"The Adventures of Henry Thoreau-chronicling the ten years in his life beginning with Harvard in 1837 and ending as he walked away from Walden Pond after living in his long dreamed-of cabin for only two years--tells the dramatic (and at times heartbreaking) story of how a troubled young man found a meaningful life in a tempestuous era"--

Long before 1984, Star Wars, or The Hunger Games, Victorian authors imagined a future where new science and technologies reshaped the world and universe they knew. The great themes of modern science fiction showed up surprisingly early: space and time travel, dystopian societies, even dangerously independent machines, all inspiring the speculative fiction of the Victorian era. In Frankenstein Dreams, Michael Sims has gathered many of the very finest...