Skip to main content

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.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more