With the vaccinations for COVID-19 starting up all over the world, we may look into the future a bit more optimistically! Let’s take a glimpse into what may lie ahead of mankind with 10 gems from our catalog.

Already in 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton speculated about The Coming Race in one of the very first sci-fi novels. An ante-deluvian civilisation lives underground, but once they’ll run out of space there, they will return to the surface and wipe out mankind…

Sadly, it’s much more likely that we’ll do that by ourselves – with the invention of androids. Auguste Villier de l’Isle-Adam writes about L’Eve Future, a female android made by Edison, that (who?) ends up with an English lord.

Don Sindulfo, the inventor of the Anacronópete, is not giving it up. Instead, he takes it to Granada in 1492, to Pompeii before the eruption, and many other places of historic importance. This delightful novel by Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau was the first novel about a time machine.

Time is often called The Fourth Dimension, additionally to the three spacial dimensions. In this 1912 book, Charles H. Hinton explores this idea: that there is a 4-D universe passing through and thus creating our 3-D universe… Just imagine that!

Speaking of imagination, Percival Lowell, upon looking at the Mars through his telescope, thought he saw familiar patterns. In Mars and its Canals, he details his discovery and how this likely is proof for an intelligent civilisation.

In Poul W. Anderson’s short novella, a Star Ship from Earth is in orbit around the planet Khazak. The crew however, got stranded below in a civilisation on the level of the Stone Age. What will they do, with space flight thousands of years away?

Our own space flight capabilities only date back some 60 years. Yet, with the retirement of the Space Shuttle imminent, the US is already Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation.

Aviator Anna discovers another great nation on an expedition to the North Pole. A race of telepathic giants inhabits the underground and they teach Anna the secrets of God and the universe. Read the novel Arqtiq by Anna Adolph to find out what these are…

But what is real and what is not? According to Calderón de la Barca, the only reality is the invisible and the eternal. He explores this philosophy in his play La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), which we have in the original Spanish and in an English translation.

Noted translator F. S. Flint, after dropping out of school, taught himself 10 languages. However, his first love was poetry. In the Net of the Stars is a collection of almost 50 of his poems, published when he was only 24.

Enjoy – and let’s hope for a bright future ahead!