Before Superman (SF) - Joshua Glenn (ed.) ***

This is the latest in MIT Press's Radium Age series, which aims to fill in the largely ignored proto-SF work that was produced between the end of the nineteenth century and the flourishing of science fiction of the 1930s and 40s. These have ranged from the dire Theodore Savage to the interesting opening book of the series Voices from the Radium Age.

The idea of this volume is to give us stories with characters who are more than human, with distinctly mixed results. A lot of what we get are actually extracts from novels (or in one case a George Bernard Shaw play), which makes the useful as illustrations, but not particularly engaging as stories in their own right.

A starting point would be to point out that most 'superhuman' stories are more fantasy than science fiction. The same applies to superhero comics and films of today. With the exception of Batman and Iron Man, the vast majority of superheroes have abilities that are nothing more than magic powers wearing scientific fancy dress (the same applies to Star Wars, of course). In his introduction, Joshua Glenn gives us several reasons for the rise and popularity of this kind of story, inevitably going into deep possibilities like being responses to Dawinian evolution or being inspired by Nietzsche. But for me it seems more likely these are simply children's fantasies of being big and powerful writ large.

A lot of writing of this period is turgid - in the case of some of these, notably the magnificently tedious Hannibal Lepsius by M. P. Shiel from 1909, not having any plot development. This is also the case amongst others with the extract from Shaw's 1921 play Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman: A.D. 3000, extracted as Zoo. 

Others are moderately readable. We get, for instance, Hugo Gernsback's 1912 Ralph 124C 41+, a story often cited in the SF literature, which I'd never actually read. Admittedly the plot is essentially 'Damsel in distress; scientist waves magic wand (sorry, engages ridiculously unlikely technology) and rescues her.' But at least something happens. Then there's Francis Stevens' 1904 The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar, where an accident with a new element (groan) gives the eponymous Dunbar super strength. Also reasonably readable, though already featured in the series in The Heads of Cerberus. One of the best is Glenn's own translation from the French of the closing chapter of Alfred Jerry's 1902 The Supermale - it's perhaps because the translation is modern that the style is more readable (though the premise is somewhat painful).

We also get a couple of pieces from better remembered authors H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs - both very pulpy producers of fiction that has dated fairly badly, but at least authors with some concept of storytelling. It's not that stories from this period have to be badly written by modern standards. The Sherlock Holmes stories still hold up wonderfully, and much of H. G. Wells' writing is very readable, but it does seem that one of the reasons this is a largely forgotten period is that much of the writing was painfully slow for the modern reader.

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