In this classic science fiction novel, Romain Ségétan, a brilliant scientist whose creativity is intimately linked to his erotic experience, particularly in its visual dimension, is struggling to develop a technology to capture and control the "waves of time," which will allow recurrent images and other echoes of the past to be brought forward into clearer focus. After being temporarily blinded by a jealous rival in love, he feels impelled to celebrate the restoration of his sight by means of a historical re-enactment of s series of frescoes found in the recently-excavated Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, aided and facilitated by his wave-enhancing apparatus, the Dyonisos. The result testifies to the subtle force of the waves of time, both in history and on the contemporary human psyche. A strikingly original—and erotic—SF novel about the nature of time!

In the 1890s, a generation before Hugo Gernsback, Louis Figuier, editor of the French popular science magazine La Science Illustrée, made a concerted effort to define and delimit the genre of roman scientifique, using that term to head a series of feuilletons that ran in his magazine from 1888 to 1905. This is a new collection of eight French proto-science fiction stories taken from the pages of La Science Illustrée, translated and annotated by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford. Included here are Vernian romances, tall tales featuring the dramatic extrapolation of natural phenomena, stories highlighting the scientific obsessions of geniuses with its social and psychological costs, and stories of everyday life in which scientific knowledge comes to play a significant role.

1821. Thanks to the technique discovered by Victor Frankenstein, it is now possible to resurrect the dead. Scotland Yard Superintendent Gregory Temple, on the trail of criminal mastermind John Devil, who plans to use such technology to reshape the world, is now forced to team up with Paris Morgue supervisor Jean-Pierre Severin, Malo de Treguern and Frankenstein's own creation to confront a cabal of vampires led by Count Szandor and the inhumanly beautiful Countess Marcian Gregoryi who also seek Frankenstein's secret... Frankenstein and The Vampire Countess is the second volume in a prodigious Alternate History saga which embraces the works of Mary Shelley, Paul Féval, Alexandre Dumas and others, written by Brian M. Stableford, an acknowledged master of the genre, author of the critically acclaimed The Plurality of Worlds.

The rustic English village of Dunwich is slowly crumbling into the sea, but a rare tidal event promises to roll back the waves and reveal ancient ruins, buried treasures and the lost true crown of England. Three scholarly pilgrims have come to Dunwich for their own secret reasons, but as they gather at The Hidden Crown, the mysteries that summoned them begin to take on a life of their own, and the seashore offers a brief but shattering glimpse of the ultimate Other. Dreams and debates intertwine with nameless, sentient dread to form a daring deconstruction of the meaning and menace of Cthulhu.

Decadent literature is intrinsically and proudly a literature of moral challenge; it is sceptical, cynical, and satirical. It recognizes that everyday morality does not work either in practical or in psychological terms, and is therefore a sham, but that ideal morality is -- not necessarily unfortunately -- unattainable. This volume collects the best of Brian Stableford's decadent work, including: "Salome," "O For a Fiery Gloom and Thee," "The Last Worshipper of Proteus," "The Evil That Men Do," "Ebony Eyes," "The Fisherman's Child," "The Storyteller's Tale," "The Unluckiest Thief," "The Flowers in the Forest," "The Mandrake Garden," and "Chanterelle."

“We haven’t brought you hack from the freeze-chamber because we’ve had any change of heart about the treatment of condemned criminals. You’re aboard a starship—a long,long way from Tanagar. “You’ve been sleeping for a long time. The only way you can actually find out if someone will last a million years is to try it. You were put away in the earliest years of the penal system—one of the first individuals sentenced to eternal life. We chose you partly for that reason—all the others we’ve revived come from a more recent period. You’ve been frozen for eight thousand years, Cheron Felix.You’re the oldest active human being in the universe

This collection of nine proto-science fiction tales, translated and edited by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford, ranges from Louis-Sébastien Mercier's 1768 opening tale, in which the hero communicates with the dead through a beam that anticipates a modern-day laser, to an 1887 story by Guy de Maupassant that speculates on Martian life. In between, we have tales of a heart transplant, a device that can see through time and an alien dragon. The book also includes Albert Robida's classic novella "The Monkey King" in which Saturnin Farandoul, shipwrecked as a baby and raised by apes on a Pacific Island, visits the Mysterious Island and joins forces with Captain Nemo to battle the savage pirate hordes of Bora-Bora. The stories gathered here exemplify the manifest intention of writers from the 18th and early 19th centuries to create a new genre of modern, imaginative fiction, distinctively different from the Utopias and occult romances typical of the times. This edition includes a historical introduction and notes by Stableford.

The masters of the Euchronian Millennium are panicking. The fabric of their ideal society on the platform built over the Earth has been ripped, and the order that they hold so precious seems to be teetering on the brink of collapse. In order to save it, the Hegemon has decided to obliterate all life in the perpetually covered Underworld of Earth from which the threat comes--but his followers are of two minds as to whether that's even possible, let alone justifiable. As the opposition grows, the plan goes forward--but then the Underworld begins to fight back, and everything's thrown into chaos: a chaos with which the citizens of a supposedly ideal society are simply not equipped to deal. Meanwhile, in the Underworld, the fight for survival goes on, as bitterly and ruthlessly as ever. The smashing conclusion to The Realms of Tartarus Trilogy!

The Aerial Valley (1810) proves that a utopian society can only maintain stability if it remains technologically limited and isolated from outside influences; it is a sensitive challenge to the philosophy of progress as an instrument of perfectibility. The Year 2800 (1829) bases its anticipations of future improvement on bold social reforms. Paris in Dreams (1863) echoes the then-ongoing endeavors of Baron Haussmann, who was busy remodeling the city in accordance with his own utopian design. Victor Hugo's The Future was the first chapter of the great author's introduction to a guide-book produced for visitors to the Exposition Universelle of 1867. Gustave Marx's Love a Thousand Years Hence (1889) is a satire of the glut of utopian accounts of future Paris, being elevated to the capital of a unified Europe.

Ten French scientific romances by Georges de La Fouchardière, Henri Lanos, E.M. Laumann, Francois-Félix Nogaret, Jean Rameau & Régis Vombal. The Mirror of Present Events (1790) is an irreverent political allegory in which a Syracusan beauty, following Archimedes' death, offers her hand in marriage to the inventor who can produce the most innovative homage to the great man's mechanical genius. A series of suitors comes forward, each offering a mechanical device ostensibly more marvelous than the last. Also included are an 1887collection of six futuristic stories by Jean Rameau featuring electric guns, automata and a striking vision of a future Paris in which people have become dependent on industrial pollution; The Immortal (1908) extrapolates the notion of immortality to a conclusion that might not be inevitable, but is no less symbolically dramatic; a hilarious 1910 feuilleton describing the career of an automaton racehorse; and L'Aerobagne 32 (1920), about a French engineer hired by a German company who discovers that its industrial operations are a cover for a rearmament scheme, and who refuses to surrender the formula for a new poison gas. He is then incarcerated in a vast airborne prison. This is the fourteenth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique.

After laboring for thousands of years, the people of Earth, fleeing ecological disaster, have built a new, clean, stable world on a worldwide platform erected over the entire land surface of the Earth. Everything is going well--except for Carl Magner, the man who's been having bad dreams. He shouldn't be having dreams at all, because dreams have been banished from the society of the Euchronian Millennium, but somehow he is, and his dreams are showing him the "Underworld." The real surface of the Earth, the Underworld that the Euchronian Millennium has left behind, still maintains life, human and otherwise, life that's adapted to a world without sky or sun, still evolving in response to extreme environmental challenges. Dreams are only dreams, but they're a provocation nevertheless, not merely for Carl Magner, but for the whole of Euchronian society. Can Heaven be truly Heaven, if Hell still festers in its entrails? The first book in a stunning SF trilogy, The Realms of Tartarus!

Brian M. Stableford’s latest novel, The Pool of Mnemosyne, concludes the saga of the immortal Axel Rathenius, from the artists’ colony of Mnemosyne, an island located off the northern coast of what in our world is called France, in the Everlasting Empire, 2,000 years after the birth of the Divine Caesar. Rathenius now returns to Mnemosyne after his meeting with the legendary Madame Minerva only to be confronted by a new conspiracy which threatens to annihilate his beloved island... Brian M. Stableford has been a professional writer since 1965. He has published more than 80 science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as several authoritative non-fiction books. He has also been translating the works of numerous authors of French mysteries, scientific romance and fantasy for Black Coat Press, which has previously published his four Mnemosyne novels.