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
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more