Mesaerion

One of the most Gothic short story writers of the nineteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe was a predominant figure of the Romantic movement in American literature and is regarded as the inventor of the detective story. His literary career began with Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) but it was his deftly plotted short stories which attracted attention. He was also a noticeable literary critic and an unwearying reviewer and essayist. The recurring themes in his works-the death of women, bereavement, horror, madness, premature burial, decay, revival of the dead, life after death-are suggested to have resulted from his own life, which was a sequence of tragic events and frequent abandonments. Poe skillfully weaved these themes into his meticulous plots and created the macabre world of terror and dark romanticism bringing alive the horror through his choice of words. More than a century and a half after Poe's death, his works still remain as fresh and scary, sending a frightening chill down the spines of his readers.

Andrew Barger, award-winning author and engineer, has extensively researched forgotten journals and magazines of the early 19th century to locate groundbreaking science fiction short stories in the English language. In doing so, he found what is possibly the first science fiction story by a female (and it is not from Mary Shelley). Andrew located the first steampunk short story, which has not been republished since 1844. There is the first voyage to the moon in a balloon, republished for the first time since 1820 that further tells of a darkness machine and a lunarian named Zuloc. Other sci-stories include the first robotic insect and an electricity gun. Once again, Andrew has searched old texts to find the very best science fiction stories from the period when the genre automated to life, some of the stories are published for the first time in nearly 200 years. Read these fantastic stories today!OUR OWN COUNTRYSo mechanical has the age become, that men seriously talk of flying machines, to go by steam,--not your air-balloons, but real Daedalian wings, made of wood and joints, nailed to your shoulder,--not wings of feathers and wax like the wings of Icarus, who fell into the Cretan sea, but real, solid, substantial, rock-maple wings with wrought-iron hinges, and huge concavities, to propel us through the air.Knickerbocker Magazine, May 1835