The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe

The sixteen stories in this volume including the celebrated Eureka, reveal Poe as both apocalyptic prophet and pioneer of science fiction. Through this new speculative fiction he sought to be the comprehensive theorist and seer of an age dominated by electro-magnetism, which witnessed the intensive exploitation of mechanical inventions and a parallel boom in all forms of transcendentalism. His tales of galvanism, mesmerism, time travel, resurrection of the dead and demonic possession are marked by a bravado of thought, an imaginative sweep and a sheer effrontery which is breathtaking. Together with a general introduction and a select chronology of post-Newtonian science in the century preceding Eureka, each of the tales in this edition carries an individual critique and full annotation.