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The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
Reader Reviews A Vast Imagination Takes Us to Remote and Shadowy Places!, August 8, 2003 Reviewer: An Amazon.com Customer This book is a marvel. Even the cover picture is brilliantly chosen. No other writer I have come across has captured that awesome, lonely sense of vastness in the most remote wildernesses of science better than Edgar Allan Poe. "The Unparralled Adventure of One Hans Phfall" is my favorite of all the tales, filled as it is with strange imagry and unexpected observations. The "Eye Balloon" on the front of the book easily becomes the vehicle in which the explorer Hans Phfall ventures into the those silent, rarified regions of lonely atmosphere beyond the reach of ordinary men. "Descent into the Maelstrom," a second story, is another example of the vastness and strangeness of nature, and the method of the sailor's escape from the vortex of thundering water is inspired. All the tales contain this sweeping sort of genius, and the whole book is without a doubt one of the greatest complilations of stories anywhere, and certainly one of the strangest. There is a certain fascination in the cold, rational extrapolation of Poe's seemingly dry, technical sentences, and the icy discipline he uses in analysing the incredible and bizarre places and things in the stories becomes entrancing.
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