Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (short story, horror, free)

This is not science fiction. It's creepy horror. A mad man is telling us how he murdered an old man because the victim had blue eyes of a vulture!

Fact sheet.

First published: 1843.
Download full text.
Download MP3 from Internet Archive.
See a movie adaptation at YouTube.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Edgar Allan Poe; from 19th century.

Terra Incognito on proto-SF stories of Edgar Allan Poe

Terra Incognito lists some of these. Without online links, but most Poe fiction should be available at Project Gutenberg.

1. "Poe´s ballooning stories are The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, The Balloon-Hoax and Mellonta Tauta." "The Balloon-Hoax [is] the description of a trans-Atlantic balloon travel." "Mellonta Tauta is the only far future story written by Poe... it takes place in the 25th Century, Poe simply criticizes human nature".
2. "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion".

But he doesn't list one of the most important science fiction stories of Poe - "A Descent into the Maelstrom". To me, this reads as very much normal hard-sf - nothing proto about it, though the language & telling style is kind of old. Arthur Clarke wrote a space age sequel to it - "Maelstrom II", of which a 3-minute movie version & a set of graphic slides are online.

Terra Incognito recommends the best short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (with short commentaries)

Link.

Related: Stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (flash fiction, apocalypse, free): Too much oxygen can be very harmful!

This is a frame story. Told as conversation between Eiros & Charmion, names in heaven (or hell) of men who once lived on earth, were known with different names there, & are now dead in the sense we understand. Eiros is updating Charmion of how life on earth ended.

Disaster itself is of the same kind as H G Wells' "The Star", Arthur Clarke's "The Hammer of God", & the Hollywood movie "Armageddon". Only it's not a solid asteroid about to hit earth; it's a tenuous cloud of gas in the form of a comet. Even the core of this comet is not solid.

A part of the story is devoted to earthmen's reactions of approaching object - this part is far more readable & shorter than Wells' version.

End comes as earth passes through the cometary gas. Effects on atmosphere are catastrophic - nitrogen is drained & oxygen is substantially increased. People feel more vigorous. Even plants are happier (why?).

But this atmosphere is far more combustible too. The passing of cometary nucleus triggers massive fires - the reason for apocalypse.

I'm not qualified to comment on some of the premises of the story, but it was an entertaining read.

Fact sheet.

First published: Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, December 1839 (via Wikipedia).
Rating: A
Download full text from The Wondersmith.
Related: All stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe's "A Descent Into The Maelström": A man survives by not losing his wits

I picked up this very engaging story because Arthur Clarke's "Maelstrom II" (a space age sequel to Poe's original) referred to it. I am not sure how this story is normally tagged; I have no hesitation labeling it hard-sf in the best traditions of the genre.

While looking for it, I read somewhere (don't recall the source), that it is this story that introduced the word "maelstrom" into English language; original used in this story is Nordic "Moskoe-ström". Moskoe is an island in Norway - near the site in sea where a very big & cyclical maelstom (whirlpool) rages.

Full text of the story is available for download.

Story summery.

Second half is the main story; first half just prepares the ground.

Main story is narrated by the unnamed middle one of the 3 brothers, & the sole survivor of the fishing boat that was wrecked first by a hurricane, & immediately afterwards was caught in The Maelstrom. Story is told 3 years after the event.

By the time they were caught in maelstrom, the (air) sail was gone, & younger brother too (blown with the sale). Narrator is holding on to a metal protrusion on the ship; his brother is holding on to "a small empty water-cask which had been securely lashed under the coop of the counter, and was the only thing on deck that had not been swept overboard when the gale first took us".

Fear makes his brother seek out the metal hold of narrator. Since there is not space for two to hold, brother effectively forces the narrator to leave the secure handle!

So narrator goes to hold the barrel brother was previously holding. Sense of doom gives way to wonder around. That is when he makes the important discovery:

"I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves.
...
It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a more exciting hope... I called to mind the great variety of buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having been absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoe-ström. By far the greater number of the articles were shattered in the most extraordinary way - so chafed and roughened as to have the appearance of being stuck full of splinters - but then I distinctly recollected that there were some of them which were not disfigured at all. Now I could not account for this difference except by supposing that the roughened fragments were the only ones which had been completely absorbed - that the others had entered the whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, for some reason, had descended so slowly after entering, that they did not reach the bottom before the turn of the flood came
...
I made, also, three important observations. The first was, that, as a general rule, the larger the bodies were, the more rapid their descent - the second, that, between two masses of equal extent, the one spherical, and the other of any other shape, the superiority in speed of descent was with the sphere - the third, that, between two masses of equal size, the one cylindrical, and the other of any other shape, the cylinder was absorbed the more slowly.
...
There was one startling circumstance which went a great way in enforcing these observations, and rendering me anxious to turn them to account, and this was that, at every revolution, we passed something like a barrel, or else the yard or the mast of a vessel, while many of these things, which had been on our level when I first opened my eyes upon the wonders of the whirlpool, were now high up above us, and seemed to have moved but little from their original station.
...
I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water."

Brother refused to let go of the big ship that he felt more secure in. So the narrator ended up as the sole survivor.

See also.

1. An illustration of the narrator after jumping - tied to barrel, scared, & still inside the whirlpool.
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Graham's Magazine, April 1841.
Rating: A
Related: All stories of Edgar Allan Poe.