Long before the term “science fiction” was coined in 1929, Edgar Allan Poe was writing tales that reached for the stars, probed the boundaries of life and death, and imagined strange future histories.
Best known as the master of the macabre, Poe here turns his restless imagination to what we’d now call sci-fi. Here we find tropes that later became staples: lunar travel, cosmic catastrophe, suspended animation, future societies, and altered states of consciousness. This audiobook brings together five of his most visionary works, written 90 years before the genre had a name.
Balloons feature as the bleeding edge of technology, taking men to the moon in The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, and bearing the writer of a letter from the year 2848 in Mellonta Tauta, detailing the ways in which contemporary society is remembered in a thousand years.
Apocalyptic fiction gets a nod in The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, in which a pair of spirits discussing the final moments of both humanity and earth.
The two remaining stories explore Mesmerism, which was considered a spiritual technology allowing access to deeper realms of experience, from beyond the barrier between life and death in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and communicating beyond thew divide between matter and spirit in Mesmeric Revelation.
A fascinating glimpse into the roots of speculative fiction, this collection reveals how one of America’s most enduring authors helped pave the way for a very different genre to the one he is remembered for. Whether you’re a longtime Poe fan or simply curious about the early stirrings of sci-fi, these stories offer a fresh, accessible listen to a side of Poe that’s often overlooked.
