Note that the Fantastic Books are not of necessity jocose books or ribald books, nor even extravagant books. If I had meant to write about extravagant books, _quâ_ extravagant, you may be certain I should have chosen that word. Rabelais is extravagant and so is Sterne, but not on account of their extravagance are they fantastic. The note of the Fantastic Book is an easy escape from the world. It is not imagination, though imagination is a necessary spring to it: it is that faculty by which the mind travels, as it reads, whether through space or through time or through _quality_. A book is a Fantastic Book, though time and space be commonplace enough, though the time be to-day and the place Camberwell, if only the mind perpetually travels, seeing one after another unexpected things in the consequence of human action or in the juxtaposition of emotions. There is a category of Fantastic Books most delightful, and never to my thinking overdone, which deals with journeys to worlds beyond the earth. I confess that I care nothing whether they are well written or ill written; so long as they are written in any language that I can understand I will read them; and to day as I write I have before me a notable collection of such, every one of which I have read over and over again. I remember one called the _Anglo-Saxon Conquest of the Solar System_ or words to that effect; another of a noble kind, called _Thuka of the Moon_. I only mention the two together by way of contrast; and I remember one in which somebody or other went to Mars and went mad, but I forget the title. Be they as well written as the _First Men in the Moon_, which is or will be a classic, or as ill written as a book which I may not mention because there is a law forbidding any one to tell unpleasant truths, so long as they concern voyages to the Planets they are worth reading. Then, also, there is the future. The _Time Machine_ is, perhaps, the chief of them; but writers who travel into the future, good or bad, are all delightful.