Fantasy and Science Fiction Classic Literature

I know your teachers tell you that fantasy isn't the same as literary classics-- those books on your high school or college recommended reading lists.  Well, guess what-- these are both! Listed below are ancient fantasy epics, like King Arthur and Arabian Nights.  All respected classics your teachers appreciate and fun fantasy epics of dragons and wizards you can enjoy.  Here they are:

• Aeneid by Virgil (1st century CE)    
  • HTML at Perseus
  • HTML at Renascence Editions
• Aladdin and the Magic Lamp (Gutenberg text; 39 K)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  • Local raw text (145 K)
  • Carnegie Mellon HTML with Tennial illustrations
• The Alliterative Morte Arthure ed. by Valerie Krishna (HTML at Virginia)
• The Arabian Nights

• Gutenberg text, translation by Andrew Land (616 K)
• Text at Virginia Tech, translation by Sir Richard Burton (1.1 M)

• Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
  • Local raw text (358 K)
  • Data Text HTML
  • Text at Wiretap (358 K)
  • Bibliomania HTML
• At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
  • Gutenberg text (490 K)
  • Text at Wiretap (464 K)
• At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Gutenberg text (285 K)
  • Text at Wiretap (263 K)
• The Birds by Aristophanes (MIT HTML)
• The Brick Moon, and Other stories by Edward Everett Hale (Virginia HTML)
• Can Such Things Be? by Ambrose Bierce (text at Wiretap; 331 K)
• The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Local raw text; 454 K)
• The Certain Hour by James Branch Cabell (Local raw text; 320 K)
• Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair by William Morris (Gutenberg text; 270 K)
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
  • Gutenberg text (173 K)
  • Illustrated HTML at Virginia
• The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella (text at Wiretap; 92 K)
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
  • Gutenberg text (668 K)
  • Text at Wiretap (628 K)
• A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allen Poe (Virginia HTML)
• The Door in the Wall, and Other Stories by H. G. Wells (Virginia HTML)
• Dracula by Bram Stoker (Carnegie Mellon HTML)
• Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker (text at Wiretap; 32 K)
• Edgar Allan Poe's Collected Short Stories (Gopher at Wiretap)
• Erewhon by Samuel Butler (text at Naked Word; 453 K)
• Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (text at Virgina Tech; 435 K)
• The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells (Gutenberg text; 396K)
• Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
  • Gutenberg text (206 K)
  • Text at Wiretap (196 K)
• Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
  • Local raw text (411 K)
  • Gutenberg text (438 K)
  • HTML by M.L. Grant
• From the Earth to the Moon and A Trip Around It by Jules Verne
  • Local raw text (535 K)
  • Text at Wiretap (237K; From the Earth to the Moon only)
• A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter (Gutenberg text; 697 K)
• Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (crocker.com HTML)
• The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Local raw text (441 K)
  • Carnegie Mellon HTML
• The Golden Age by Kenneth Grahame (Virginia HTML)
• Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (HTML)
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (text at Virgina Tech; 566 K)
• The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (text files at WELL Gopher)
• The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley (Gutenberg text; 364 K)
• The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins (Gutenberg text; 369 K)
• Herland by Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman (Gutenberg text; 323 K)
• A House-Boat on the Styx, John Kendrick Bangs (1895)
• The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll
  • Gutenberg text (40 K)
  • Virginia HTML
• The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
  • Text at Wiretap (266 K)
  • Virginia HTML
• The Iron Heel by Jack London (text at Virginia Tech)
• The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
  • Local raw text (237 K)
  • Virginia HTML
• A Journey in Other Worlds by John Jacob Astor (illustrated HTML at Virginia)
• A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (text at Virginia Tech; 338 K)
• Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Malory
  • Volume 1: Virginia HTML
  • Volume 2: Virginia HTML
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
  • Texas HTML with commentary
  • Gutenberg text (80 K)
• The Light Princess by George MacDonald (Wheaton HTML)
• The Lost Continent by Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Gutenberg text (225 K)
  • Text at Wiretap (205 K)
  • Virginia HTML
• The Lost Continent by C. H. Cutliffe Hyne (Local raw text; 511 K)
• The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Gutenberg text (441 K)
  • Local raw text (414 K)
• The Magic Egg and Other Stories by Frank R. Stockton (Virginia HTML)
• Maria or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
  • Gutenberg text (277 K)
  • Text at Wiretap (261 K)
• Metamorphoses by Ovid (text at Virginia Tech; 939 K)
• A Midsummer's Night Dream by William Shakespeare (Local raw text; 94 K)
• The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Local raw text (313 K)
  • Carnegie Mellon HTML
• The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne (illustrated HTML in Israel)
• New Atlantis by Francis Bacon (text at Wiretap; 82 K)
• News from Nowhere by William Morris
  • Text at CMU (409 K)
  • Virginia HTML
• Penguin Island by Anatole France (text at Virginia Tech; 364 K)
• The People of the Abyss by Jack London (text at Virginia Tech; 361 K)
• Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women by George MacDonald (Virginia illustrated HTML)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (Gutenberg text; 450 K)
• The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe
  • Text at Wiretap (35 K)
  • Virginia HTML
• The Poison Belt by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Local raw text (160 K)
  • Text at Wiretap (164 K)
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Local raw text (355 K)
  • Carnegie Mellon HTML 
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Gutenberg text; 32 K)
• Rip Van Winkle< 41 Tech; Virginia at (Text Irving Washington>
• Round the Moon by Jules Verne (text at Wiretap; 298 K)
• She by H. Rider Haggard (text at Wiretap; 569 K)
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon (Virginia HTML)
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Gutenberg text (154 K)
  • Rutgers HTML
  • Virginia HTML
• The Tempest by William Shakespeare (Local raw text; 97 K)
• The $30,000 Bequest and other stories by Mark Twain (Gutenberg text; 546 K)
• Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
  • Gutenberg text (183 K)
  • Indiana HTML
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (Local raw text)
• Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells (Gutenberg tex; 785 K)
• The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
  • Gutenberg text with footnotes (129 K)
  • Gutenberg text (86 K)
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (Gutenberg text; 245 K)
• Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (Carnegie Mellon HTML)
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
  • Gutenberg text (591 K)
  • Text at Virginia Tech (467 K)
  • Virginia HTML
• Utopia by Thomas More (Text at Carnegie Mellon; 223 K)
• The War in the Air by H. G. Wells (Gutenberg text; 586 K)
• The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
  • Local raw text (335 K)
  • HTML at Fourmilab 
• The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley (Gutenberg text; 380 K)
• The Well at the World's End by William Morris (Gutenberg text; 1180 K)
• When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells (Gutenberg text; 496 K)
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (Local raw text; 319 K)
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
  • Local raw text (208 K)
  • Carnegie Mellon HTML

Collateral Works

• The Aeneid by Virgil (text at Wiretap; 627K)
• Aesop's Fables (Gutenberg text)
• Beowulf translation by F. B. Gummere
  • Text at Wiretap (143 K)
  • Gutenberg text (157 K)
• Bulfinch's Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch (Virginia Tech Gopher)
• Bulfinch's Mythology: Legends of Charlemagne by Thomas Bulfinch (Gutenberg text)
• Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Chivalry by Thomas Bulfinch (Gutenberg text)
• Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable (revised by editor) by Thomas Bulfinch, ed. by Edward Everett Hale (Gutenberg text)
• The Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear (Gutenberg Text; 30 K)
• Candide by Voltaire, the classic parable of an innocent traveling in our cruel world (text at Virginia Tech)
• Classics, Greek and Roman (MIT HTML; includes Homer, Plato and many more)
• The Divine Comedy by Dante (Princeton HTML)
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (text at Virginia Tech; 2.3 MB)
• Enuma Elish (When on High), by an unknown author (18th century BCE)
• The Epic of Gilgamesh by an unknown author (3rd millennium BCE)
  • Ishtar and Izdubar: The Epic of Babylon (1884 translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh), ed. by Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton (HTML with commentary at sacred-texts.com)
• Erewhon by Samuel Butler
  • Naked Word text (453K)
  • Naked Word HTML (461K)
• The History of Herodotus by Herodotus (1.4 MB)
• The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson, the tale of an innocent escapee from utopia (text at UPenn)
• The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (1.1 MB)
• The House of Seven Gables by Nathanial Hawthorne, a classic American novel with a family curse at its heart

• Gutenberg text
• Text at Wiretap

• The Iliad by Homer (text at MIT; 790K)
• The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (text at Wiretap)
• The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
• Mars by Percival Lowell (Bibliomania HTML)
• The Nibelungenlied, trans. by Daniel Bussier Shumway
  • HTML at OMACL
  • Gutenberg text
  • The Nibelungenlied, Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the  Metre of the Original by George Henry Needler (Gutenberg text)
• News From Nowhere by William Morris (Virginia HTML)
• The Odyssey by Homer (text at MIT; 597k)
• The Oedipus Trilogy by Sophocles
  • Gutenberg text
  • Text at Wiretap
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
  • Gutenberg text
  • Text at Wiretap
• Paradise Regained by John Milton
  • Gutenberg text
  • Text at Wiretap
• The Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Condensed into English Verse (1899), trans. by Romesh C. Dutt (HTML at sacred-texts.com)

• Ramayan of Valmiki, Trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith [1870-1874]

• The Republic by Plato, the earliest great utopian work in the West
  • Text at Wiretap
  • Virginia HTML
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, the archetypal tale of an alien visitor reforming a new world to conform to his vision of his homeland
  • Bibliomania HTML
  • Text at Virginia Tech
• Teutonic Myth and Legend: An Introduction to the Eddas and Sagas, Beowulf, The Nibelungenlied, Etc. by Donald Alexander Mackenzie (illustrated HTML at sacred-texts.com)
• The Tao Teh King by Lao-Tse, translation by James Legge, the fountainhead of East Asian philosophy and a crucial source for such works as Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness.
  • Local raw text
  • Christopher Newport University text and commentary

  Utopia by Thomas More (text at Wiretap)

Many similar books are available at the Internet Sacred Text Archive

Recommended Reading Main Page

Read Henry Potty and the Pet Rock: The Unauthorized Harry Potter Parody

Read From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey in Myth and Legend

Coming Soon!