A World of Women (SF) - J. D. Beresford ****

The MIT Press series 'Radium Age' introduces us to science fiction from the sometimes forgotten period between pioneers such as Wells and Verne and the pulp era. This was relatively easy to do with the introductory collection of short stories, Voices from the Radium Age, as the SF short story was already a fairly polished form by then, but many of the novels of the period were turgid - finding one that is both illustrative and still readable must have been something of a challenge. Although A World of Women has its tedious passages, it is nonetheless an eye-opener.

Of course, the editors must have thought they had struck gold when they saw what it featured - a pandemic (described as a plague) that starts in China then spreads relentlessly around the world. There is particular resonance early on with Covid, when John Davys Beresford gives us a debate between the economics of staying open to the world and the potential benefit of closing borders immediately. But there is one huge difference with a real pandemic - this plague is almost always deadly for men, but spares most women.

This gives Beresford the opportunity in this his second novel, dating back to 1913 (he would go on to write until the 1940s) to pull apart the stuffy attitudes of Edwardian society and to consider ways in which he thought women would do things differently, on top of the usual post-apocalyptic 'how will an industrialised society survive without any of the usual services?' question. We see many dying of starvation before a return to the land and a medieval-level agricultural existence becomes common.

There are some problems. Apart from the boring bits of exposition, despite his relative modernity on such things as sex outside marriage, Beresford is mired in the antisemitism, and class and gender prejudices, of his age. He claims that in the new society the old ideas of class don't matter, describing titled ladies working in the fields alongside farmers' widows - yet his portrayal of the Goslings, the central family in the story, (the book was originally called The Goslings) is riddled with the author's casual disdain for the intelligence of the working class, and the idea that women would find it difficult to understand anything requiring logic, not helped by a painful attempt to spell out a cockneyish accent worthy of Dick van Dyke in the family's speech.

There's also a fudged ending that is distinctly uninspiring. However, this is a genuinely interesting SF novel with what was, for the period, particularly original thinking. It's a real asset to the series.

Paperback:

Bookshop.org

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
-
See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically? Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Search This Blog