Skip to main content

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question.  Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

Vector - Robyn Arianrhod ****

This is a remarkable book for the right audience (more on that in a moment), but one that's hard to classify. It's part history of science/maths, part popular maths and even has a smidgen of textbook about it, as it has more full-on mathematical content that a typical title for the general public usually has. What Robyn Arianrhod does in painstaking detail is to record the development of the concept of vectors, vector calculus and their big cousin tensors. These are mathematical tools that would become crucial for physics, not to mention more recently, for example, in the more exotic aspects of computing. Let's get the audience thing out of the way. Early on in the book we get a sentence beginning ‘You likely first learned integral calculus by…’ The assumption is very much that the reader already knows the basics of maths at least to A-level (level to start an undergraduate degree in a 'hard' science or maths) and has no problem with practical use of calculus. Altho

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on