Aurore Lescure, the first woman astronaut, who starred in The Xenobiotic Invasion, returns in this ground-breaking novel about the first successful interplanetary flight to the planetoid Eros. There, the intrepid explorers discover that evolution on Eros has taken a different turn than on Earth, producing a species of intelligent dinosaurs... The notion of a Japanese-financed rocket piloted by a French female astronaut was a radical one in 1932, when this daring and original novel was written. With The Castaways of Eros, Théo Varlet hoped to promote the potential of rocket technology to launch a "Space Age" of interplanetary colonization. Sadly, the advent of WWII and his untimely death in 1938 put an end to that dream, leaving only this remarkable roman scientifique as a witness to a future that never was.

Shortly after the end of World War I, the fall of an asteroid in the Atlantic causes a tidal wave and gives birth to a new island. An expedition sent by the French government discovers that it is made of iron... and gold! The exploitation of the new island could upset the world's economic order and start a new World War, as forces from all across the globe converge upon the "Golden Rock." Penned in 1927 before the Wall Street crash of 1929 by the great Théo Varlet (The Martian Epic, The Xenobiotic Invasion, Timeslip Troopers), The Golden Rock is both a homage to Jules Verne and a novel with its finger firmly on the pulse of the real political issues and concerns of the 1930s, which it addresses with admirable verve and perspicacity. This edition also includes three more genre stories by Varlet.

Aurore Lescure, the first woman astronaut to have gone into space, returns to Earth with deadly alien spores which feed on electricity and threatens to utterly destroy our civilization. Theo Varlet's 1930 novel shows the influence of J.-H. Rosny Aîné's classic disaster story The Mysterious Force (1913) and Henri Allorge's award-winning The Great Cataclysm (1922), both available from Black Coat Press. It is an exhilarating thriller which extrapolates ideas about dangerous alien lifeforms with considerable verve and polish, and foreshadows many similar-themed novels of the 1950s.