Robert Paltock 3 hr 32 min read

Shipwrecked near the South Pole, Peter Wilkins passes through a subterranean cavern into a strange new world, and there rescues, and marries, a Gawry: a woman who can fly.

Robert Paltock's 1751 novel is a classic of early imaginative fiction, a beloved fantasy-voyage in the Crusoe tradition. Charming, inventive, historically important. Read it for a delightful eighteenth-century wonder-tale of a lost world of flying men and women, an influence on Coleridge and Shelley and a landmark of proto-science fiction.

In its time

Published in 1751, during the Pre-1800, voyages to the moon, subterranean worlds, and philosophical utopias, the deep roots of the imaginative tradition, from kepler and cyrano to the enlightenment.

Reading it

3 hr 32 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).