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The Mummy! by Jane C. Loudon EPUB
Published anonymously in three volumes in 1827, when the author was only 17 years old, The Mummy! is, as she describes it herself, a strange, wild novel that - "to an audience nearer her future than when Loudon imagined it" - is filled with striking similarities to our modern world, including a form of the internet. But it is also filled with brilliant flights of fancy: Her court ladies wear hair ornaments of controlled flame; surgeons and lawyers may be steam-powered automatons; people holiday by moving their entire home on rails. The visionary technological setting contrasts with a morality seemingly gone awry as it falls to the reanimated mummy Cheops to try to find a role in this corrupted society.
A lost curio of Victorian futurism waiting to be discovered, The Mummy! is as bizarre and entertaining as its premise promises - and more. Its present-day appeal to fans of steampunk and Victorian settings is undeniable.
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