The Log of the Flying Fish: A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure

In 1887, when the airplane hadn't yet been invented and the submarine was in its infancy, Harry Collingwood imagined a vessel that could sail the skies, skim the waves, and plunge into the ocean's depths. The Flying Fish, constructed from a fictional metal called aetherium lighter than air, is the brainchild of Professor Heinrich von Schalckenberg, a German scientist whose theories captivate a group of wealthy English adventurers at London's Migrants' Club. These men, a baronet, a colonel, and a lieutenant, agree to fund his radical experiment, and soon the Flying Fish carries them beyond the boundaries of the known world: to the ice-locked Arctic where they discover the remains of a Viking ship, to Africa where they casually depose one king and install another more to their taste, and into the crushing depths of oceans no human eye has seen. It's a spectacular work of proto-science-fiction, imagining technological marvels decades before they became reality, infused with the unselfconscious confidence of the British imperial age. For readers who wonder where science fiction came from, or who simply want a ripping adventure that asks nothing of them but belief.