Frank Reade, Jr. And His Engine of the Clouds

Frank Reade, Jr. And His Engine of the Clouds is one of Luis Senarens’s many Frank Reade Library dime novels, working in the proto science fiction adventure mode that established many of the conventions later science fiction would develop. The engine of the clouds points to a flying or atmospheric vehicle of some kind, with the various airship and flying machine inventions that Frank Reade Jr. built across multiple stories giving Senarens room to deliver the kind of aerial adventures that the dime novel tradition rewarded.

The Frank Reade stories typically follow a young American inventor and his crew of friends and engineers as they build a remarkable new machine and use it to explore some remote and dangerous corner of the world. For scholars of early American popular literature, of the prehistory of science fiction, or of the dime novel as a publishing phenomenon, Senarens’s work is essential. Many of his stories are now in the public domain.