Science fiction has been around as a genre for more than 200 years. That's such a long time that many of the greatest works have fallen into the public domain, providing a way to get free and easy access to many of these timeless works (and a few that time has forgotten.)

Project Gutenberg seeks to make many of these works available. Here are a few available there, as well as a couple from Archive.org, which similarly collects public domain works.

Flatland by Edward Abbott Abbott

This is the tale of a two dimensional square who makes a new friend – a three dimensional sphere. The novella also serves as a primer in geometry, concisely explaining the first, second, and third dimensions while also critiquing Victorian culture's narrow-mindedness.

In Search of the Unknown by Robert W. Chambers

Robert W. Chambers belongs more in weird fiction – that sort of gray area of dark fantasy and horror that H.P. Lovecraft so well embodied. Chambers was, after all, a huge inspiration for the first season of True Detective about his "King in Yellow" stories, a narrative woven of a play that drives those who read it mad by the second act.

But In Search of the Unknown is about a search for rare animals, cryptids, and out-and-out monsters from the perspective of a world-traveling zoologist. It has fewer horror overtones and is more geared toward telling adventure stories of secret lands and hidden species.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Yes, this is simply a link to a whole lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs, because a lot of his work is in the public domain and is serialized. There's of course A Princess of Mars and its four sequels, featuring the stories of John Carter of Mars. There are also a whole lot of Tarzan books to choose from. But you can also delve into some of his lesser known properties, like At the Earth's Core, which has more than a passing resemblance to a certain Jules Verne book.

There's also the Land that Time Forgot series, showing a further obsession with untapped wildernesses, relict animals, and more. Or you can dive into the schlocky goodness that is The Monster Men, which is exactly what it sounds like and involves mad scientists and genetic engineering.

House on the Borderland and The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson

Another set of stories planted firmly in the weird fiction genre, House on the Borderland tells the tale of two men staying in a house that opens to a hellish other dimension from which gruesome pig-men continually escape. The novel straddles a line between horror and science fiction and includes elements of time travel and dimension hopping.

The Night Land deals with a dying Earth. The sun has long since gone out, and the only light on Earth comes from volcanoes. All of humanity lives in one gigantic fortress. Outside the fortress lie creatures descended from humanity but twisted by the desolate atmosphere outside. While post-Apocalyptic science fiction is nothing new, this is definitely an excellent example, and like much of Hodgson's work, is bizarre and incredibly imaginative.

Armageddon – 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan

This novel marks the first appearance of Buck Rogers, then called Anthony. Anthony is a World War I veteran thrust into the future after exposure to a mysterious gas left him in a prolonged coma. He becomes a freedom fighter in a hellish world five centuries from his own.

The Buck Rogers we came to know was a swashbuckling space opera hero; this novel is definitely terrestrial, though filled with fabulous flying weapons of mass destruction and other far-future technologies. The tone is a little different, too. Still, this was the start of one of the most influential heroes of the pulp era.

A Trip to Venus by John Munro

Munro is largely forgotten today, but A Trip to Venus is important for what it predicted all the way back in 1897: that the best way to get between planets in the solar system might be to get there by rocket. (In the story, however, much of the technology here relies on anti-gravity mechanisms rather than combustion.)

Triplanetary by E.E. "Doc" Smith

A true classic from the Golden Age of science fiction, written by a science fiction great. The pulpy space opera tale has aliens who secretly shape humanity's destiny, nuclear war, space travel, genetic engineering, stellar pirates, and more. This was just the first part of the Lensman series, an expansive set of books that spans billions of years.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

This book is a longstanding personal favorite, a tale of explorers who follow a series of caverns down to a prehistoric wonderland in the core of the Earth. The conceit is ridiculous to the point of near-fantasy, but as a tale of adventure its influence can still be felt, and it spawned many stories of relict dinosaurs and mysterious lands, as well as "what's under the crust" stories with varying degrees of implausibility.

The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Two tales that endure to this day. In the first, a time-traveler flung to the far future discovers competing races of human descendants. The Eloi are docile surface dwellers, while the Morlocks are an insidious, enslaving race that dwell in a series of caverns far below the surface.

In The War of the Worlds, Martians invade Earth. While the famous Orson Welles drama has taken on a mythic status thanks to some hyperinflation of the "panic" by members of the press looking for a story, the real scare was very small. Still, the book created a template for future invasion stories, predicted germ warfare, and has created a series of adaptations and imitators.

Samuel Delany

Two novels are available by Samuel "Chip" Delany on Project Gutenberg. Chip is a living legend, having only recently stepped down from his post at Temple University as head of the creative writing department. As a queer black man, he's brought a unique voice to science fiction over the years, incorporating themes of variant sexualities and varying event perceptions into his work. While Nova and Dahlgren are his most known works, The Jewels of Aptor and Captives of the Flame kicked off his long career. As opposed to his later works, both combine elements of fantasy and science fiction into a far-future, dying-earth tale.

Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom and Makers by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow's books are much newer than most on this list. The BoingBoing founder has been a consistent critic of modern copyright law, and he's put his money where his mouth is by making many of his books Creative Commons or putting them in the public domain.

Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom is a tale of a post-death, Disney-owned world where dying is just a temporary inconvenience. There are social credit points – called Whuffies – alotted to participants as rival gangs of Mouseketeers compete for popularity among park visitors.

Makers, on the other hand, plays as a sort of near-future cyberpunk-inspired novel about the DIY movement of hacker and maker spaces. It's about how hackers and makers struggle to survive as the economy falls apart, using ad hoc fixes to make their way through a changing economic landscape.

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

Lost lands. Dinosaurs. Adventure. Old timey racism.

Ok, that last one isn't so great. However, despite its major faults, The Lost World is a highly influential lost-land story of a group of adventures on a South American plateau who find the land where dinosaurs and prehistoric reptiles not only live, but thrive alongside Ice Age mammals and other creatures known only through fossils.

Deathworld and Planet of the Damned by Harry Harrison

Deathworld is a sort of parallel story to Harrison's famous Stainless Steel Rat series, taking place in the same sort of framework but focusing on a gambler thrust onto a hellish world full of dangerous beasts and awful weather on a smuggling trip.

Planet of the Damned is an interplanetary Hunger Games, in which a survivor of the Twenties (a fittest-person challenge) tries to navigate a harsh realm of planets seemingly on the brink of nuclear war. There are also symbiotic aliens and more weirdness as the protagonists try to defuse worlds on the brink of destruction.

The Last Man and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Some regard Frankenstein as the first true science fiction novel. The Last Man is Shelley's more forgotten work, a post-apocalyptic tale of survival after a plague ravages the world. Slowly, the small handful of survivors dwindle in number after facing hardship after hardship. The novel was bleak and far ahead of its time.

Erewhon by Samuel Butler

Perhaps the biggest legacy of this 1872 book is an outline of what would become artificial life and artificial intelligence, written in an age in which the computer was just a huge analog machine like the Difference Engine. Butler was a leader in thinking about AI, often discussing the ways machines might follow Darwinian evolution. He combined his writings on the matter with utopic novels of the time to tell the tales of Erewhon, guiding us through a strange society in a pseudo-sci-fi setting.

The Red One by Jack London

Maybe it's cheating to include a short story in an article about novels, but it's the curiosity of this one that warrants inclusion. London, known more for his tales of man conquering nature in extreme environments, chose to write this story about an sphere of extraterrestrial origin that posits itself as a deity to primitive societies, who make sacrifices to it.

The Brick Moon by Edward Everett Hale

Another short story, but this 1869 tale by Hale is credited as the first to anticipate artificial satellites and space habitations—though we know today that there will never be an orbital colony built out of bricks. Well, probably not.

The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Still famous today, this novel portrays a scientist twisted by his chemistry experiments into a monster that comes out and savagely attacks people in the night, as the timid Dr. Jekyll works to control his more monstrous half. It's been adapted to film a dozen times over, been copied in part into The Incredible Hulk, and has something or other to do with that Entourage movie I desperately want to avoid seeing.

The Crack of Doom by Robert Cromie

This 1895 novel has the first fictional account of an atomic explosion, and involves a society fueled by nuclear energy. The society in the novel can also view molecules up close with atomic microscopy – another technology seen today. Cromie also wrote a space travel story called A Plunge Into Space in 1890.

This just scratches the surface of a wide realm of science fiction stories, novels, and more available out there for free. Happy hunting!

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