Two early science fiction stories by the late Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson have been discovered in Stockholm.

The best-selling author sent the short stories to the Swedish science fiction magazine Jules Verne when he was 17, hoping to have them published, but the magazine rejected them.

The Swedish National Library received the stories, titled The Crystal Balls and The Flies, as part of a private donation of the magazine's archives in 2007.

Mr Larsson never had time to enjoy the success of his Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. He died in 2004 of a heart attack aged 50, a year before the first novel in the series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, was published.

In the letter to the Jules Verne magazine, Mr Larsson described himself as "a 17-year-old guy from Umea with dreams of becoming an author and journalist". He called the science fiction stories his "first tentative efforts" at writing.

The author's heirs will decide whether to publish the stories.

Mr Larsson had originally planned to compose 10 books in the Millennium series and had written about half of a fourth book before he died. That work has not been published because of a legal battle over Mr Larsson's estate between his brother and father and Mr Larsson's partner Eva Gabrielsson.