Showing results by publisher "MuseumAudiobooks.com" in Science Fiction & Fantasy

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.

The Star by H.G. Wells is about a strange luminous object which erupted into the solar system, after disturbing the orbit of Neptune. The object creates havoc with Jupiter and attracts the moon away from the earth, whose surface suffers much upheaval. Many of the survivors move to the polar areas, where the climate has become temperate

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.

The Age of Chivalry focuses on Arthurian legends of the legendary King Arthur who, according to medieval histories and romances, led the defense of Britain against Saxon invaders in the late 5th and early 6th centuries AD. It includes the chapters "The Mythical History of England", "Merlin", "Sir Gawain", "Lancelot of the Lake", "The Lady of Shalott", "Queen Guenever's Peril", "Tristram and Isoude", and "Sir Palamedes".

Donald Alexander Mackenzie (1873-1936) was a Scottish writer. Teutonic Myth and Legend (1912) is his retelling of the legends and myths of the Goths, Norsemen, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, Angles, Saxons, and other Germanic tribes. Poems and prose passages from classic literature that are related to these myths are included.

"2 B R 0 2 B" is a science fiction short story by Kurt Vonnegut, originally published in a magazine in 1962, and collected in Vonnegut's Bagombo Snuff Box (1999). The title is pronounced "2 B R naught 2 B," in reference to the famous phrase "to be, or not to be" from Hamlet. The setting is a society in which aging has been cured, individuals live indefinitely, and population control is used to keep the population at 40 million; this number is maintained through infanticide and government-assisted suicide.

Tales of Space and Time is a fantasy and science fiction collection of short stories and novellas first published in 1899. They include "The Crystal Egg"; "The Star"; "A Story of the Stone Age"; "The Idler"; and A Story of the Days to Come.

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 protagonist, Layeville, had built a time machine and invited the world’s top scientists to attend its first performance. Unfortunately, a massive explosion killed them all, and for his crime, Layeville was imprisoned in a glass pendulum for what seemed an eternity. The people called him The Prisoner of Time. But everything comes to an end.

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.

Leo Tolstoy, best known for the novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace, also wrote short stories that expound on Christianity. The Godson is a moving parable about a man finding a way to understand himself, the events around him, and his purpose in life. The story is about a son who was born to a poor peasant who rejoiced and went to a neighbour to ask him to become godfather to the boy.

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.

Jean Lang (Mrs John Lang, 1867-1932) wrote extensively on Greek, Roman, and Germanic mythology and its interpretation. In Lang’s version of the Icarus myth, there is a strong emphasis on the boy’s duty to fulfill the aspirations of his father, Daedalus.

"The Fight of the Good Ship Clarissa" is an experimental short story by Ray Bradbury. It was first published in the Winter 1940 edition of Futuria Fantasia, credited as "by one who should know better". The story begins with the space rocket Clarissa being nine days out from Venus, while “the members of the crew were also out for nine days”. The narrative then morphs into an incoherent "stream of consciousness", where various scenarios of bizarre wordplay briefly follow one another.

"The Story of the Siren" centers around two people, a couple, who have both seen a siren deep in the sea. The couple are to be wed and bear a child who will reveal the siren to the world and thus save it. However, a priest plots to quash this prophecy in a dark and shocking way.

An astronomer visits an industrialist, and they discuss the possibility of interstellar trade. Meanwhile, their two sons have found “strange animals” that they want to turn into a circus act. Going outside, the two men discover a crashed spacecraft and the two “animals” that the youths have locked up in a barn. After having repaired their spacecraft, the aliens depart for their planet, called earth.

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.

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.

After chasing a “monster", the protagonists find themselves prisoners on a futuristic submarine called the Nautilus. Their captor is Captain Nemo, and the prisoners enjoy a wild ride on the Nautilus. Visiting far-flung regions of the ocean, they see amazing coral formations, sunken vessels, the Antarctic ice barrier, the South Pole, the transatlantic telegraph cable, and Atlantis, the legendary underwater kingdom. In the underwater forests off Crespo Island, they hunt sharks, but when the submarine returns to the Atlantic Ocean, giant squid attacks them....

In the Year 2889 by Jules Verne is a diary of the observations of Fritz Napoleon Smith, the editor of an influential futuristic newspaper. It is an action-packed tale of technological advances and science fiction scenarios. Some of the predictions were remarkably accurate.