Stylized sci-fi banner for Forgotten Futures, a curated classic science fiction book series featuring authors like Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, with a retro-futuristic logo and alien mountain landscape background.

🧭 Forgotten Futures: The Lost Futures of Classic Sci-Fi

Share this page
Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this page are paid links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.

Welcome to Forgotten Futures — a curated series of mid-century science fiction masterpieces rescued from obscurity and brought roaring back into the present.

These aren’t just old pulp stories. These are prophetic, feral, genre-bending tales that predicted everything from The Matrix to influencer culture, gig economies, genetic engineering, and the slow erosion of human agency in the face of algorithmic control.

Each volume in the Forgotten Futures series is hand-picked, restored, and repackaged by Andrew G. Gibson, author of The Time Traveller’s User Guide, with introductions, context, and layout designed for modern readers.

This is retrofuturism without the rose-tinted glasses.
This is pulp with teeth.


📚 The Books

The Marching Morons and Other Futuristic Nightmares
By C.M. Kornbluth

Welcome to a world where intelligence is extinct… except for one man.
This scathing satire from 1951 predicted the modern idiocracy with unnerving precision. The Marching Morons is paired here with other dark futures: from discarded medical tech wreaking havoc (The Little Black Bag), to an artist forced to serve the machine (With These Hands).

These aren’t comforting reads. They’re warnings.
And they’re more relevant now than ever.


Search the Sky
By Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth

One man. Many planets. One terrifying conclusion.
As Ross navigates a crumbling interstellar network of human colonies, each with its own failed utopia, he begins to understand just how badly humanity can mismanage its destiny — and how little time is left to course-correct.

This book reads like a tour of social media bubbles taken to their dystopian extremes. It’s funny, disturbing, and occasionally all too real.


Wolfbane
By Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth

What if The Matrix was written in 1957?
Wolfbane imagines a world where alien machines have reduced humanity to mindless “Components” in a perfectly controlled society — until one man breaks free and begins to see the simulation for what it is. It’s eerie, prophetic, and more than a little unhinged.

If you like your sci-fi soaked in metaphysics and wrapped in paranoia, this one will blow your mind.


Plague of Pythons and Other Mind Control Horrors
By Frederik Pohl

What if every act of madness in the world — murder, arson, riots — wasn’t caused by evil or illness, but by remote control?

In Plague of Pythons, Pohl imagines a world ruled by a mysterious elite who can hijack your body at will. If you kill your neighbour or torch your own home, it might not be you doing it. And when the protagonist discovers who’s really behind the control — the truth is worse than he ever imagined.

This is possession-by-telepresence. It’s Black Mirror before Black Mirror existed. A chilling precursor to modern fears about drones, surveillance, and the death of personal agency.


🧠 Why Forgotten Futures?

There’s a whole branch of science fiction history that never made it into the canon. Forgotten Futures is about digging it back up — restoring the raw, intelligent, high-concept stories that helped build the genre before it was safe, slick, or lucrative.

Each volume is:

• Carefully curated to reflect a theme or era
• Introduced with fresh commentary by Andrew G. Gibson
• Formatted for modern readers, with clean layout and editing
• Affordable, available on Kindle and paperback
• Ideal for collectors, educators, sci-fi fans, and cynical time travellers alike


👨‍🚀 About the Curator

Andrew G. Gibson is the author of The Time Traveller’s User Guide, The Crank, and the Incredible Science Fiction series. He lives between timelines, usually with a strong cup of tea, and firmly believes the future is best viewed through the strange lens of the past.


🛎️ More Volumes Coming Soon

This is just the beginning.
Subscribe to the Gibson on Books YouTube channel or follow @JellypieBooks on Twitter for previews, updates, and deep-dive videos exploring these lost classics.