Collected here are the stories, poems, and religious writings that preceded and helped form the science fiction and fantasy genres. The collection explores the key imaginative roots and their later literary permutations. The author list alone reads like a literary who's who and includes many writers not primarily known for their forays into the fantastic. Organized by topic rather than simple chronology, this volume allows the listener to trace the history of robots, aliens, and apocalypses up to some of their most recent manifestations.

Topic chapters and represented authors include "Transformers" (Card, Asimov, Rossetti), "Shocking Futures" (Swift, More), and "Traveling Fools" (Carol, Burroughs, McCaffrey). This definitive collection of science fiction and fantasy sources illustrates how earlier generations imagined the future.

Written by Dante Alighieri, Isaac Asimov, Edward Bellamy, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Ben Bova, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Orson Scott Card, Lewis Carroll, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur C. Clarke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stephen Crane, John Crowley, Guy de Maupassant, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harlan Ellison®, Elliot Engel, Euripides, E.M. Forster, Nicolai Gogol, Queen Hatshepsut, Homer, Oskar Kokoschka, R.A. Lafferty, Ursula K. Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey, Sir Thomas More, William Morris, Ovid, Gareth Owen, Barry Pain, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, Christina Rossetti, Stefan Rudnicki, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Robert Silverberg, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sam M. Steward, Frank R. Stockton, Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, Walt Whitman, and William B. Yeats.

Narrated by David Birney, Scott Brick, Cassandra Campbell, Danny Campbell, Christopher Cazenove, Gabrielle de Cuir, Harlan Ellison®, Arte Johnson, Roz Landor, John Lee, Don Leslie, Enn Reitel, John Rubinstein, Stefan Rudnicki, Bahni Turpin, Simon Vance, Mirron Willis, Michael York, and Judy Young.

Includes an accompanying PDF with a list of the stories, authors, and narrators presented.