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One hundred fifty years later, Jules Verne's epic novel of science and adventure is just as thrilling as when it was first published  A dirty slip of parchment falls from the pages of an ancient manuscript. Deciphered by the indefatigable Otto Liedenbrock, professor of geology, and his reluctant nephew, Axel, the parchment's coded message is a wild assertion made by a medieval alchemist: Inside a volcano in Iceland is a passageway to the center of the earth. Impossible, says Axel—the temperature of the earth's core is far too high for any human being to go near it. That is one theory, the professor replies. Two days later, they embark on a journey so fantastic it will alter the very meaning of history.     First published in 1864, Journey to the Center of the Earth is a cornerstone of science fiction and one of the greatest stories ever told. This ebook edition contains the classic Ward Lock & Co. translation of 1877, one of the first English-language versions faithful to the original French.   This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

The classic tale of the wonders and terrors lurking in the deep A monster has been wreaking havoc in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The US government has sent forth a team featuring Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist; Ned Land, a Canadian harpoonist; and Aronnax's servant Conseil to take care of the problem. Their mission: Kill the beast. But what they find is the submarine Nautilus and its helmsman, the fearsome Captain Nemo. Onboard Nemo's ship, Aronnax has a vision of ocean life that he never believed possible. In Nemo he sees a man who is entirely liberated yet completely shackled to his past—a scientist with the power to go anywhere in the world but held back by fierce anger. Written in 1870, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was one of the earliest novels of science fiction literature and has remained a classic of the genre over a century later. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Okafor ran wildly through the jungle, the phantom captain and his ghoulish platoon in hot pursuit. The faster he ran the more they gained on him. The earth suddenly became marshy and slippery under his feet, impeding speed and balance. He came to an intersection where the jungle paths crossed and saw a mound of earth about four feet high. Just beyond the mound stood a giant Iroko tree. Intuitively, he knew that if he jumped over the mound and quickly climbed up the tree, the ghostly captain and his soldiers would lose him. Eons merge in interstellar whirls. Realism, science fiction and fantasy fuse to drive this drama of transition, cross civilisation and self-discovery.

During the years of the so-called Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975), with its economic recovery after World War II, France witnessed the development of a technologized consumer society and a technocratic approach to public planning, which fostered a futuristic outlook and a boom in paperback publishing. A major success story of this era was the Éditions Fleuve Noir science-fiction series, Anticipation, to which popular genre author Maurice Limat contributed numerous novels. Although marketed as science fiction and set far in the future and in outer space, Limat’s novels featuring the Chevalier Bruno Coqdor resemble more often those of a knight-errant from medieval romance. These works of space fantasy express medieval nostalgia but also engage the massive social changes occurring in France during this period while extrapolating France’s survival in the distant future.

Combining original historical research with literary analysis, Adam Barrows takes a provocative look at the creation of world standard time in 1884 and rethinks the significance of this remarkable moment in modernism for both the processes of imperialism and for modern literature. As representatives from twenty-four nations argued over adopting the Prime Meridian, and thereby measuring time in relation to Greenwich, England, writers began experimenting with new ways of representing human temporality. Barrows finds this experimentation in works as varied as Victorian adventure novels, high modernist texts, and South Asian novels—including the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, H. Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. Demonstrating the investment of modernist writing in the problems of geopolitics and in the public discourse of time, Barrows argues that it is possible, and productive, to rethink the politics of modernism through the politics of time.

Theorising Literary Islands is a literary and cultural study of both how and why the trope of the island functions within contemporary popular Robinsonade narratives. It traces the development of Western “islomania” – or our obsession with islands – from its origins in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe right up to contemporary Robinsonade texts, focusing predominantly on American and European representations of fictionalized Pacific Island topographies in contemporary literature, film, television, and other media. Theorising Literary Islands argues that the ubiquity of island landscapes within the popular imagination belies certain ideological and cultural anxieties, and posits that the emergence of a Western popular culture tradition can largely be traced through the development of the Robinsonade genre, and through early European and American fascination with the Pacific region.

The dystopian character of Joca Reiners Terron’s A morte e o meteoro (2019) is indissociable from its critique of colonialism. But while the novel makes frequent references to the violent methods of exploitation that characterized American colonization, it mostly relies on allusions to different literary traditions—including gothic fiction, the adventure novel, and science fiction—in its depiction of colonialism. The dialogue with Heart of Darkness plays a significant role in A morte e o meteoro, which to a large extent is a critical rereading of Conrad’s novella. This article examines how this appropriation of textual and cultural paradigms shapes the dystopian outlook of the novel, while also offering alternatives to the hopelessness that defines its fictional world.

In the complex arena of international relations, literature and narratives can, like a transparent mirror, reveal the hidden and emotional aspects of political and diplomatic actions. The trilogy \"The Adventures of Two Captains\"[1] by Paul Jan Amroud and Elias Aghili Dehnavi is one of these narrative texts that has a high capacity for exploring this arena.   [1] Dehnavi, E. A., & Amord, P. J. (2019). Adventures of Two Captains: an epic science fiction poem. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379565767_Adve ntures_of_Two_Captains_An_Epic_Science_Fiction_Poem.

In the complex arena of international relations, literature and narratives can, like a transparent mirror, reveal the hidden and emotional aspects of political and diplomatic actions. The trilogy \"The Adventures of Two Captains\" by Paul Jan Amroud and Elias Aghili Dehnavi is one of these narrative texts that has a high capacity for exploring this arena. Language and literature have always played a fundamental role in shaping political and international discourses. In today's world, where concepts such as soft power, public diplomacy, and the dialogue of civilizations have become increasingly important, a deep and comprehensive understanding of the role of language in international relations is essential and important. The work of The Adventures of Two Captains, with its dynamic narrative and rich characterization, can provide a suitable platform for examining these concepts.

For half a century, digital machines have lent their computational power to mediate text-based, diegetic worlds, in the shape of software that we call games, video games, or sometimes interactive fiction. Perhaps the first such was Gregory Yob’s simple labyrinth-monster game Hunt the Wumpus (1973), but ever since then the games (if that is what they should be called) have become larger and far more complex, and, in recent decades, a single such work can contain more text than, say, Shakespeare’s collected plays. Given this massive textual content, as well as the often experimental and innovative nature of these works, they can also be considered a new form of novel; a kind of text that has much more in common with literature than with other digital games such as Candy Crush Saga, Age of Empires or Counterstrike. In these ‘games’, we find complex characters, difficult ethical choices (left to the player), imaginative landscapes and mythologies, and thousands if not millions of lines of carefully crafted prose. Teams of writers work collectively to stich these textual universes together, under production conditions that might remind us of multi-season TV series, but which are structured and consumed very differently – in fact, more like literature than TV. The claim made in this article is that the perspective of the novel (or supernovel) is a productive one for understanding the nature of these artistic works of ludic software. Should they be considered Literature? Through a discussion of the notions of literature, novel, and fiction and through a close ludic reading of Fallout: New Vegas (2010) I will argue that these textual games are in fact Literature, a new kind of novelistic genre, and discuss the wider cultural implications of this assessment.