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The War of the Worlds is the classic alien-invasion novel: Martian cylinders fall down upon a complacent Victorian England, unleashing towering tripods, heat rays and poisonous black smoke. An unnamed writer is among the humans trying to flee, and it is through his eyes that we see the shattering of ordinary life by beings with advanced intelligence and weaponry. The novel's terror is timeless. Its depiction of technological shock, mass panic and sudden ruin feels both fantastical and unnervingly possible. It exposes the arrogance of empire and the horror of facing a power we don't understand.

This is a story from the The Happy Prince and Other Stories collection.

At the heart of these stories, as with all the best of Lovecraft’s work, is the belief that the Earth was once inhabited by powerful and evil gods, just waiting for the chance to recolonise their planet. Cthulhu is one such god, lurking deep beneath the sea until called into being by cult followers who – like all humans – know not what they do.

At a dinner party in Richmond, the host tells an astonishing story of his travels into the future, where, at first, it seems that man has moved on to a higher plane of existence - suffering and war seem to have been eliminated. But in fact there are two races living on the Earth: the Eloi, a leisured, decadent, androgynous group; and the Morlocks, an underground tribe of bestial workers.

At the Mountains of Madness first appeared in 1936, in the February, March and April editions of the American magazine Astounding Stories. One of H.P. Lovecraft’s most chilling works, it draws on Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, as well as Lovecraft’s deep fascination with the Antarctic. The sinister discoveries made by a group of explorers in At the Mountains of Madness are testament to the author’s enormous powers of imagination.

In our own time, when the dark threat of a dystopian world is not an alien or avoidable concept, The Last Man (1826) is revealed as a trailblazing novel. With a truly global view, Mary Shelley’s futuristic romain à clef–containing portraits of her husband Percy (Adrian), Lord Byron (Raymond) and several others–spearheaded the apocalyptic genre for an intimidated 19th-century readership that rejected her ‘diseased imagination’ and ‘polluted taste’.

Although William Morris is known primarily as a designer, he was also a writer of poetry and prose. The novel News from Nowhere (subtitled An Epoch of Rest Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance) is his best-known prose work and describes a humane socialist future as experienced by William Guest, who is transplanted there from the 19th century. Set in London and Oxfordshire, the novel takes place in 2090, over a century after a revolutionary upheaval. It remains a distinctive literary contribution to the concept of the utopian ideal.

Bored with inactivity following the end of the Civil War, the fanatical members of the American Gun Club in Baltimore look for a project to fulfill their passion for rearms. Their distinguished President, Impey Barbicane, proposes an exciting new endeavor - one that will cement their names in history: They will build the largest projectile ever known to man and shoot it at the moon! The bullet will be hollowed to accommodate Barbicane and two bold companions, along with their dog, and they will claim the moon as America's 37th state.

The year is 1866; the American Civil War is at its height. Five prisoners of war hatch an audacious plan to escape their camp by balloon. After a perilous 6,000-mile journey in a fierce storm, they are ‘shipwrecked’ on an unknown Pacific island. What follows is a thrilling tale of resourcefulness, courage and suspense. Together with our heroes we learn to hunt, to make weapons and pottery, to calculate our position by the sun, to extract iron and even to make explosives from the island’s remarkable natural resources.

Homer's Odyssey is the thrilling and moving tale of the wanderings of the hero Odysseus after the end of the Trojan war. For ten years he experiences storms, shipwrecks, and seductions as he tries to find a way home to Ithaca, contending with the wrath of Poseidon but protected by Pallas Athena. Meanwhile, his wife Penelope is beset by suitors who believe him dead.

Deep in the labyrinthine corridors of Gormenghast Castle, a child is born. Titus, 77th Earl of Groan, is heir to arcane and all-embracing rituals that determine the activities of everyone from Lord Sepulchrave, his father, to the vast cook, Swelter, and the irrepressible Dr Prunesquallor. But not the steely and devious Steerpike, who will lie, cheat and even murder to get on. One of the greatest feats of sustained imaginative writing, the world of Gormenghast Castle is brilliantly realised in this darkly fantastic novel.

An impecunious businessman, Bedford, retreats to the Kent coast where he meets the archetypal absent-minded scientist, Dr Cavor, who is on the point of producing a gravity-defying material. His experiments prove successful, making possible one of man’s oldest dreams: a journey to the moon. The two men embark on this fantastic voyage–Bedford motivated by the prospect of wealth, and Cavor by the thirst for knowledge. However, when they arrive, they find a world of freezing nights and sweltering days, and signs of a threatening alien presence, from which they may never escape.

George MacDonald, described by W.H. Auden as "one of the most remarkable writers of the 19th century", was valued in his own time as an original thinker and spiritual guide. Of all his writing, it is the fairy tales that have retained their fascination, and this collection includes all 11 stories. The fairy tales feature the stock characters of traditional tales—fairies both good and bad, and children undertaking precarious journeys. Often adopting paradox and nonsense as Lewis Carroll did, the stories invite adults to deploy the same open-mindedness as children.

Roy McMillan talks about Don Quixote, one the most influential novels in Western literature.

The Shadow over Innsmouth and The Whisperer in Darkness are counted among H. P. Lovecraft's most popular stories. In the first we are transported to the decrepit coastal town of Innsmouth, whose amphibianlike citizens betray a dark and sinister secret. The second takes us to Vermont, where a university professor becomes embroiled in a mind-bending celestial mystery after strange things are seen floating in the rivers.

A stranger arrives in a small English town, wreathed in a hat, coat, goggles and bandages. It's not just his identity he's hiding, though; he has discovered the secret of invisibility, and believes it will lead him to ultimate power. But he needs to be able to control the process, and when the terrified villagers refuse to help him, he decides on bloody revenge.

The swashbuckling sequel to The Mark of Zorro (The Curse of Capistrano), The Further Adventures of Zorro sees the daring hero out for revenge once more. After Captain Ramon kidnaps the beautiful Lolita Pulido, Zorro takes to the seas and battles pirates in a bid to win her back. Swordfights, death traps, and disastrously tight corners await him. But it is never much more than a challenge as the gallant caballero laughs in the face of danger - nothing can faze him.

This is a story from the The Happy Prince and Other Stories collection.

The story begins in Hamburg, 1863. The brilliant Professor Lidenbrock, inspired by an ancient, encoded manuscript, impetuously decides to take his reluctant nephew Axel on a seemingly insane mission: to travel down volcanic tunnels to the very center of the earth.

Here is the precursor to Jurassic Park. Victorian explorers have heard there is a remote plateau where dinosaurs still survive, and a group set outs on a dangerous mission to find out more about it.