Steampunk and Victorian science fiction audiobooks
Submarines, airships, time machines and lost worlds, as first imagined.
Before steampunk was a style, it was simply the future as Victorians pictured it. These nineteen scientific romances and lost-world tales by Verne, Wells, Doyle, Burroughs and others are narrated in full, with the text on screen.
All 20
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The War of the Worlds
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The Time Machine
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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
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The Island of Doctor Moreau
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A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
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A Princess of Mars
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King Solomon's Mines
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The Mysterious Island
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The Coming Race
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The Lost World
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From the Earth to the Moon; and, Round the Moon
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The Sleeper Awakes: A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes
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The Land That Time Forgot
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Five Weeks in a Balloon
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The Poison Belt
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Robur the Conqueror
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Edison's Conquest of Mars
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At the Earth's Core
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The First Men in the Moon
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When the Sleeper Wakes
About this list
The word steampunk was coined in the 1980s for modern stories set in an imagined age of brass and steam. The books on this list are where that look and mood came from. They were written between 1863 and 1918 by people who saw railways, telegraphs and electric light arrive in their own lifetimes and wondered what would come next. Jules Verne supplies the hardware: a balloon over Africa, a giant cannon aimed at the moon, Captain Nemo's electric submarine, and Robur's flying machine, which he uses to humble a club of balloon enthusiasts.
H. G. Wells called his own books scientific romances, and they are darker. A gentleman inventor tests a time machine, Martians land in Surrey, two Englishmen reach the moon by an antigravity metal, and a shipwrecked man finds an island where a banished surgeon is at work. Garrett P. Serviss answered Wells within months with Edison's Conquest of Mars, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton imagined a race living beneath the earth and powered by a force called vril.
The second strand is the lost world. Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and Doyle's The Lost World send expeditions to places no map shows, and Doyle brings Professor Challenger back for The Poison Belt. Edgar Rice Burroughs pushes further, to Mars, to a jungle world inside the hollow earth, and to an island where evolution took another route.
Good to know
What books inspired steampunk?
The Victorian scientific romances of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells are the main source, especially Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Robur the Conqueror and The Time Machine. Lost-world tales by Haggard and Doyle added the expedition spirit.
Where should I start with Victorian science fiction?
The Time Machine is short and complete in one sitting. Follow it with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for the classic Verne experience, then The Lost World for a lighter, funnier expedition.
Is The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle?
Yes. Doyle published The Lost World in 1912, sending the irritable Professor Challenger to a South American plateau. The Poison Belt, a shorter sequel, is also on this list.
Can I listen for free?
The first chapter of every book plays free with no account. A free account adds the opening chapters of every book, plus one whole book of your choice from a shelf of five classics.
