The Second Deluge
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- General readers interested in early science fiction and apocalyptic disaster themes
- Literature students and scholars studying the evolution of the science fiction genre
- English learners who wish to practice their sense of the language by reading original English texts
- Readers who collect public-domain classics and are interested in early popular science writing
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting modern hard SF technology and rigorous worldbuilding
- Readers who prefer fast-paced contemporary fiction with strong plotting
- Readers with weak English reading skills who need Chinese annotations for support
Reading tips
- Read the opening disaster setup first, then focus on the characters' choices amid the upheaval to grasp the narrative rhythm of early science fiction.
- Read alongside background materials on the history of science from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century to understand the sources of the author's imagination.
- If used for a course, select the chapters on the flood's arrival and humanity's response for close reading and discuss the narrative patterns of disaster fiction.
- When reading the original English, keep a vocabulary notebook and focus on accumulating astronomy, geography, and navigation-related terms.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
Garrett Putnam Serviss (1851–1929) was an American astronomer, popular science writer on astronomy, and early science fiction author. A Cornell University graduate, he worked as an editor at the New York Sun. He excelled at turning complex astronomical knowledge into accessible prose; works such as Astronomy with an Opera-glass, Pleasures of the Telescope, and Curiosities of the Sky invited ordinary readers to explore the night sky. At the same time, he was an early writer to blend astronomical imagination with adventure narratives, producing science fiction including Edison's Conquest of Mars, A Columbus of Space, The Moon Metal, and The Second Deluge, which deal with interstellar travel, extraterrestrial civilizations, and catastrophes, and exerted a degree of influence on early science fiction. Ten of his works are held in this collection. Public information is limited, and details of his life and the classification of his works remain to be further verified.
