pages in some cases because nobody had ever taken them out of the library (in over a hundred years)! I love the ending to The Great War Syndicate, and the whaling captain in The Great Stone of Sardis. The Bee Man of Orn has been adopted as a children's picture book, with one version illustrated by Maurice Sendak, of "Where the Wilds Things Are" fame.

Amos Kilbright: His Adscititious Experiences

The Adventures of Captain Horn

The Bee Man of Orn and other Fanciful Tales

The Great Stone of Sardis

The Great War Syndicate

The Vizier of the Two Horned Alexander

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Tucker, George

Voyage to the Moon

This novel certainly qualifies as science fiction but it's more of a satire disguised as a science fiction travelogue than a novel in the normal sense. I suspect the author is a fan of Eastern philosophy, I didn't manage to read the whole thing.

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Twain, Mark

Twain's science fiction was really about social commentary, irony and sarcasm were his primary weapons, but he wrapped it up in enough humor to make the pill go down smoothly.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven

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Vance, Jack

Sjambak

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Verne, Jules

Considered by many the father of science fiction, Verne was incredibly successful and influential as a writer. He took a fairly dark view of mankind and capitalism in general, his early life as a stockbroker may have had something to do with the latter.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Around the World in Eighty Days

From the Earth to the Moon

The Mysterious Island

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

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Vonnegut, Kurt

2BR02B

A very short story, his other works are no longer available free. Table of Contents |

Walton, Bryce

By Earthlight

Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly?

Strange Alliance

The Victor

Thy Name is Woman

To Each His Star

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Wells, H. G.

A primary concern of Wells fiction and nonfiction writing was the future, and he believed in the inevitable rise of a world government. Many of his prophesies were eerily accurate and Wells once wrote that his epitaph should be ""I told you so. You damned fools." I included all of his works available free on Amazon, not just the SciFi.

The Wells collection is very much in flux. Many of these books are "in review" by Amazon, which means they may be removed. And currently, the only free version of "the Time Machine" isn't from Amazon, but from Simon&Schuster, who may raise the price back to $1.99. So be warned.

In The Days Of The Comet

The Door in the Wall and Other Stories

The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth

The Invisible Man

The Red Room

The Research Magnificent

The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents

The Time Machine

The War in the Air

The War of the Worlds

When the Sleeper Wakes

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Williamson, Jack

Salvage in Space

The Cosmic Express

The Pygmy Planet

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Zagat, Authur Leo

True pulp style, very non-politically correct stories. The first one offers white man's triumph over aliens, the second, in a very depopulated world, is white man's triumph over what remains of the everybody else.

The Great Dome on Mercury

When The Sleepers Woke

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