Hello, I’m Brian Kelly.

I grew up on the stuff. A boy in Clydebank in the 1970s, dog-earing second-hand paperbacks picked up for a few pence, the impossible cities and the ringed planets on the covers, rockets with fins, ray-guns, robots with feelings and scientists with none. Stories written by people who genuinely believed the future was going to be astonishing, and who, bless them, were usually wrong in the most wonderful ways. I read them under the covers with a torch and I have, if I’m honest, never really stopped.

And it’s not only the science fiction. I have an equally hopeless soft spot for vintage comedy, the perfectly-timed pratfall, the deadpan that could strip paint, the absurdist gag that shouldn’t work and somehow lands like a piano. There’s a thread that runs between the two, I think: both are made by people delighted by possibility, unafraid to be a little bit daft, swinging for wonder. Old science fiction and old comedy share the same beating heart. They both ask, “wouldn’t it be something if…?”

These stories were never meant to gather dust in a catalogue. They were meant to be read, grinning, gasping, staying up far too late.

Here’s the thing that got under my skin, though. So many of these brilliant, strange, joyful stories had slipped into the public domain and then, quietly, into obscurity, sitting in plain-text files, stripped of their covers, their context, their spark, waiting for a reader who’d never come because they’d never find them. That felt like a small tragedy. So I decided to do something about it.

SF Supernova is that something. It is, unashamedly, a labour of love. Every one of the 4170 titles here has been rescued, tidied up, dressed back up in its cover art, given a synopsis so you know what you’re getting into, and slotted into an atlas of eras, themes and authors so you can actually wander. I’ve written biographies for the people who wrote them, 1357 authors and counting, and built 12 curated collections to give you a way in. It is an absurd amount of work for one person. I have loved nearly every minute.

There’s a nice symmetry to all this, I’ll admit. By day I’m a director of Arkelstone, an AI and robotics systems-integration company, I spend my working hours wiring up the actual future: the thinking machines and the mechanical hands that the writers in this archive could only dream about. Then in the evenings I come home to the dreamers themselves, to the pulp visionaries who imagined all of it decades before the silicon caught up. Building tomorrow’s robots by day and preserving yesterday’s robot stories by night feels, to me, like exactly the right way round.

I’m not doing this to sell you anything. There’s no algorithm here trying to keep you scrolling, no ads elbowing in, no catch. Just the good stuff, free to read, presented the way I always wished someone would present it, like it matters, because it does.

So: welcome. Poke around. Get lost. Fall for a writer nobody’s mentioned to you in fifty years. My genuine hope is that you come to love this daft, dazzling old corner of the imagination as much as I do, and honestly, if even one story here delights you the way they’ve all delighted me, then every late night was worth it.

— Brian