Voices from the Radium Age (SF) - Joshua Glenn (Ed.) ****

I was a bit suspicious of this collection of science fiction(ish) stories from between 1905 and 1931, mostly because of the way it is framed by the series editor, Joshua Glenn. The implication is that this is proto-science fiction bridging the scientific romances of the end of the nineteenth century with the so-called golden age of SF from the 30s to the 50s. However, this seems extremely artificial to me. The likes of Wells and Verne were, without doubt, writing science fiction. Denying this because the label hadn't been invented yet is like claiming there weren't any scientists before 1834, when the word was coined.

However, that's just a distraction, because there are some remarkable stories here that are well worth encountering. Inevitably they tend to have a certain flabby wordiness, typical of the period, but that doesn't prevent them from being interesting, all the more so because they had less of an existing genre history to build on.

In a couple of them, I have to commend Glenn and MIT Press from not succumbing to the urge to cancel anything offensive. Jack London's The Red One is painfully racist and at first seems more a horror story than SF, but incorporates a genuinely interesting encounter with alien technology. Meanwhile, though W. E. B. Du Bois' The Comet features racism from some characters, it does so to underline that the concept of race is purely cultural. It might seem that its theme of an apocalyptic occurrence when the Earth passed through a poisonous comet tail is far fetched, but reflects a real-life panic in 1910.

One of the best-known stories in the collection is Neil R. Jones' The Jameson Satellite. Although Jones clearly hasn't got a clue about how orbits work, his idea of preserving a corpse in orbit seems to have partially inspired the cryonic movement - though few imagine waiting as long as the protagonist does to be revived. (Again, Jones' ideas of what will happen to the solar system on what timescales are way off even based on the science of the time.)

The biggest surprise, though, and for me by far the best bit of pure science fiction in the book was E. M. Forster's (yes, that E. M. Forster) The Machine Stops from 1909. The future world that Forster dreamed up would surely go on to inspire many dystopias - but also has quite a few unintentional echoes of aspects of the modern world from social media to music streaming.

The remaining two stories were disappointing. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Sultana's Dream was pure fantasy and a poor fit for the collection. There was slightly more of an SF feel to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Horror of the Heights, particularly in his description of future aircraft, bearing in mind the story was written just 10 years after the first powered flight, but as the name suggests, this was a far better fit to the horror genre, and had none of the light readability of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.

Even so, to get so many hits was remarkable - and I look forward to future additions 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