Edward Sylvester Ellis 2 hr 9 min read

'Howly vargin! what is that?' cries Mickey McSquizzle, as a towering, smoke-belching mechanical man built by a boy genius comes striding across the Western prairie.

Edward S. Ellis's 1868 dime novel is a landmark of early American science fiction, the first great Edisonade. Rousing, historic, gloriously pulpy. Read it for the foundational steam-man story, a marvelous man-shaped engine hauling its inventors across the frontier, the tale that launched a whole tradition of boy-inventor adventure.

In its time

Published in 1868, during the 1860s, verne launches the voyages extraordinaires.

Reading it

2 hr 9 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).