Fantastica imprint: 92 books

Claudius Bombarnac, a reporter is assigned by the Twentieth Century to cover the travels of the Grand Transasiatic Railway which runs between Uzun Ada, Turkestan and Peking, China. Accompanying him on this journey is an interesting collection of characters, including one who is trying to beat the round the world record and another who is a stowaway.

I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of the basket trick, packs of cards that looked all right, and all that sort of thing, but never had I thought of going in until one day...

Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a pin, it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent that he has done. He has really, this time at any rate, without any touch of exaggeration in the phrase,...

That past!… I was—in those days—rather a nice fellow, rather shy— taste for grey in my clothes, weedy little moustache, face interesting, slight stutter which I had caught in my early life from a schoolfellow. Engaged to a very nice girl, named Delia. Fairly new, she was— cigarettes—liked...

Gottfried Plattner is, in spite of his name, a freeborn Englishman. His father was an Alsatian who came to England in the sixties, married a respectable English girl of unexceptionable antecedents, and died, after a wholesome and uneventful life. Gottfried's age is seven-and-twenty. He is, by virtue...

The story follows adventures of five Americans on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. The five Americans escape from prison during the siege of Richmond, Virginia, by hijacking a balloon.

Sir Launcelot is virtuous and strange, and he is surrounded by a Smollettian menagerie whose various jargons are part of this novel's linguistic virtuosity and satire. He is an eighteenth-century gentleman who rides about the country in armour, attended by his comic squire, Timothy Crabshaw, redressing grievances.

Smollett describes in great detail the natural phenomena, history, social life, economics, diet and morals of the places he visited. Smollett had a lively and pertinacious curiosity, and, as his novels prove, a very quick eye. He foresaw the merits of Cannes, then a small village, as a health-resort, and the possibilities of the Corniche road.

The novel tells the life story of Roderick Random, who was born to a Scottish gentleman and a lower-class woman and is thus shunned by his father's family. His mother dies soon after giving birth and his father is driven mad with grief. Random's paternal grandfather coerces a local school master into providing free education for the boy, who becomes popular with his classmates.

Set in a future where consumerism has made much of Earth into a junk heap, Peter Payne is a trashformer, a scavenger, a kid under the thumb of a world too brutal to stay human. When his one chance for love and to change his fate is violently torn away from him, he embarks on a quest to rebuild the object...

The chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at Camberwell, and kept the electric railway going, came out of Yorkshire, and his name was James Holroyd. He was a practical electrician, but fond of whisky, a heavy red-haired brute with irregular teeth. He doubted the existence of the...

The canoe was now approaching the land. The bay opened out, and a gap in the white surf of the reef marked where the little river ran out to the sea; the thicker and deeper green of the virgin forest showed its course down the distant hill slope. The forest here came close to the beach. Far beyond, dim...

A comet called Gallia touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. On the territory that was carried away by the comet there remained a total of thirty-six people of French, English, Spanish and Russian nationality. These people did not realize at first what had happened, and considered the collision an earthquake.

A wealthy American Jeorling is looking for a passage back to the USA after private studies of the wildlife on the Kerguelen Islands. Halbrane is one of the first ships to arrive at Kerguelen, and its captain Len Guy somewhat reluctantly agrees to have Jeorling as a passenger as far as Tristan da Cunha....