A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
After five years and most of his fortune, Monson must decide whether his flying machine is ready—or whether ridicule has forced the decision.
An ironmaster invites his wife’s lover on a midnight tour of the furnaces, where every display of heat carries a threat.
A sighted mountaineer falls into an isolated valley where blindness is universal—and learns that his advantage has no accepted meaning.
A neglected shopkeeper discovers that a crystal egg offers a living view of another world—and that its inhabitants may be watching back.
A ragged stranger claims to carry a fortune in man-made diamonds, but every proof of his success has made him look more like a criminal.
A Brazilian gunboat sent against a plague of giant ants discovers an organized enemy capable of challenging human rule of the Amazon.
A quiet orchid collector longs for one remarkable event, then a mysterious plant from the tropics begins to bloom in his greenhouse.
A colonial patrol trapped on a cliff must escape enemy fire, thirst, and a drop that seems impossible to survive.
A confident rural army meets an enemy weapon built to cross trenches, resist rifles, and turn courage into a tactical liability.
An abused laborer in a roaring power station begins to worship the largest dynamo as a god capable of judging his brutal supervisor.
A father follows his young son into a shop where stage tricks become genuine magic and every doorway leads deeper from ordinary London.
After his rival dies, a celebrated entomologist discovers a moth no one else can see—and cannot stop trying to catch it.
A physiologist’s new stimulant speeds thought and movement so radically that the outside world seems frozen in time.
A chemistry accident sends an ordinary schoolmaster into a shadow world that overlaps the lives of everyone he knew.
A confident skeptic spends the night in a notorious room, armed with candles and reason against its dark reputation.
A laboratory accident blinds Davidson to London and replaces it with a vivid view of a remote island that may be more than hallucination.
A seaside walker discovers that unfamiliar deep-sea creatures have reached the English coast—and have developed a taste for human prey.
A new star grows brighter each night, and one mathematician realizes that its path will bring catastrophe to Earth.
A nervous visitor steals a scientist’s deadliest culture and races across London with catastrophe—and fame—on his mind.
A London psychical researcher leaves his body during an experiment—and returns to find it occupied by something else.
Two exhausted adventurers follow a stolen treasure map into a tropical forest, certain that murder has put a fortune within reach.
Over whisky, a taxidermist boasts that preserving nature is only the beginning of his art—and explains how easily collectors can be fooled.
Three horsemen pursuing a fleeing woman enter a silent valley where the wind carries vast webs alive with spiders.
Confined to a couch, an invalid watches a distant manhunt as entertainment until the chase crosses the river and comes to his window.
