The Scientific Club

Ray Cummings' Scientific Club sequence opens with 'The Girl in the Golden Atom' (1919, expanded into a fixup novel in 1922-23), in which a chemist takes a size-diminishing drug and shrinks into a civilization living inside a gold ring. Framed as tales told among a club of gentleman scientists, the sequence is a loose one: later entries such as The Man Who Mastered Time and the stories gathered in Tales of the Scientific Crime Club aren't tight continuations so much as variations on Cummings' recurring idea of a drug that opens onto whole hidden worlds at other scales.