The Time Machine
The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895 and written as a frame narrative; the work is credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle; the Time Machine has been adapted into three feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions, a large number of comic book adaptations. It has indirectly inspired many more works of fiction in many media productions. Wells had considered the notion of time travel before, in a short story titled "The Chronic Argonauts"; this work, published in his college newspaper, was the foundation for The Time Machine. Wells stated that he had thought of using some of this material in a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette until the publisher asked him if he could instead write a serial novel on the same theme.
Wells agreed and was paid £100 on its publication by Heinemann in 1895, which first published the story in serial form in the January to May numbers of The New Review. Henry Holt and Company published the first book edition on 7 May 1895; these two editions are different textually and are referred to as the "Holt text" and "Heinemann text", respectively. Nearly all modern reprints reproduce the Heinemann text; the story reflects Wells's own socialist political views, his view on life and abundance, the contemporary angst about industrial relations. It is influenced by Ray Lankester's theories about social degeneration and shares many elements with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. Other science fiction works of the period, including Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and the film Metropolis, dealt with similar themes. Based on Wells' personal experiences and childhood, the working class spent a lot of their time underground, his own family would spend most of their time in a dark basement kitchen when not being occupied in their father's shop.
His own mother would work as a housekeeper in a house with underground tunnels, where the staff and servants lived in underground quarters. A medical journal published in 1905 would focus on these living quarters for servants in poorly ventilated dark basements. In his early teens, Wells became a draper's apprentice, having to work in a basement for hours on end; this work is an early example of the Dying Earth subgenre. The portion of the novella that sees the Time Traveller in a distant future where the sun is huge and red places The Time Machine within the realm of eschatology, i.e. the study of the end times, the end of the world, the ultimate destiny of humankind. The book's protagonist is a Victorian English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond and identified by a narrator as the Time Traveller; the narrator recounts the Traveller's lecture to his weekly dinner guests that time is a fourth dimension and demonstrates a tabletop model machine for travelling through the fourth dimension.
He reveals that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person through time, returns at dinner the following week to recount a remarkable tale, becoming the new narrator. In the new narrative, the Time Traveller tests his device. At first he thinks nothing soon finds out he went five hours into the future, he sees his house disappear and turn into a lush garden. The Time Traveller stops in A. D. 802,701, where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet deteriorating buildings, having a fruit-based diet, his efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of discipline. They fear the dark and in particular fear moonless nights. Observing them, he finds, he speculates. After exploring the area around the Eloi's residences, the Time Traveller reaches the top of a hill overlooking London, he concludes that the entire planet has become a garden, with little trace of human society or engineering from the hundreds of thousands of years prior.
Returning to the site where he arrived, the Time Traveller is shocked to find his time machine missing and concludes that it has been dragged by some unknown party into a nearby structure with heavy doors, locked from the inside, which resembles a Sphinx. Luckily, he had removed the machine's levers before leaving it. In the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Exploring one of many "wells" that lead to the Morlocks' dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible, he alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks. Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores the Morlock tunnels, learning that due to a lack of any other means of sustenance, they feed on the Eloi.
His revised analysis is that their relationship is not one of lords and servants but of livestock a
The Shadow
The Shadow is the name of a collection of serialized dramas in 1930s pulp novels, in a wide variety of Shadow media. One of the most famous adventure heroes of 20th century North America, the Shadow has been featured on the radio, in a long-running pulp magazine series, in American comic books, comic strips, serials, video games, at least five feature films; the radio drama included episodes voiced by Orson Welles. A mysterious radio show narrator, The Shadow was developed into a distinctive literary character in 1931 to become a pop culture icon, by writer Walter B. Gibson; the character has been cited as a major influence on the subsequent evolution of comic book superheroes Batman. The Shadow debuted on July 31, 1930, as the mysterious narrator of the radio program Detective Story Hour, developed to boost sales of Street and Smith's monthly pulp Detective Story Magazine; when listeners of the program began asking at newsstands for copies of "That Shadow detective magazine", Street & Smith decided to create a magazine based on The Shadow and hired Gibson to create a character concept to fit the name and voice and write a story featuring him.
The first issue of The Shadow Magazine went on sale on a pulp series. On September 26, 1937, The Shadow radio drama, a new radio series based on the character as created by Gibson for the pulp magazine, premiered with the story "The Death House Rescue", in which The Shadow was characterized as having "the power to cloud men's minds so they cannot see him"; as in the magazine stories, The Shadow was not given the literal ability to become invisible. The introduction from The Shadow radio program "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!", spoken by actor Frank Readick, has earned a place in the American idiom. These words were accompanied by an ominous laugh and a musical theme, Camille Saint-Saëns' Le Rouet d'Omphale. At the end of each episode, The Shadow reminded listeners that, "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit! Crime does not pay... The Shadow knows!" In order to boost the sales of their Detective Story Magazine and Smith Publications hired David Chrisman of the Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising agency and writer-director William Sweets to adapt the magazine's stories into a radio series.
Chrisman and Sweets felt the upcoming series should be narrated by a mysterious storyteller with a sinister voice, began searching for a suitable name. One of their scriptwriters, Harry Engman Charlot, suggested various possibilities, such as "The Inspector" or "The Sleuth". Charlot proposed the ideal name for the phantom announcer: "The Shadow". Thus, beginning on July 31, 1930, "The Shadow" was the name given to the mysterious narrator of the Detective Story Hour; the narrator was voiced by James LaCurto, replaced after four months by prolific character actor Frank Readick Jr. The episodes were drawn from the Detective Story Magazine issued by Street and Smith, "the nation's oldest and largest publisher of pulp magazines". Although the latter company had hoped the radio broadcasts would boost the declining sales of Detective Story Magazine, the result was quite different. Listeners found the sinister announcer much more compelling than the unrelated stories, they soon began asking newsdealers for copies of "that Shadow detective magazine" though it did not exist.
Recognizing the demand and responding promptly, circulation manager Henry William Ralston of Street & Smith commissioned Walter B. Gibson to begin writing stories about "The Shadow". Using the pen name of Maxwell Grant and claiming the stories were "from The Shadow's private annals as told to" him, Gibson wrote 282 out of 325 tales over the next 20 years: a novel-length story twice a month; the first story produced was "The Living Shadow", published April 1, 1931. Gibson's characterization of The Shadow laid the foundations for the archetype of the superhero, including stylized imagery and title, supervillains, a secret identity. Clad in black, The Shadow operated after dark as a vigilante in the name of justice, terrifying criminals into vulnerability. Gibson himself claimed the literary inspirations upon which he had drawn were Bram Stoker's Dracula and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The House and the Brain". Another possible inspiration for The Shadow is the French character Judex. French comics historian Xavier Fournier notes other similarities with another silent serial, The Shielding Shadow, whose protagonist had a power of invisibility, considers The Shadow to be a mix between the two characters.
In the 1940s, some Shadow comic strips were translated in France as adventures of Judex. Because of the great effort involved in writing two full-length novels every month, several guest writers were hired to write occasional installments in order to lighten Gibson's workload; these guest writers included Lester Dent, who wrote the Doc Savage stories, Theodore Tinsley. In the late 1940s, mystery novelist Bruce Elliott would temporarily replace Gibson as the primary author of the pulp series. Richard Wormser, a reader for Street & Smith, wrote two Shadow stories; the Shadow Magazine ceased publication with the Summer 1949 issue, but Walter B. Gibson wrote three new "official" stories between 1963 and 1980; the first began a new series of nine updated Shadow novels from Belmont Books, starting with Return of The Shadow under his own na
Crossover (fiction)
A crossover is the placement of two or more otherwise discrete fictional characters, settings, or universes into the context of a single story. They can arise from legal agreements between the relevant copyright holders, unauthorized efforts by fans or common corporate ownership. Crossovers occur in an official capacity in order for the intellectual property rights holders to reap the financial reward of combining two or more popular, established properties. In other cases, the crossover can serve to introduce a new concept derivative of an older one. Crossovers occur between properties owned by a single holder, but they can, more involve properties from different holders, provided that the inherent legal obstacles can be overcome, they may involve using characters that have passed into the public domain with those concurrently under copyright protection. A crossover story may try to explain its own reason for the crossover, such as characters being neighbors or meeting via dimensional rift or similar phenomenon.
Some crossovers are not explained at all. Others are absurd or impossible within the fictional setting, have to be ignored by the series' respective continuities. Still others intentionally make the relations between two or more fictional universes confusing, as with The Simpsons and Futurama, where each show is fiction in the other. Crossovers of multiple characters owned by one company or published by one publisher, have been used to set an established continuity, where characters can meet within one setting; this is true of comic book publishers, as different characters in various Marvel, DC or Valiant comic books interact with one another since they live in a "shared universe". For example, in the Marvel Comics universe, Spider-Man has frequent dealings with another Marvel hero, just as in the DC Comics Universe, the Flash and Green Lantern collaborate. In comic book terminology, these "guest star" roles are common enough that they are not considered crossovers. A crossover in comic book terms only occurs.
This has led to "crossover events", in which major occurrences are shown as affecting most or all of the stories in the shared universe. The earliest such crossover event was Gardner Fox's Zatanna's Search, which took place in Hawkman #4, Detective Comics #336, The Atom #19, Green Lantern #42, Detective Comics #355, Justice League of America #51; this story dealt with Zatanna attempting to reconnect with her father and seeking the aid of Hawkman, Robin, the Atom, Green Lantern, Elongated Man along the way. The first major crossover event was spearheaded by the Marvel Editor-in-Chief at the time, Jim Shooter; as a way to further toy sales he devised the Secret Wars crossover, which brought all the major Marvel heroes into a 12-issue miniseries to battle a common threat. After the threat was dealt with, they all returned to their regular titles. Secret Wars was hailed as both a critical and commercial success because the events of the crossover had lasting effects on the characters. Jim Shooter perfected his crossover technique at Valiant Comics with the Unity event.
Unity brought all the Valiant characters together to defeat Mothergod, but was told within the existing Valiant Comics titles. Readers were not obliged to buy all 18 chapters as the story was coherent when reading just one title, but far more layered when all were read. Like Secret Wars, the Unity crossover had lasting effects on the Valiant universe. Dark Horse Comics's Aliens Versus Predator comic book franchise was a success that continued into many video games, two movies and an Aliens Versus Predator Versus The Terminator comic; the comic crossovers from Raj Comics are famous in India, in which the super heroes meet to fight a common enemy. Many of these crossovers have occurred between Super Commando Dhruva. In Kohram, all the heroes in Raj Universe meet to finish Haru, an powerful enemy. Webcomics creators sometimes produce crossovers. In 2013, Archie Comics released a 12-part crossover of Capcom character Mega Man and Sega character Sonic the Hedgehog called "Worlds Collide". Taking place in issues of the Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Universe and Mega Man comic series from Archie, the crossover involved Dr. Eggman and Dr. Wily forming an alliance to take over both their universes and destroy their respective nemeses.
Sonic and Mega Man were tricked into fighting each other, but joined forces and teamed up with other heroes to battle the doctors' forces, which included every Robot Master introduced in the Mega Man games. The popularity of this crossover and the books involved led to a second crossover in 2015 entitled "Worlds Unite", which not only reunited Sonic and Mega Man but featured comics-exclusive characters from both of their books, the Mega Man X and Sonic Boom spinoff franchises and various other SEGA and Capcom franchises; this crossover was enabled by the conclusion of the first crossover, which saw a reboot to the Sonic books as their universe was drastically rewrit
Allan Quatermain
Allan Quatermain is the protagonist of H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines and its sequels. Allan Quatermain was the title of a book in this sequence. An English big game hunter and adventurer, in film and television he has been portrayed by Richard Chamberlain, Sean Connery, Cedric Hardwicke, Patrick Swayze and Stewart Granger among others; the character Quatermain is an English-born professional big game hunter and occasional trader in southern Africa, who supports colonial efforts to'spread civilization' in the'dark continent', though he favours native Africans having a say in their affairs. An outdoorsman who finds English cities and climate unbearable, he prefers to spend most of his life in Africa, where he grew up under the care of his widower father, a Christian missionary. In the earliest-written novels, native Africans refer to Quatermain as Macumazahn, meaning "Watcher-by-Night," a reference to his nocturnal habits and keen instincts. In later-written novels, Macumazahn is said to be a short form of Macumazana, meaning "One who stands out."
Quatermain is accompanied by his native servant, the Hottentot Hans, a wise and caring family retainer from his youth. His sarcastic comments offer a sharp critique of European conventions. In his final adventures, Quatermain is joined by two British companions, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good of the Royal Navy, by his African friend Umslopogaas; the series spans 50 years of Quatermain's life, from 18 to 68. Physically, he is small and unattractive, with a beard and short hair that sticks up, his one skill is his marksmanship. Quatermain is aware that as a professional hunter, he has helped to destroy his beloved wild free places of Africa. In old age he hunts without pleasure. About Quatermain's family, little is written, he lives in Natal, South Africa. He marries twice, but is widowed both times, he entrusts the printing of memoirs in the series to his son Harry, whose death he mourns in the opening of the novel Allan Quatermain. Harry Quatermain is a medical student. Haggard did not write the Quatermain novels in chronological order, made errors with some details.
Quatermain's birth, age at the time of his marriages, age at the time of his death cannot be reconciled to the apparent date of Harry's birth and age at death. Although some of Haggard's Quatermain novels stand alone, there are two important series. In the Zulu trilogy, Child of Storm, Finished, Quatermain becomes ensnared in the vengeance of Zikali, the dwarf wizard known as "The-thing-that-should-never-have-been-born" and "Opener-of-Roads." Zikali plots and achieves the overthrow of the Zulu royal House of Senzangakona, founded by Shaka and ending under Cetewayo. These novels are prequels to the foundation pair, King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain, which describe Quatermain's discovery of vast wealth, his discontent with a life of ease, his fatal return to Africa following the death of his son Harry. With She and Allan, Haggard engineered a crossover between his two most popular series, uniting Quatermain with Ayesha, the central character of his hugely successful "She" novels, bringing in several other key characters from each series—Hans and Zikali from the Quatermain series, Bilali, Ayesha's faithful minister.
This book formed the third part of the "She" trilogy, although in chronological terms, it served as a prequel to the first two "She" books, since Holly and Leo, the protagonists of the first two books, both die at the end of the second novel. Dates of events in Allan Quatermain's life and Ayesha's, are shown at left. Dates of publication in book form are shown at right; the four Ayesha novels are marked. Allan Quatermain and Umslopogaas appears only in She and Allan, third-published of the four, second in the fictional Ayesha chronology; the three Umslopogaas novels are marked. Ayesha appears only in She and Allan, the third-published of the three, second in the fictional Umslopogaas chronology, along with Allan Quatermain, who appears in the 1887 novel Allan Quatermain, which marks the last chronological appearance of the iconic character created by Haggard, chronologically followed by Ayesha: The Return of She; the Allan Quatermain character has been expanded by modern writers. The character was used by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill in their series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, adapted to film in 2003, based on the premise that he faked his death to enjoy a quiet retirement.
The character of Allan Quatermain has been portrayed in film and television by Richard Chamberlain, John Colicos, Sean Connery, Cedric Hardwicke, Patrick Swayze. Stewart Granger played Quatermain in the 1950 Hollywood film adaptation of King Solomon's Mines, directed by Compton Bennett. Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold is a film released in 1987, adapted from the plot of Haggard's 1887 novel, he was featured in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, released in 2003, where he served as the team leader and a mentor and father-figure to American Secret Service agent Tom Sawyer, the 2008 direct-to-DVD Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls. In 2010, it was announced that Sam Worthington would portray the character in an upcoming sci-fi adaptation of King S
Arsène Lupin
Arsène Lupin is a fictional gentleman thief and master of disguise created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc. He was called Arsène Lopin, until a local politician of the same name protested; the character was first introduced in a series of short stories serialized in the magazine Je sais tout. The first story, "The Arrest of Arsène Lupin", was published on 15 July 1905. Lupin was featured in 17 novels and 39 novellas by Leblanc, with the novellas or short stories collected into book form for a total of 24 books; the number becomes 25 if the 1923 novel The Secret Tomb is counted: Lupin doesn't appear in it, but the main character Dorothée solves one of Arsène Lupin's four fabulous secrets. The character has appeared in a number of books from other writers as well as numerous film, stage play, comic book adaptations. Five authorized sequels were written in the 1970s by the celebrated mystery writing team of Boileau-Narcejac. Arsène Lupin is a literary descendant of Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail's Rocambole, whose adventures were published from 1857 to 1870.
Like him, he is a force for good, while operating on the wrong side of the law. Those whom Lupin defeats, always with his characteristic Gallic style and panache, are worse villains than he. Lupin shares distinct similarities with E. W. Hornung's archetypal gentleman thief A. J. Raffles, whose stories were published from 1898 to 1909. Both Raffles and Lupin can be said to anticipate and have inspired characters such as Louis Joseph Vance's The Lone Wolf and Leslie Charteris's The Saint; the character of Arsène Lupin might have been based by Leblanc on French anarchist Marius Jacob, whose trial made headlines in March 1905, but Leblanc had read Octave Mirbeau's Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, which features a gentleman thief named Arthur Lebeau, had seen Mirbeau's comedy Scrupules, whose main character is a gentleman thief. Several Arsène Lupin novels contain some interesting fantasy elements: a radioactive'god-stone' that cures people and causes mutations is the object of an epic battle in L’Île aux trente cercueils.
Leblanc introduced Sherlock Holmes to Lupin in the short story "Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late" in Je sais tout No. 17, 15 June 1906. In it, an aged Holmes meets a young Lupin for the first time. After legal objections from Doyle, the name was changed to "Herlock Sholmes" when the story was collected in book form in Volume 1. Sholmes returned in two more stories collected in Volume 2, "Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmes", in a guest-starring role in the battle for the secret of the Hollow Needle in L'Aiguille creuse. Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmes was published in the United States in 1910 under the title "The Blonde Lady" which used the name "Holmlock Shears" for Sherlock Holmes, "Wilson" for Watson. In 813, Lupin manages to solve a riddle. Sherlock Holmes, this time with his real name and accompanied by familiar characters such as Watson and Lestrade confronted Arsène Lupin in the 2008 PC 3D adventure game Sherlock Holmes Versus Arsène Lupin. In this game Holmes are attempting to stop Lupin from stealing five valuable British items.
Lupin wants to steal the items in order to humiliate Britain, but he admires Holmes and thus challenges him to try to stop him. In a novella "The Prisoner of the Tower, or A Short But Beautiful Journey of Three Wise Men" by Boris Akunin published in 2008 in Russia as the conclusion of "Jade Rosary Beads" book, Sherlock Holmes and Erast Fandorin oppose Arsène Lupin on December 31, 1899. Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar Arsène Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes The Hollow Needle 813 The Crystal Stopper The Confessions of Arsène Lupin The Shell Shard Not part of the Arsène Lupin series, Lupin was written into the story in the 1923 edition; the Golden Triangle The Island of Thirty Coffins The Teeth of The Tiger The Secret Tomb (Dorothée, Danseuse de Corde, 1923. The main character Dorothée solves one of Arsène Lupin's four fabulous secrets; the Eight Strokes of The Clock The Countess of Cagliostro The Overcoat of Arsène Lupin Novella first published in 1924 in France as La Dent d'Hercule Petitgris. Altered into a Lupin story and published in English as The Overcoat of Arsène Lupin in 1926 in The Popular Magazine The Damsel With Green Eyes The Man with the Goatskin (L'Homme à la peau de bique The Barnett & Co.
Agency (AKA: Jim Barnett Intervenes, Arsène Lupin Inte
Philip José Farmer
Philip José Farmer was an American author known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Farmer is best known for his sequences of novels the World of Tiers and Riverworld series, he is noted for the pioneering use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for, reworking of, the lore of celebrated pulp heroes, occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters. Farmer mixed real and classic fictional characters and worlds and real and fake authors as epitomized by his Wold Newton family group of books; these tie all classic fictional characters together as real people and blood relatives resulting from an alien conspiracy. Such works as The Other Log of Phileas Fogg and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life are early examples of literary mashup. Literary critic Leslie Fiedler compared Farmer to Ray Bradbury as both being "provincial American eccentrics" who "strain at the classic limits of the form," but found Farmer distinctive in that he "manages to be at once naive and sophisticated in his odd blending of theology and adventure."
Farmer was born in Indiana. According to colleague Frederik Pohl, his middle name was in honor of an aunt, Josie. Farmer grew up in Peoria, where he attended Peoria High School, his father was a supervisor for the local power company. A voracious reader as a boy, Farmer said, he became an agnostic at the age of 14. At age 23, in 1941, he married and fathered a son and a daughter. After washing out of flight training in World War II, he went to work in a local steel mill, he continued his education, earning a bachelor's degree in English from Bradley University in 1950. Farmer had his first literary success when his novella The Lovers was published by Samuel Mines in Startling Stories, August 1952, it features a sexual relationship between a human and an extraterrestrial and he won the next Hugo Award as "most promising new writer". Thus encouraged, he quit his job to become a full-time writer, entered a publisher's contest, promptly won the $4,000 first prize for a novel, Owe for the Flesh, that contained the germ of his Riverworld series.
But the book was not published and Farmer did not get the money. Literary success did not translate into financial security so he left Peoria in 1956 to launch a career as a technical writer, he spent the next 14 years working in that capacity for various defense contractors, from Syracuse, New York to Los Angeles, while writing science fiction in his spare time. He won a second Hugo for the 1967 novella Riders of the Purple Wage, a pastiche of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as well as a satire on a futuristic, cradle-to-grave welfare state. Reinvigorated, Farmer became a full-time writer again in 1969. Upon moving back to Peoria in 1970, he entered his most prolific period, publishing 25 books in 10 years, his novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go won him his third Hugo in 1971. A 1975 novel, Venus on the Half-Shell, created a stir in media, it purported to be written in the first person by one "Kilgore Trout," a fictional character appearing as an underappreciated science fiction writer in several of Kurt Vonnegut's novels.
The escapade did not please Vonnegut when some reviewers not only concluded that it had been written by Vonnegut himself, but that it was a worthy addition to his works. Farmer did have permission from Vonnegut to write the book, though Vonnegut said he regretted giving permission. Farmer had both critical detractors. Leslie Fiedler proclaimed him "the greatest science fiction writer ever" and lauded his approach to storytelling as a "gargantuan lust to swallow down the whole cosmos, present and to come, to spew it out again." Isaac Asimov praised Farmer as an "excellent science fiction writer. But Christopher Lehmann-Haupt dismissed him in The New York Times in 1972 as "a humdrum toiler in the fields of science fiction."In 2001 Farmer won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the Science Fiction Writers of America made him its 19th SFWA Grand Master in the same year. Farmer died on February 25, 2009. At the time of his death, he and his wife Bette had two children, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
The Riverworld series follows the adventures of such diverse characters as Richard Francis Burton, Hermann Göring, Samuel Clemens through a bizarre afterlife in which every human to have lived is resurrected along a single river valley that stretches over an entire planet. The series consists of To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, The Magic Labyrinth and Gods of Riverworld. Although Riverworld and Other Stories is not part of the series as such, it does include the second-published Riverworld story, free-standing rather than integrated into one of the novels; the first two Riverworld books were published as novellas, "The Day of the Great Shout" and "The Suicide Express," and as a two-part serial, "The Felled Star," in the science fiction magazines Worlds of Tomorrow and If between 1965 and 1967. The separate novelette "Riverworld" ran in Worlds of Tomorrow in January 1966. A final pair of linked novelettes appeared in the 1990s: "Crossing the Dark River" and "Up the Bright River".
Farmer introduced himself into the series as Peter Jairus Frigate. The
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction dealing with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, extraterrestrials in fiction. Science fiction explores the potential consequences of scientific other various innovations, has been called a "literature of ideas." "Science fiction" is difficult to define as it includes a wide range of concepts and themes. James Blish wrote: "Wells used the term to cover what we would today call'hard' science fiction, in which a conscientious attempt to be faithful to known facts was the substrate on which the story was to be built, if the story was to contain a miracle, it ought at least not to contain a whole arsenal of them."Isaac Asimov said: "Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology." According to Robert A. Heinlein, "A handy short definition of all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world and present, on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method."Lester del Rey wrote, "Even the devoted aficionado or fan—has a hard time trying to explain what science fiction is," and that the reason for there not being a "full satisfactory definition" is that "there are no delineated limits to science fiction."
Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying "science fiction is what we point to when we say it." Mark C. Glassy described the definition of science fiction as U. S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart did with the definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." Science fiction had its beginnings in a time when the line between myth and fact was arguably more blurred than the present day. Written in the 2nd century CE by the satirist Lucian, A True Story contains many themes and tropes that are characteristic of contemporary science fiction, including travel to other worlds, extraterrestrial lifeforms, interplanetary warfare, artificial life; some consider it the first science-fiction novel. Some of the stories from The Arabian Nights, along with the 10th-century The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Ibn al-Nafis's 13th-century Theologus Autodidactus contain elements of science fiction. Products of the Age of Reason and the development of modern science itself, Johannes Kepler's Somnium, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and The States and Empires of the Sun, Margaret Cavendish's "The Blazing World", Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Ludvig Holberg's Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum and Voltaire's Micromégas are regarded as some of the first true science-fantasy works.
Indeed, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered Somnium the first science-fiction story. Following the 18th-century development of the novel as a literary form, Mary Shelley's books Frankenstein and The Last Man helped define the form of the science-fiction novel. Brian Aldiss has argued. Edgar Allan Poe wrote several stories considered science fiction, including "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" which featured a trip to the Moon. Jules Verne was noted for his attention to detail and scientific accuracy Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea which predicted the contemporary nuclear submarine. In 1887, the novel El anacronópete by Spanish author Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau introduced the first time machine. Many critics consider H. G. Wells one of science fiction's most important authors, or "the Shakespeare of science fiction." His notable science-fiction works include The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds. His science fiction imagined alien invasion, biological engineering and time travel.
In his non-fiction futurologist works he predicted the advent of airplanes, military tanks, nuclear weapons, satellite television, space travel, something resembling the World Wide Web. In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, the first of his three-decade-long planetary romance series of Barsoom novels, set on Mars and featuring John Carter as the hero. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback published the first American science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in which he wrote: By'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision... Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive, they supply knowledge... in a palatable form... New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow... Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written...
Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well. In 1928, E. E. "Doc" Smith's first published work, The Skylark of Space, written in collaboration with Lee Hawkins Garby, appeared in Amazing Stories. It is called the first great space opera; the same year, Philip Francis Nowlan's original Buck Rogers story, Armageddon 2419 appeared in Amazing Stories. This was followed by the first serious science-fiction comic. In 1937, John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Science Fiction, an event, sometimes conside
