Fitz James O'Brien 32 min read

From boyhood, the narrator's whole soul has bent toward the microscope, and his obsession will carry him past murder to the discovery of a perfect world, and a woman, within a single drop of water.

Fitz-James O'Brien's 1858 story is a foundational classic of science fiction and horror. Haunting, obsessive, superbly told. Read it for one of the great early tales of the field, a microscopist's mad quest for the ultimate lens, and the tragic, unattainable beauty he glimpses in the infinitely small.

In its time

Published in 1858, during the 1850s, fairy tale and moral fantasy for a mass reading public; the sensation novel stirs.

Reading it

32 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).