Résultats Éditeur "MuseumAudiobooks.com" dans Science fiction et fantaisie

1984 is a novel by the British author George Orwell in 1949. The narrative unfolds in an imagined future when most of the world has fallen prey to omnipresent government surveillance, propaganda, and endless war. Great Britain has become a province of the super state Oceania, which is ruled by the Party, whose leader is called Big Brother. The Party employs the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Winston Smith, the protagonist, is an ordinary worker who secretly despises the Party and dreams of rebellion.

Set in 2540 CE, Brave New World is a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley that was published in 1932. The novel takes place in a futuristic society called The World State, where life revolves around science and efficiency. Emotions and individuality are conditioned out of children, and citizens are socially engineered into an intelligence-based hierarchy. People are kept in a passive state through their consumption of a soothing drug called soma, and trouble-makers are exiled to various islands.

Dystopian literature is a genre of fictional writing used to explore social and political structures in a nightmarish world. The term dystopia refers to a society characterized by misery, squalor, or oppression, and the theme is most commonly used in science-fiction and speculative-fiction genres.  

This collection includes A Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, The Mysterious Island, The Master of the World, and In the Year 2889.

In this fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, a young mermaid saves the life of a prince. She falls in love with him and undergoes many trials. Finally, she achieves salvation as she was prepared to give up her identity as a mermaid to gain a human soul. 

The New Atlantis (1627) is a utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon in which he describes a vision of the future of human discovery, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humanity. The novel portrays a utopian world where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit" are the dominant qualities of the inhabitants. 

The Star Rover is a 1914 collection of science fiction short stories with the theme of reincarnation. It tells the story of Darrell Standing, an inmate of San Quentin’s death row. The narrator escapes the horror of prison life by withdrawing into altered states and the memory of past lives. Forming the body of the work, the accounts of these past lives are vivid but disconnected. They include a desert island survival story, one which involves a Roman perspective on Christ, a tale of medieval Korea, and one which takes place in a prehistoric era.

George Brisbane Scott Douglas (1856-1935), the Scottish poet and writer, published the book Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales in 1901. The literary genres of the book include comic, literary, nursery, and animal stories plus fairy tales of mythic creatures like the brownies, bogles, kelpies, and mermaids. Classified, tabulated, and scientifically labelled, these imaginative narratives are related in vernacular language, and have a timeless appeal to adults and children alike. Amongst the most popular stories are "The Fox’s Stratagem", and "The Bee and the Mouse".

Malthus predicted a grim future with geometrical population growth, versus food production that increases only arithmetically. He claimed that this would result in famine and starvation unless births were controlled. It is called the Malthusian catastrophe, in which humans would disregard the limits of natural resources and the world would be plagued by famine and disease.

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a poet, novelist, and literary critic. He created the enchanting world of fairyland inhabited by characters like the snow-queen, the mermaid's son, ogres, dwarfs, monsters, magicians, and giants. The Pink Fairy Book contains 41 tales from Africa, Japan, Scandinavia, and Europe. They range from familiar stories like "The Snow-Queen" and "The Fir-Tree" to the obscure tales of the Tanuki. This collection contains stories like "The Cats' Elopement", The "Princess in the Chest", "Snowflake", and more....

Where Huxley and Orwell have often been described as prophets of our political world, Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World has gained some equal praise as a prophecy of the religious world. This dystopian science fiction novel published in 1907, prophesies a modern world where the antichrist reigns in the form of philosophical relativism and secular interference. How the world is further built on tolerance and personal freedoms but how religious life, slowly but surely, becomes the receiver of intolerance.

In this atmospheric horror story, the city of the title is the ruin of a primordial site in the Arabian desert, thought to be more ancient than the first human civilization. In its heyday, the city flourished on the edge of the ocean. The inhabitants were a species of reptile looking like a hybrid of crocodile and seal, but with horns and protruding foreheads. They moved by crawling, so the remaining buildings have low ceilings.  

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women is a fantasy novel by the Scottish author George MacDonald, first published in 1858. It is the story of a young man, Anodos, who enters a dreamlike realm where he experiences breathtaking adventures, while encountering a host of entities like tree spirits, gnomes, monsters, and giants as well as his own shadow. All the time, he searches for his ideal of female beauty, in the form of the "Marble Lady". After having been killed in Fairy Land, Anodos wakes up on Earth, retaining the memory of his adventures in the realm of dreams.

A Princess of Mars is a science fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of the Barsoom series. Set on Mars, the story is full of heroic feats and interplanetary romance, against the background of a dying planet with an increasingly arid environment. The humanoid Red Martians who are allies of the protagonist, Carter, control the planet’s system of canals. When Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Helium is captured by the Tharks, Carter recues her.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical novel by the English author Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in 1884. The book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on Victorian culture, but the novella's enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.

Andrew Lang (1844 - 1912) was a Scottish poet, novelist, and literary critic. His 12 collections of fairy tales are known as Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy Books or Andrew Lang's Fairy Books of Many Colors. The third in the series, the Green Fairy Book, contains tales from around the world, from Grimm (“The White Snake” and “Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle”), France de Caylus, Fenelon, Kletke, and D'Aulnoy. The stories include "The Crystal Coffin", "The Three Snake-Leaves", "The Riddle", "Jack My Hedgehog", "The Golden Lads", and many more.

The Island of Doctor Moreau is an 1896 science-fiction novel by the English author H. G. Wells (1866-1946). The story is narrated by Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat and left on the island home of Doctor Moreau. An eminent physiologist from London whose experiments in vivisection had been exposed, the doctor fled England and continued his experiments on a remote island where he creates mutant beings from animals.

A poor shoemaker and his wife need money to pay the rent. He gives away the last pair of shoes he has to a needy person. Before going to bed, he cuts out the last pieces of leather so that he can sew them into a pair of shoes the next day. Three elves come in the night and make the pair of shoes which he sells for more than his asking price the next day. 

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on January 1, 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.

Jules Verne’s masterpiece, The Mysterious Island, is a fascinating story of five men and a dog who escape the American Civil War in a hot air balloon. A storm takes them far away and they land on an unknown island. One adventure follows another as they cope with pirate attacks and active volcanoes. After receiving a message in a bottle, they rescue another castaway on Tabor Island. In crisis situations, they are assisted by an unseen helper who once supplies medicine and another time beats back the pirates.