Broadview Gift Packages contain thematically linked editions that are perfect for gift-giving—or for stocking your own library. Broadview staff have drawn together compelling combinations of some of our all-time favourites—and we’ve also included some works that we hope will become treasured new discoveries. They are delivered wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine: an elegant gift for anyone who loves books.
This gift package includes stories of other worlds: a selection of beautiful and contextually-rich Broadview Editions that capture the imagination.
The package includes four Broadview Editions:
Nicholas Ruddick’s edition of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine has been widely praised by critics and readers alike. Wells was interested in the implications of evolutionary theory on the future of human beings at the biological, sociological, and cultural levels, and The Time Machine, short and readable, draws on many of the social and scientific debates of the time.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s provocative utopian novel Herland, first published in 1915, tells its story through the observations of three male explorers who discover a land inhabited solely by women; the women reproduce through parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). Initially skeptical, the explorers come to realize that Herland has evolved into an ideal, cooperative, matriarchal society—fertile, peaceful, and clean—by selectively reproducing the women’s best attributes. As the explorers study Herland culture, they also rethink their own.
The Coming Race is the crowning achievement of the genre of hollow earth fiction, in which a hero makes a perilous journey underground and discovers a superior race. The customs and political systems of these “aliens from inner space” are researched and contrasted with the deficient practices of old-fashioned, muddling, imperfect humanity. The subterranean race in this novel, the Vril-ya, are seemingly angelic creatures whose amazing powers come from their harnessing of a force called Vril. Bulwer’s novel is unequaled for the depth of its intellectual explorations—inquiries into an astonishing range of social, political, scientific, religious, linguistic, and sexual issues that are enabled by the hollow earth plot.
In A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, four British gentlemen take turns reading a manuscript that they find inside a copper cylinder discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The manuscript recounts Adam More’s adventures after being lost at sea during an Antarctic voyage in 1844 and his life with the Kosekin, a lost civilization living at the South Pole. The values of the Kosekin are opposed to the civilized norm—they love death, abjection, and poverty. Their society may be well suited to their particular evolution, but it is profoundly disconcerting to the narrator, and it is radically contentious to the Victorian gentlemen who read and debate More’s account.
Please note that additional discounts and/or Broadview coupon codes may not be applied to package orders.
