Sci fi and fantasy stories from the sun

Later described as “the lost giant of American science fiction,” Edward Page Mitchell wrote many science fiction and fantasy short stories in the 1870’s to 1890’s, nearly all of which were published anonymously in the The Sun daily newspaper of New York. Mitchell was editor-in-chief of The Sun and was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board for many years.

Mitchell introduced many technological and social predictions which were daring for the time, prior to similar predictions by famous authors, such as travel by pneumatic tube, electrical heating, newspapers printed in the home by electrical transmission, food-pellet concentrates, international broadcasts, suspended animation of a living human being through freezing (cryogenics), a man rendered invisible by scientific means, a time-travel machine, faster-than-light travel, a thinking computer, a cyborg, matter transmission or teleportation, voting by American women, and interracial marriage. His fantasy stories dabble with the occult and bizarre, involving ghosts, the Devil, masochism, inanimate objects coming to life, and more.