Future perfect Book

First I want to mention that the definition of science fiction that is operation in this book includes things I would not have thought of, like communicating with the dead and psychic powers. So that was interesting.

Secondly, I'll say that the stories themselves are a mixed bag. Most of them don't totally work for me as stories, and some are barely stories- but some are so over the top that I couldn't help liking them. For example, in one of them, this guy is instructed by a long-dead scientist during a séance to get a big diamond and run electricity through it to make a special microscope, and then- OK, I just clicked on the spoiler button, because I have to tell the rest- he murders his neighbor to get the diamond and then he makes said microscope and then he falls in love with a very small person who lives in a drop of water who he's only able to see through the microscope and then he leaves the drop of water on the microscope so he can keep looking at her but the water evaporates and she dies and he goes crazy. I have to say I was carried away by the strangeness here.

In addition to the one I just described, here are some other images that will stick with me: the mechanized butterfly made by a watchmaker in one of the Hawthorne tales; Melville's doomed bell-ringing automaton; Washington Irving's Martian invasion, with all its parallels to colonizers' real-life invasion of this continent; a woman who goes to Mars in her dreams and finds that male and female roles are totally reversed on that planet; and Mizora, a woman-only society at the center of the earth (strange since I just also read Herland.)