A dollmaker cleverly schemes to pass his most beautiful doll off as a real girl, but he is outwitted by the townspeople he tries to deceive.

This book presents the reader with some of the earliest classic SF short stories - all of them published between 1858 and 1934, featuring both well-known and long-forgotten writers - dealing for the first time with topics to which science had (some) answers only at much later stages. This includes aspects of alien life forms, transmogrification, pandemics, life on Mars, android robots, big data, matter transmission and impact events to name but a...