Buck Rogers

A man sleeps through five centuries and wakes to find the sky belongs to someone else. Anthony "Buck" Rogers, a veteran of the Great War surveying a played-out Pennsylvania mine, breathes a pocket of strange gas, and when he opens his eyes it is the 25th century: America broken and forested over, its scattered people hiding from the airships of a conquering empire. He straps on a rocket pistol and a leaping-belt and goes to work. This is the rocket-age adventure that taught the century how to picture the future, first told in Philip Francis Nowlan's 1928 Amazing Stories tale before the name became newspaper shorthand for tomorrow itself. The library runs in two great movements. First the source: Nowlan's origin, "Armageddon 2419 A.D." and its companion "The Airlords of Han," where Buck falls in with the Wyoming gangs, meets the redoubtable Wilma Deering, and joins a continent's uprising. Then the modern build-out — TSR's XXVc "25th Century" shared world of the late 1980s and '90s, which lifts the frontier off Earth and flings it across the whole solar system: the RAM cartel ruling from Mars, the NEO resistance, engineered "gennies." Many hands built it — M. S. Murdock (The Martian Wars), Richard A. Lupoff, the Inner Planets Trilogy, Invaders of Charon — alongside later revival novels and children's adaptations. The texture is inertron and disintegrators, brisk pulp optimism, an ordinary man improvising against tyranny. Its earliest pages carry a dated "yellow peril" streak worth knowing about going in. Begin at the beginning: Nowlan's "Armageddon 2419 A.D." For the star-spanning continuity, start with Murdock's opening XXVc novel.