By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
What are the best places to begin exploring the wonderful world of science fiction? Some of the classic novels of the genre, from Frank Herbert’s Dune to Asimov’s Foundation series (which eventually stretched to seven volumes), might appear daunting because of their sheer size and scope.
Below, we introduce ten short science fiction stories which offer the perfect way in to the imaginative wonders of science fiction.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Borges and I’ is one of the shortest stories by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, a master of the very short story. In many ways it condenses some of the most distinctive aspects of his work into a very short ‘narrative’. But what is ‘Borges and I’ about, and how should we interpret this little parable?
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Morgan Robertson’s prophetic novel The Wreck of the Titan
What connects the invention of the periscope to the sinking of the Titanic? Nothing specifically technical or naval: it’s a literary link, of sorts. The man who claimed to have invented the periscope also wrote a short novel which uncannily predicted the sinking of the Titanic some fourteen years before that ship’s ill-fated voyage.
Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
The ‘nineteenth-century novel’ covers Jane Austen’s Regency fiction, the comic exuberance of Dickens, the social critiques of Elizabeth Gaskell, the realism of George Eliot, the Gothic inventiveness of late Victorian writers, and the birth of detective fiction. Below, we introduce twelve of the greatest nineteenth-century novels, with some curious facts about them.
Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
The 1920s was the Jazz Age in America, and the age of modernism in Britain. It was the era of flappers, cocktail parties, and experimenting with the novel; but for others, who couldn’t afford the luxury of gin fizzes in luxury mansions or a room of their own to move the novel in new directions, it was an era marked by poverty and class divisions. Below, we introduce some of the finest novels from, and about, the 1920s.