The Lost World: The Explorer Who Briefed Conan Doyle Later Vanished Into the Amazon
The Lost World began at the Royal Geographical Society. On February 13, 1911, Percy Fawcett stood up there and described a plateau in South America, and monstrous tracks of unknown origin, and Conan Doyle was interested enough to ask him for more. Fawcett’s own memoirs record it: Doyle wanted information ...
The Three-Body Problem: Liu Cixin’s Hugo Winner, the Chapters That Moved to the Front, and What Netflix Changed
The Three-Body Problem is the novel that opens Liu Cixin’s trilogy, and it starts somewhere very few science-fiction novels start: Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. A young woman named Ye Wenjie, trained in astrophysics, watches a crowd of Red Guards turn on ...
Roadside Picnic: The Strugatskys’ Zone, the Book the Censors Fought for Eight Years, and Which Translation to Read
Roadside Picnic is the Soviet science-fiction novel that gave the world the Zone and the stalker. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky wrote it in 1971: aliens have visited Earth, stayed for two days, and left without a word, and in the places where they landed they left behind a scatter of ...
Hard to Be a God: The Strugatskys’ Observer in Arkanar, Aleksei German’s Decades-Long Film, and Which Translation to Read
Hard to Be a God is the 1964 novel in which Arkady and Boris Strugatsky sent a man from a peaceful, rational future Earth to live undercover in a kingdom that is sliding from the Middle Ages into something much worse. His name at home is Anton. In the kingdom ...
Solaris Book Guide: Stanisław Lem’s Living Ocean, the Two English Translations, and the Films
Solaris is Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel about a planet covered by an ocean that seems to think, and the Solaris book is still the way most English-language readers first meet him. Its narrator, the psychologist Kris Kelvin, comes down to the one station still hovering over that ocean, finds its ...
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: Nemo Has No Origin Because His Publisher Deleted It
Captain Nemo is the most famous mystery in nineteenth-century fiction, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea never tells you who he is. A man of no stated nationality, driven by a grief he will not explain, who sinks a warship belonging to a country the reader is never told ...
The Mysterious Island: The Standard Translation Was by a Woman Whose Husband Took the Credit
The first English translation of The Mysterious Island was credited to W. H. G. Kingston. It was made by his wife, Agnes Kinloch Kingston. She had studied on the continent and had the languages. He was a popular author of boys’ adventure stories who ran into money trouble in the ...
The Lighthouse at the End of the World: Two Different Books, and the Real One Waited Ninety-Four Years
Wikipedia lists two authors for The Lighthouse at the End of the World: Jules Verne and Michel Verne. That is accurate, and it is the reason this page exists. Verne drafted it in 1901 and died in 1905. His son Michel prepared the manuscript for publication and revised it, and ...
Michael Strogoff: The Plot Turns on a Real Piece of Physics
Michael Strogoff is the most thrilling novel Verne wrote, it is not science fiction, and its central event depends on a phenomenon any physicist can name. The Leidenfrost effect. A liquid meeting a surface far hotter than its boiling point does not spread and evaporate. It forms an insulating vapor ...
The Children of Captain Grant: Disney Took the English Title and Verne Never Got It Back
Verne did not call the novel you know as In Search of the Castaways anything of the kind. He called it Les Enfants du capitaine Grant. The Children of Captain Grant. A sweep of English search data finds effectively nothing under the French title, or its literal translation, and a ...
