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1Space Prison

By Tom Godwin

AFTER TWO CENTURIES....The sound came swiftly nearer, rising in pitch and swelling in volume. Then it broke through the clouds, tall and black and beautifully deadly — the Gern battle cruiser, come to seek them out and destroy them. Humbolt dropped inside the stockade, exulting. For two hundred years his people had been waiting for the chance to fight the mighty Gern Empire ... with bows and arrows against blasters and bombs! (Summary from the Gutenberg text)

2Caleb Williams or Things As They Are

By William Godwin

The novel describes the downfall of Ferdinando Falkland, a British squire, and his attempts to ruin and destroy the life of Caleb Williams, a poor but ambitious young man that Falkland hires as his personal secretary. Caleb accidentally discovers a terrible secret in his master's past. Though Caleb promises to be bound to silence, Falkland, irrationally attached (in Godwin's view) to ideas of social status and inborn virtue, cannot bear that his servant should possibly have power over him, and sets out to use various means--unfair trials, imprisonment, pursuit, to make sure that the information of which Caleb is the bearer will never be revealed.<br>Godwin described the book as "a series of adventures of flight and pursuit; the fugitive in perpetual apprehension of being overwhelmed with the worst calamities", so that Caleb Williams can be classified as an early thriller or mystery novel. (Summary from Wikipedia)

A self-serving Spaniard discovers a means of traveling to the moon, describing his sensations in transit in terms remarkably consistent with modern astronauts' experiences. He finds on the moon a utopia, which he describes in detail, but being a fallen creature, he takes the first opportunity of coming home. (Summary by Thomas A. Copeland)

4Damon and Delia

By William Godwin

Damon and Delia fall in love instantly. Unfortunately, Damon is promised to another. Can true love prevail? Damon and Delia is a romance that is a bit tongue in cheek. It was penned on commission by William Godwin, political philosopher and writer, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, and father of Mary Shelley.

5Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

By William Godwin

William Godwin writes a tell-all about his ex-wife one year after her death. Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley) was an early proponent of women's rights and lived a lifestyle that was frowned upon during her life. - Summary by Katie Cocco

It was Godwin, in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (2 vols., 1793), who was the first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he did not give that name to the ideas developed in his remarkable work. Laws, he wrote, are not a product of the wisdom of our ancestors: they are the product of their passions, their timidity, their jealousies and their ambition. The remedy they offer is worse than the evils they pretend to cure. - Summary by Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921)

It was Godwin, in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (2 vols., 1793), who was the first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he did not give that name to the ideas developed in his remarkable work. Laws, he wrote, are not a product of the wisdom of our ancestors: they are the product of their passions, their timidity, their jealousies and their ambition. The remedy they offer is worse than the evils they pretend to cure. - Summary by Peter Kropotkin

Among the earliest sci-fi books known in English, this account of a trip to the moon was originally published in 1638. The version recorded here is an abridged edition published in 1768. Domingo Gonsales is transported to the moon in a machine carried by a flock of geese—go figure—and meets the race of people who live there, whom he calls the Lunars. After a short stay, his geese bring him back to earth, setting him down in China. The book also recounts several other of Gonsales’ adventures before and after his moon trip. Who knew, when President Kennedy said that Americans would land a man on the moon by 1970, that we’d already been there! - Summary by Verla Viera