Science Fiction & Speculative
A Martian Odyssey
Stanley G. Weinbaum follows astronaut Dick Jarvis after an emergency landing on Mars, where his attempts to survive lead to encounters with bizarre and intelligent alien life
Literra collection
Science Fiction & Speculative
Browse science fiction and speculative works that examine imagined possibilities, unfamiliar worlds, technology, and change. This collection currently contains 34 titles in Literra’s catalogue.
34 books in this collection17 linked author profiles
Science FictionSpeculativeWarScienceClassTechnologySocietySurvival
Books in this collection
Browse the complete catalogue list. Each title opens its dedicated book page.
Science Fiction & Speculative
A Modern Utopia
H. G. Wells imagines a future world-state and uses the fictional journey to discuss government, social organization, technology, work, mobility, and the possibility of reform
Science Fiction & Speculative
A Princess of Mars
Burroughs combines planetary adventure, combat, romance and imaginative world-building around John Carter’s sudden displacement to Mars
Science Fiction & Speculative
A Voyage to Arcturus
David Lindsay sends a human traveler through a strange alien world whose shifting landscapes and bodies become a philosophical exploration of identity, desire, spirituality, and reality
Science Fiction & Speculative
A voyage to the moon
Cyrano de Bergerac's A Voyage to the Moon is a seventeenth-century work of imaginative science fiction disguised as comic travel literature. The narrator devises an improbable method for reaching the Moon and, after a series of absurd complications, arrives in a world whose inhabitants and
Science Fiction & Speculative
Around the world in eighty days
Phileas Fogg makes an absurd wager: he can travel around the world in eighty days. Calm, wealthy, methodical, and almost comically punctual, Fogg leaves London with his new French servant Passepartout and begins a journey in which every delay could cost him the bet
Science Fiction & Speculative
At the Earth's Core
Burroughs sends an explorer into a hidden world deep beneath the Earth, where humans and monstrous creatures inhabit a bizarre prehistoric civilization
Science Fiction & Speculative
Before Adam
Jack London imagines a modern narrator recovering ancestral dreams of prehistoric humanity, blending evolution, survival, fear, and primitive social life
Science Fiction & Speculative
Flatland
Edwin A. Abbott uses a two-dimensional world to satirize class hierarchy and social convention while introducing readers to the idea of dimensions beyond ordinary experience
Science Fiction & Speculative
Gulliver's travels into several remote nations of the world
Gulliver’s Travels follows Lemuel Gulliver through four voyages that carry him into societies increasingly strange to European eyes. In Lilliput, tiny people reveal the absurdity of politics, pride, and factional disputes
Science Fiction & Speculative
In the Days of the Comet
A strange atmospheric event becomes the trigger for a transformed society. Wells uses the speculative premise to imagine changes in politics, conflict, relationships and everyday life
Science Fiction & Speculative
In the fourth year
In the Fourth Year is H. G
Science Fiction & Speculative
Looking Backward
A utopian future imagined from the late nineteenth century, useful for comparing assumptions about technology, institutions, work and social organization
Science Fiction & Speculative
Moonfleet
Moonfleet begins with a boy, John Trenchard, who lives in the Dorset village of Moonfleet and becomes fascinated by the legend of the Mohune family. What first appears to be an old local mystery soon opens into something much larger: smugglers, secret passages, hidden treasure, dangerous
Science Fiction & Speculative
So runs the world
So Runs the World is built around the idea that people move through life according to forces they only partly understand—chance, desire, social expectation, ambition, and the consequences of earlier choices. Henryk Sienkiewicz was especially interested in characters caught between private
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Chessmen of Mars
A later Mars adventure with new creatures, cultures and rules of movement, showing how serialized fantasy can make world-building itself part of the plot
Science Fiction & Speculative
The first men in the moon
When businessman Bedford meets the eccentric scientist Mr. Cavor, he expects oddity; he does not expect to be invited on a journey to the Moon
Science Fiction & Speculative
The First Men in the Moon
A lunar adventure that combines scientific speculation with invention, exploration and the discovery of an unfamiliar civilization
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Gods of Mars
John Carter’s return to Mars expands the series’ invented geography and cultural conflicts while keeping momentum through pursuit, combat and discovery
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Invisible Man
A scientific transformation becomes a story about power, anonymity, paranoia and the social consequences of gaining the ability to act unseen
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Island of Doctor Moreau
An isolated island experiment raises questions about scientific power, violence, morality and the unstable boundary between human and animal
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Last Man
Mary Shelley imagines a future devastated by a global plague and follows Lionel Verney through friendship, loss, love, war, and the collapse of civilization
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Lost Continent The Story of Atlantis
C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne imagines the lost civilization of Atlantis, mixing romance, warfare, disaster, political intrigue, and the destruction of an ancient world
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Lost World
Arthur Conan Doyle sends Professor Challenger and his companions to a remote plateau where prehistoric creatures survive, combining exploration, scientific curiosity, danger, and adventure
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Machine Stops
A dystopian vision of people living almost entirely through a machine network, making dependence, mediated life and system failure central themes
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Maracot Deep
A deep-sea expedition becomes an encounter with a lost civilization beneath the Atlantic, mixing exploration, scientific speculation, and adventure with a vanished-world premise
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Master of the World
Jules Verne follows authorities pursuing a mysterious inventor who uses an extraordinary all-purpose vehicle to challenge conventional ideas of speed, travel, and power
Science Fiction & Speculative
The sleeper awakes
Wells imagines a man who sleeps for centuries and awakens in a transformed future where technology, wealth, class, and concentrated power have reshaped society
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Time Machine
Wells turns time travel into a vehicle for thinking about evolution, class, technology and the long-term consequences of social arrangements
Science Fiction & Speculative
The war of the worlds
The War of the Worlds begins with one of science fiction’s most effective reversals: humanity discovers that it is not the dominant species on its own planet. Martians land in England and unleash machines vastly more powerful than human weapons
Science Fiction & Speculative
The Warlord of Mars
A climactic Barsoom adventure that turns earlier rivalries and journeys into a larger conflict involving political power and survival
Science Fiction & Speculative
The world set free
The World Set Free is H. G
Science Fiction & Speculative
The World Set Free
Wells imagines a future reshaped by atomic energy, showing how a technological breakthrough can reorganize politics, warfare and the structure of civilization
Science Fiction & Speculative
Trips to the moon
Trips to the Moon gathers imaginative journeys to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor, turning the moon into a place where writers can escape ordinary geography and invent impossible societies. The tradition goes back to antiquity, when Lucian wrote fantastical voyages that used impossible
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