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Voices from the Radium Age
A collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth century by authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle to W. E. B. Du Bois.
This collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth century features work by the famous (Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes), the no-longer famous ("weird fiction" pioneer William Hope Hodgson), and the should-be-more famous (Bengali feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain). It offers stories by writers known for concerns other than science fiction (W. E. B. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk) and by writers known only for pulp science fiction (the prolific Neil R. Jones). These stories represent what volume and series editor Joshua Glenn has dubbed "the Radium Age"--the period when science fiction as we know it emerged as a genre. The collection shows that nascent science fiction from this era was prescient, provocative, and well written.
Readers will discover, among other delights, a feminist utopia predating Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland by a decade in Hossain's story, "Sultana's Dream"; a world in which the human population has retreated underground, in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops"; an early entry in the Afrofuturist subgenre in Du Bois's last-man-on-Earth tale, "The Comet"; and the first appearance of Jones's cryopreserved Professor Jameson, who despairs at Earth's wreckage but perseveres--in a metal body--to appear in thirty-odd more stories.
Contents:
Sultana's Dream (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
The Voice in the Night (1907) by William Hope Hodgson
The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster
The Horror of the Heights (1913) by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Red One (1918) by Jack London
The Comet (1920) by W. E. B. Du Bois
The Jameson Satellite (1931) by Neil R. Jones
This collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth century features work by the famous (Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes), the no-longer famous ("weird fiction" pioneer William Hope Hodgson), and the should-be-more famous (Bengali feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain). It offers stories by writers known for concerns other than science fiction (W. E. B. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk) and by writers known only for pulp science fiction (the prolific Neil R. Jones). These stories represent what volume and series editor Joshua Glenn has dubbed "the Radium Age"--the period when science fiction as we know it emerged as a genre. The collection shows that nascent science fiction from this era was prescient, provocative, and well written.
Readers will discover, among other delights, a feminist utopia predating Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland by a decade in Hossain's story, "Sultana's Dream"; a world in which the human population has retreated underground, in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops"; an early entry in the Afrofuturist subgenre in Du Bois's last-man-on-Earth tale, "The Comet"; and the first appearance of Jones's cryopreserved Professor Jameson, who despairs at Earth's wreckage but perseveres--in a metal body--to appear in thirty-odd more stories.
Contents:
Sultana's Dream (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
The Voice in the Night (1907) by William Hope Hodgson
The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster
The Horror of the Heights (1913) by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Red One (1918) by Jack London
The Comet (1920) by W. E. B. Du Bois
The Jameson Satellite (1931) by Neil R. Jones
224 pages, Paperback
First published March 8, 2022
18 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
March 8, 2022
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.
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.
March 27, 2022
A collection of early 20th century science fiction (1905-1930) which I really enjoyed. The Machine Stops by EM Forster is a favourite of mine but the other 6 in the collection I had not read before. The themes range from a feminist utopia, Sultana's Dream (by a Bengali woman in 1905!); a shipwrecked couple suffering from a weird disease, The Voice in the Night; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Horror of the Heights is about upper atmosphere air travel! The final two stories are excellent. The Comet by W.E.B. Du Bois explores race in a post apocalypse world where there appears to be only two survivors, a working class black man and a young rich white woman. The Jameson Satellite by Neil R. Jones is a far future story when immortal aliens discover a dead earth and a satellite coffin with the remains of a man in it. The only lowlight for me was The Red One by Jack London . I just found the overt ugly racism made it impossible for me to engage in the story of an alien object worshipped by Solomon Islanders.
July 5, 2024
Anyone who has ever followed my reviews has likely come across the term "Radium Age" when referring to works of science fiction. Well, here we have a story collection edited by the man who coined the phrase.
When I was a kid, most of the science fiction I read was from the "Golden Age" of the 40s and 50s or the "Scientific Romance" period of the mid to late 1800s. In school, if we were to read science fiction, it was often the more bizarre and highbrow stuff from the "New Wave" era of the 60s and 70s. When I was a young adult, my friends were all getting into the cyberpunk era of science fiction or the so-called "Diamond Age" of space opera. But by that point, I was curious what happened to science fiction during early decades of the 20th Century. Why don't we know much about that period? Why don't we even have a name for it? Does that mean science fiction didn't exist during that time? I started looking into it, and found a wealth of new books, and some familiar ones, that came out during this under-appreciated period. I became a Radium Age science fiction, fantasy, and horror fanatic by my mid-twenties. But at the time, there was no name for this literary epoch.
Joshua Glenn had also noticed this gap in contemporary discussion of sci-fi history as well, and set out to raise public consciousness of these almost forgotten works. I started following his blog about ten years ago, and buying his paperback publications of some of these books that hadn't been in print for half a century. And he purposefully (and appropriately) labeled this era the "Radium Age" in order to have a common reference to this period in fan vernacular.
Now his reprints are available on e-book, and so the curious reader no longer has to plunder outdated sci-fi reference books and try to find lost titles archived on Project Gutenberg or snag expensive first editions via online stores--or at least, not as much.
So Joshua Glenn is the science fiction equivalent to Will Erickson and Grady Hendrix, who brought popularity back to another of my favorite periods of genre fiction, horror from the 70s and 80s.
This is his first collection of shorter stories compiled from periodicals and pulp mags from the 1900s to the 1930s. These entries are curated with care to be diverse in respect to ethnic and cultural approaches as well as in ideas, while still being all highly representative of the era. And there are some real greats.
Each I've reviewed separately on Goodreads, so if you want more information, check out the profiles for these stories.
1) Sultana's Dream (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: A Muslim woman wakes up in a country in the future where men are treated with the same disrespect as women from her time in history. Though not the best written of the collection, it is an essential milestone in feminist literature. 4/5
2) The Voice in the Night (1907) by William Hope Hodgson: A short story by one of my favorite masters of weird fiction which inspired the film "Matango," which will surely make your skin crawl. 5/5
3) The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster: Excellent and complex dystopian novella that deserves attention in today's society, in my opinion. 5/5
4) The Horror of the Heights (1913) by Arthur Conan Doyle: A quick little weird fiction monster thriller with lots of tentacle action set in the largely neglected frontier of our upper atmosphere by the man who brought us Sherlock Holmes. 3/5
5) The Red One (1918) by Jack London: Disturbing cosmic horror at its finest, but also highly important to remember for its colonial racist attitudes. 4/5
6) The Comet (1920) by W. E. B. Du Bois: A highly influential and important work of civil rights, and a thought-provoking plea for a colorblind society all wrapped in a succinct and brilliant apocalyptic story. 5/5
7) The Jameson Satellite (1931) by Neil R. Jones: The strangest tale of the bunch, a group of cyborgs on an intergalactic exploration discover a cryogenically frozen human 40 million years in the future. 4/5
Together with Joshua Glenn's thoughtful scholarship which introduces these stories, you have one hell of a nice collection here that is worthy of your time. Your mileage may vary with these different offerings depending on your taste, but one thing I can promise is that you'll certainly join me in appreciation for this era of speculative fiction, and I hope you will continue to explore more awe-inspiring tales from the great Radium Age!
TOTAL SCORE: 4.5, rounded to a full 5 fanboy genre fiction bloggers out of 5
When I was a kid, most of the science fiction I read was from the "Golden Age" of the 40s and 50s or the "Scientific Romance" period of the mid to late 1800s. In school, if we were to read science fiction, it was often the more bizarre and highbrow stuff from the "New Wave" era of the 60s and 70s. When I was a young adult, my friends were all getting into the cyberpunk era of science fiction or the so-called "Diamond Age" of space opera. But by that point, I was curious what happened to science fiction during early decades of the 20th Century. Why don't we know much about that period? Why don't we even have a name for it? Does that mean science fiction didn't exist during that time? I started looking into it, and found a wealth of new books, and some familiar ones, that came out during this under-appreciated period. I became a Radium Age science fiction, fantasy, and horror fanatic by my mid-twenties. But at the time, there was no name for this literary epoch.
Joshua Glenn had also noticed this gap in contemporary discussion of sci-fi history as well, and set out to raise public consciousness of these almost forgotten works. I started following his blog about ten years ago, and buying his paperback publications of some of these books that hadn't been in print for half a century. And he purposefully (and appropriately) labeled this era the "Radium Age" in order to have a common reference to this period in fan vernacular.
Now his reprints are available on e-book, and so the curious reader no longer has to plunder outdated sci-fi reference books and try to find lost titles archived on Project Gutenberg or snag expensive first editions via online stores--or at least, not as much.
So Joshua Glenn is the science fiction equivalent to Will Erickson and Grady Hendrix, who brought popularity back to another of my favorite periods of genre fiction, horror from the 70s and 80s.
This is his first collection of shorter stories compiled from periodicals and pulp mags from the 1900s to the 1930s. These entries are curated with care to be diverse in respect to ethnic and cultural approaches as well as in ideas, while still being all highly representative of the era. And there are some real greats.
Each I've reviewed separately on Goodreads, so if you want more information, check out the profiles for these stories.
1) Sultana's Dream (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: A Muslim woman wakes up in a country in the future where men are treated with the same disrespect as women from her time in history. Though not the best written of the collection, it is an essential milestone in feminist literature. 4/5
2) The Voice in the Night (1907) by William Hope Hodgson: A short story by one of my favorite masters of weird fiction which inspired the film "Matango," which will surely make your skin crawl. 5/5
3) The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster: Excellent and complex dystopian novella that deserves attention in today's society, in my opinion. 5/5
4) The Horror of the Heights (1913) by Arthur Conan Doyle: A quick little weird fiction monster thriller with lots of tentacle action set in the largely neglected frontier of our upper atmosphere by the man who brought us Sherlock Holmes. 3/5
5) The Red One (1918) by Jack London: Disturbing cosmic horror at its finest, but also highly important to remember for its colonial racist attitudes. 4/5
6) The Comet (1920) by W. E. B. Du Bois: A highly influential and important work of civil rights, and a thought-provoking plea for a colorblind society all wrapped in a succinct and brilliant apocalyptic story. 5/5
7) The Jameson Satellite (1931) by Neil R. Jones: The strangest tale of the bunch, a group of cyborgs on an intergalactic exploration discover a cryogenically frozen human 40 million years in the future. 4/5
Together with Joshua Glenn's thoughtful scholarship which introduces these stories, you have one hell of a nice collection here that is worthy of your time. Your mileage may vary with these different offerings depending on your taste, but one thing I can promise is that you'll certainly join me in appreciation for this era of speculative fiction, and I hope you will continue to explore more awe-inspiring tales from the great Radium Age!
TOTAL SCORE: 4.5, rounded to a full 5 fanboy genre fiction bloggers out of 5
December 15, 2021
Before I started reading this, I was expecting a collection of mostly scholarly interest: a look at proto-sf short stories, mostly literary work which weren’t really SFF as we know it e.g. during the Golden Age, but with some light speculative elements.
Obviously I’d heard of The Machine Stops before, but many of the other tales were new to me. Some of them were very surprising works indeed. It’s a cool look at how diverse the early speculative scene was already, and I enjoyed most of them more than I was expecting.
I would recommend this anthology to all fans of proto-sf.
SULTANA’S DREAM (4/5)
An early feminist piece of light SF. Nothing particularly special, although it’s interesting as a female utopia. Kind of insane that this was written in a time when most women in this country had no access to education. Some parts of its message (people of any sex are equal) are still “progressive” in many areas… The longer I think about it, the more impressive it becomes, despite being rather unimpressed on my first reading.
THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT (3.5/5)
This is a fun little fungal monster story. It’s a clear precursor to many current-day stories, though this one never feels like real “horror”- it’s more of a travelogue-esque description of an encounter.
THE MACHINE STOPS (4/5)
Definitely a highlight of proto-SF. Not only in how it predicted technologies, but especially in how it anticipated some major problems of our current and near-future age, such as our addiction to and overreliance on technology. It’s surprisingly readable, too, a visionary work, only making me wish Forster had written a proper dystopia-themed novel. He had the right ideas, that’s for sure.
THE HORROR OF THE HEIGHTS (3.5/5)
The concept of this short story is kind of ridiculous yet strangely fun. It’s kind of like the Zones of Thought/Fermi Paradox but for air travel: some mysterious monster in “air jungles” prevents people from going over 30,000ft in the air. You get the gist of the story fairly quickly, but it’s a cool (if super dated) idea for its time.
THE RED ONE (3.5/5)
What an interesting tale of an alien message lost in the wilderness! Sure, much of this story feels a bit yikes now (sexism, racial stereotypes, classic “primitives” and “civilized” scientists), but it’s the type of idea I still like to read today.
THE COMET (3/5)
Don’t read this short story for its sci-fi aspect, because that’s not the focus here. It’s all background, some disaster scenario which creates the situation in which a person of color rescues a white woman in the 1920s, and the shock it causes. Obvious themes of racial and social justice, this story is a kind of proto-afrofuturist work, lacking in depth maybe, but probably a great story at the time.
THE JAMESON SATELLITE (4/5)
What a joy! It’s clear how influential this story was. You’ve got cryopreservation, cyborgs, dying earth, deep time… all in one single short story from the 1930s. Reads like the kind of stuff Olaf Stapledon wrote around the same time but actually fun to read. It’s a great initial vision of the sad death of our world. This one definitely felt Golden Age.
Average rating per story: 3.65, rounded up to 4.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC for this book in exchange for an honest review.
Obviously I’d heard of The Machine Stops before, but many of the other tales were new to me. Some of them were very surprising works indeed. It’s a cool look at how diverse the early speculative scene was already, and I enjoyed most of them more than I was expecting.
I would recommend this anthology to all fans of proto-sf.
SULTANA’S DREAM (4/5)
An early feminist piece of light SF. Nothing particularly special, although it’s interesting as a female utopia. Kind of insane that this was written in a time when most women in this country had no access to education. Some parts of its message (people of any sex are equal) are still “progressive” in many areas… The longer I think about it, the more impressive it becomes, despite being rather unimpressed on my first reading.
THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT (3.5/5)
This is a fun little fungal monster story. It’s a clear precursor to many current-day stories, though this one never feels like real “horror”- it’s more of a travelogue-esque description of an encounter.
THE MACHINE STOPS (4/5)
Definitely a highlight of proto-SF. Not only in how it predicted technologies, but especially in how it anticipated some major problems of our current and near-future age, such as our addiction to and overreliance on technology. It’s surprisingly readable, too, a visionary work, only making me wish Forster had written a proper dystopia-themed novel. He had the right ideas, that’s for sure.
THE HORROR OF THE HEIGHTS (3.5/5)
The concept of this short story is kind of ridiculous yet strangely fun. It’s kind of like the Zones of Thought/Fermi Paradox but for air travel: some mysterious monster in “air jungles” prevents people from going over 30,000ft in the air. You get the gist of the story fairly quickly, but it’s a cool (if super dated) idea for its time.
THE RED ONE (3.5/5)
What an interesting tale of an alien message lost in the wilderness! Sure, much of this story feels a bit yikes now (sexism, racial stereotypes, classic “primitives” and “civilized” scientists), but it’s the type of idea I still like to read today.
THE COMET (3/5)
Don’t read this short story for its sci-fi aspect, because that’s not the focus here. It’s all background, some disaster scenario which creates the situation in which a person of color rescues a white woman in the 1920s, and the shock it causes. Obvious themes of racial and social justice, this story is a kind of proto-afrofuturist work, lacking in depth maybe, but probably a great story at the time.
THE JAMESON SATELLITE (4/5)
What a joy! It’s clear how influential this story was. You’ve got cryopreservation, cyborgs, dying earth, deep time… all in one single short story from the 1930s. Reads like the kind of stuff Olaf Stapledon wrote around the same time but actually fun to read. It’s a great initial vision of the sad death of our world. This one definitely felt Golden Age.
Average rating per story: 3.65, rounded up to 4.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC for this book in exchange for an honest review.
December 29, 2024
I've been looking forward to this book for years; the thrust behind the Radium Age reprint series (both in its current MIT incarnation and its previous one) is really interesting to me, as I've always enjoyed science fiction from the time before the genre name was coined - Wells' *The Time Machine* is the book that got me into reading adult science fiction, after all - and I always want to read more of it. I even bought four of these Radium Age copies (albeit remaindered ones) at the same time because I'd like to go all in with the collection. That being said, I didn't enjoy this book as much as I expected to. I don't think this necessarily captures the best science fiction from this period (I'll just call it SF even though Gleen likes to throw about the term "proto-sf"... I wouldn't call 1818's *Frankenstein* "proto" SF, and I won't call these stories that either), but it's still an interesting trip down a historical lane that contemporary readers probably don't travel down often enough, and I do hope you'll give this reprint series a chance. At least read through my thoughts on each story to see if this may be a little more suited for you than for I...
--The collection starts with "Sultana's Dream" by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, which I've read before (in the Adam Roberts-edited *Classic Science Fiction Stories*, which collects some cool stories from the latter 1800s), and found to be disappointing. I still find it disappointing here, but I was actually able to see it in a new light. It's about a Bengali woman dreaming (literally) about a version of her country where the men were going to be beat my an invading force and the women surged up to use technology to save their day and become the dominant force. Now they've locked all the men in their homes, and now everything works perfectly. It's just... black-and-white and unengaging to me. And Gleen's introductory comment to the story admittedly upset me - he said something about Hossain's situation being comparable to contemporary American women's, which is absurd because American women are not zealously controlled in America, and it just put a bad taste in my mouth. But that also helped me realized that this story shouldn't be seen through an American lens (as both Gleen and my younger self read it), a painfully obvious sentiment but one I missed the first time I read this. When looked at as a period piece and response to Hossain's living conditions, the story actually gets sadder, more hopeful, and really not as bad as I had thought. I still don't enjoy it, per se, but I can appreciate it more. 6.5/10.
--"The Voice in the Night" by William Hope Hodgson is a bit more straightforward; it's about a couple of fishermen who come across a little boat steered by a man who refuses to have lantern light shone upon him. This mysterious man asks for provisions and tells a story of how he and his fiancé crashed on an island fraught with a - a lot happens off-screen, and having someone narrate the real story is a total early 1900s cliche, but thanks to Hodgson's clear prose and an earnesty to this concept, which was more unique at the time than it seems to be now, I think this story works relatively well, even if it's not as outwardly science fictional as you would expect one of these stories to be. Clear cut and engaging; 7.75/10.
--"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster is the focal point of this collection based upon both word count and prescience. This story looks at a future where humanity lives in isolation underground and narrows in on one perspective, that of a woman in a state all too common for her time who can't bear the thought of human contact outside of breeding purposes and spends her days plugged into a constant conversation where she lectures and remains engaged with a vast amount of people online. In contrast, her son isn't satisfied with this way of life, and wants to use airships to travel around the world and actually meet his mother. When they do meet her tells her that he ? I don't know, just like I don't know a lot of things in this story. It's about something to do with complacency in the world of technology and human nature when it comes to vast, controlling forces, and I think that the contemporary reader can still get a lot out of it. It's well-written, and there are little scenes you may recognize from things that come later; still, I'm rather apathetic towards apathetic narrators and I think I would've appreciated a bit more clearly drawn character arcs and the like here, because beyond the academic act of retrospection, I don't know how much there is to really grab hold of here - still, it's worth your time. 8/10.
--"The Horror of the Heights" pops up in most anthologies like this. It's about a man who journeys into the atmosphere to discover if there's some horror high above our heads gobbling up our sky-travelers. I tend to like Arthur Conan Doyle's prose, but I go back and worth on this story; the first time I found it drab and unengaging, the second time I was surprised that I initially spaced on all the engaging, imaginative parts, and this time I'm somewhere between. 7/10?
--A lot of people don't like "The Red One" by Jack London because the main character is a white man thrust into a tribe of "islander savages" who act like you'd expect "savages" to be written in the 1910s; it's a bit racist. Well, saying it's only a bit might be a stretch... and the story ain't great either. This white man is pretty much screwed out of meeting any of his ex-shipmates again, as he has been ever since he first heard the primordial call of the savages' "Red One" rumbling across the entire island he's stranded on. Now he gradually weakens from sickness and gets closer to death (which he hopes comes before . There's some aspect of majesty and cosmic horror involved, but it takes quite a few pages of disengaging prose (that I had to restart in order to get through) to get there, and is even then obscured by things like a shaman being obsessed with being able to cure the main character's head once he's dead; I'm not sure exactly what London was getting at with that relationship, but I don't know if I want to know. 5.5/10.
--"The Comet" by W. E. B. Du Bios explores what it would be like if a comet suspended in poisonous gas squashed out all life in London (and possibly the world) except for a black man who was fetching something in a bank basement and a young white woman, happily married, who was in an exposure room at the time of the comet's passing. They console each other once they find his family dead and then . So it's a good story that has something to say, but a tricky one to lay out sufficiently; still gets a 7.25/10 from me.
--Finally, "The Jameson Satellite" by Neil R. Jones looks at a scientist who put himself into suspended animation and launched himself into Earth's orbit only for a race of cyborgs to appear and revitalize him. These cyborgs are immortal and explore the stars looking for nothing more than knowledge and enlightenment, and after . On one hand it's the pulpiest and most overtly science fictional story in the bunch with a sense of heart and a cool, early depiction of cybernetics and suspended animation, but on the other it's kind of forgettable and not as flavorful as it looks on first glance. Still, I am glad it was included, because a collection of Radium Age stories needs one of the pulpy stories that proceeded John W. Campbell's oversight of the pulps. It was apparently the first in a line of stories about Professor Jameson, and I think I'd be up for more in the future. 7.25/10.
Overall, this anthology is a mixed bag with a few historically important tales and a few that, while not *bad*, I won't remember for the reset of my literary life. I probably would've thrown some different stories in (like "A Martian Odyssey" or one of Wells' later cuts), but this wasn't meant to be a "Best Of," but a sampling of the age. My enthusiasm for the other books in the series hasn't been cut (I think my next one will by *The Clockwork Man* by E. V. Olde), and even though I've grumbled a bit, this book isn't getting a bad rating, but a 7/10. I'm glad I read it, but I'm more excited about things to come; stay tuned for more adventures in the Radium Age, Golden Age, New Wave, and whatever other era of science fiction you prefer soon...
--The collection starts with "Sultana's Dream" by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, which I've read before (in the Adam Roberts-edited *Classic Science Fiction Stories*, which collects some cool stories from the latter 1800s), and found to be disappointing. I still find it disappointing here, but I was actually able to see it in a new light. It's about a Bengali woman dreaming (literally) about a version of her country where the men were going to be beat my an invading force and the women surged up to use technology to save their day and become the dominant force. Now they've locked all the men in their homes, and now everything works perfectly. It's just... black-and-white and unengaging to me. And Gleen's introductory comment to the story admittedly upset me - he said something about Hossain's situation being comparable to contemporary American women's, which is absurd because American women are not zealously controlled in America, and it just put a bad taste in my mouth. But that also helped me realized that this story shouldn't be seen through an American lens (as both Gleen and my younger self read it), a painfully obvious sentiment but one I missed the first time I read this. When looked at as a period piece and response to Hossain's living conditions, the story actually gets sadder, more hopeful, and really not as bad as I had thought. I still don't enjoy it, per se, but I can appreciate it more. 6.5/10.
--"The Voice in the Night" by William Hope Hodgson is a bit more straightforward; it's about a couple of fishermen who come across a little boat steered by a man who refuses to have lantern light shone upon him. This mysterious man asks for provisions and tells a story of how he and his fiancé crashed on an island fraught with a - a lot happens off-screen, and having someone narrate the real story is a total early 1900s cliche, but thanks to Hodgson's clear prose and an earnesty to this concept, which was more unique at the time than it seems to be now, I think this story works relatively well, even if it's not as outwardly science fictional as you would expect one of these stories to be. Clear cut and engaging; 7.75/10.
--"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster is the focal point of this collection based upon both word count and prescience. This story looks at a future where humanity lives in isolation underground and narrows in on one perspective, that of a woman in a state all too common for her time who can't bear the thought of human contact outside of breeding purposes and spends her days plugged into a constant conversation where she lectures and remains engaged with a vast amount of people online. In contrast, her son isn't satisfied with this way of life, and wants to use airships to travel around the world and actually meet his mother. When they do meet her tells her that he ? I don't know, just like I don't know a lot of things in this story. It's about something to do with complacency in the world of technology and human nature when it comes to vast, controlling forces, and I think that the contemporary reader can still get a lot out of it. It's well-written, and there are little scenes you may recognize from things that come later; still, I'm rather apathetic towards apathetic narrators and I think I would've appreciated a bit more clearly drawn character arcs and the like here, because beyond the academic act of retrospection, I don't know how much there is to really grab hold of here - still, it's worth your time. 8/10.
--"The Horror of the Heights" pops up in most anthologies like this. It's about a man who journeys into the atmosphere to discover if there's some horror high above our heads gobbling up our sky-travelers. I tend to like Arthur Conan Doyle's prose, but I go back and worth on this story; the first time I found it drab and unengaging, the second time I was surprised that I initially spaced on all the engaging, imaginative parts, and this time I'm somewhere between. 7/10?
--A lot of people don't like "The Red One" by Jack London because the main character is a white man thrust into a tribe of "islander savages" who act like you'd expect "savages" to be written in the 1910s; it's a bit racist. Well, saying it's only a bit might be a stretch... and the story ain't great either. This white man is pretty much screwed out of meeting any of his ex-shipmates again, as he has been ever since he first heard the primordial call of the savages' "Red One" rumbling across the entire island he's stranded on. Now he gradually weakens from sickness and gets closer to death (which he hopes comes before . There's some aspect of majesty and cosmic horror involved, but it takes quite a few pages of disengaging prose (that I had to restart in order to get through) to get there, and is even then obscured by things like a shaman being obsessed with being able to cure the main character's head once he's dead; I'm not sure exactly what London was getting at with that relationship, but I don't know if I want to know. 5.5/10.
--"The Comet" by W. E. B. Du Bios explores what it would be like if a comet suspended in poisonous gas squashed out all life in London (and possibly the world) except for a black man who was fetching something in a bank basement and a young white woman, happily married, who was in an exposure room at the time of the comet's passing. They console each other once they find his family dead and then . So it's a good story that has something to say, but a tricky one to lay out sufficiently; still gets a 7.25/10 from me.
--Finally, "The Jameson Satellite" by Neil R. Jones looks at a scientist who put himself into suspended animation and launched himself into Earth's orbit only for a race of cyborgs to appear and revitalize him. These cyborgs are immortal and explore the stars looking for nothing more than knowledge and enlightenment, and after . On one hand it's the pulpiest and most overtly science fictional story in the bunch with a sense of heart and a cool, early depiction of cybernetics and suspended animation, but on the other it's kind of forgettable and not as flavorful as it looks on first glance. Still, I am glad it was included, because a collection of Radium Age stories needs one of the pulpy stories that proceeded John W. Campbell's oversight of the pulps. It was apparently the first in a line of stories about Professor Jameson, and I think I'd be up for more in the future. 7.25/10.
Overall, this anthology is a mixed bag with a few historically important tales and a few that, while not *bad*, I won't remember for the reset of my literary life. I probably would've thrown some different stories in (like "A Martian Odyssey" or one of Wells' later cuts), but this wasn't meant to be a "Best Of," but a sampling of the age. My enthusiasm for the other books in the series hasn't been cut (I think my next one will by *The Clockwork Man* by E. V. Olde), and even though I've grumbled a bit, this book isn't getting a bad rating, but a 7/10. I'm glad I read it, but I'm more excited about things to come; stay tuned for more adventures in the Radium Age, Golden Age, New Wave, and whatever other era of science fiction you prefer soon...
June 23, 2022
I enjoyed the idea more than the execution. It was great to see examples of proto SF, and to imagine how they influenced later writers. But I only enjoyed about half the stories.
March 22, 2025
This is a collection of shorter SF fiction from what the editor calls ‘the Radium Age’: Inspired by the exactly contemporaneous career of Marie Curie, who shared a Nobel Prize for her discovery of radium in 1903, only to die of radiation-induced leukemia in 1934. This first volume contains seven pieces written between 1905 and 1931, often by famous authors.
The contents:
Sultana's Dream (1905) short story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain a classic utopia from present-day Bangladesh, the author-narrator follows a person, whom she initially sees as her friend to the future, where women created a better living, harnessing both sun energy and aerial water, shifting men to secluded places (like women where). I’ve read it before, it is naïve but definitely interesting and relevant still today. 4*
The Voice in the Night (1907) short story by William Hope Hodgson a man on a ship in Pacific at night hears a call – a man asks for help but doesn’t come near their ship and fears light. They drop him food and later he returns to tell his story 3.5*
The Machine Stops (1909) novelette by E. M. Forster another classic, this one about people turning too dependent on a machines, so that each lives their life in their room underground, communicating only remotely. 5*
The Horror of the Heights (1913) short story by Arthur Conan Doyle a collection of notes from a pilot, who on monoplane reached 30’000 feet to see life forms at that height (and to hunt them) – this is a great eye opener how many things were yet unknown in 1913, but otherwise a-ok yawn. 3*
The Red One[The Red One 1] (1918) novelette by Jack London a white man ends up somewhere among (extremely racist described) natives and while he is ill, he hears songs of the Read One, worshiped by locals . He is fine with destroying all natives to get his discovery to ‘civilization’ but he is too ill to move. 3*
The Comet (1920) short story by W. E. B. Du Bois a social essay masquerading as an SF story from the famous activist. After a comet, everyone in NY dies except a black man and a white woman. They see that they are new Adam and Eve and the color of their skin doesn’t matter… 3*
The Jameson Satellite[Professor Jameson] (1931) novelette by Neil R. Jones Jameson orders to bury him in a rocket orbiting Earth. After 40 mln years a race of eternal brains in mechanic bodies find him and re-liven his brain. 3*
The contents:
Sultana's Dream (1905) short story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain a classic utopia from present-day Bangladesh, the author-narrator follows a person, whom she initially sees as her friend to the future, where women created a better living, harnessing both sun energy and aerial water, shifting men to secluded places (like women where). I’ve read it before, it is naïve but definitely interesting and relevant still today. 4*
The Voice in the Night (1907) short story by William Hope Hodgson a man on a ship in Pacific at night hears a call – a man asks for help but doesn’t come near their ship and fears light. They drop him food and later he returns to tell his story 3.5*
The Machine Stops (1909) novelette by E. M. Forster another classic, this one about people turning too dependent on a machines, so that each lives their life in their room underground, communicating only remotely. 5*
The Horror of the Heights (1913) short story by Arthur Conan Doyle a collection of notes from a pilot, who on monoplane reached 30’000 feet to see life forms at that height (and to hunt them) – this is a great eye opener how many things were yet unknown in 1913, but otherwise a-ok yawn. 3*
The Red One[The Red One 1] (1918) novelette by Jack London a white man ends up somewhere among (extremely racist described) natives and while he is ill, he hears songs of the Read One, worshiped by locals . He is fine with destroying all natives to get his discovery to ‘civilization’ but he is too ill to move. 3*
The Comet (1920) short story by W. E. B. Du Bois a social essay masquerading as an SF story from the famous activist. After a comet, everyone in NY dies except a black man and a white woman. They see that they are new Adam and Eve and the color of their skin doesn’t matter… 3*
The Jameson Satellite[Professor Jameson] (1931) novelette by Neil R. Jones Jameson orders to bury him in a rocket orbiting Earth. After 40 mln years a race of eternal brains in mechanic bodies find him and re-liven his brain. 3*
August 22, 2023
An anthology of interesting 'proto-SF' stories from before the era known as the 'Golden Age of Science Fiction'. These stories show that some ideas about aliens, machine intelligence and the unknown are much older than they seem. However, due to their age, some stories may make modern audiences cringe at the depictions of humans at the time (as being 'lesser beings' compared to white people). My favourite stories here are by E. M. Forster and Arthur Conan Doyle, which I have read before in other anthologies, but are still cracking stories that show what SF (and horror) are capable of, even in those early times.
- "Sultana's Dream (1905)" by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: a woman dreams and is transported to a land where women rule the country and men run the kitchen. It is, of course, a utopia.
- "The Voice in the Night (1907)" by William Hope Hodgson: a sailing vessel is hailed by a lone voice which refuses to reveal himself. But he tells the sailors the story of how he ends up being marooned on an island with nothing to eat but a fungus that slowly reveals its horrors.
- "The Machine Stops (1909)" by E. M. Forster: in a future where all of humanity lives in isolated underground cells, and their every need is catered to by the Machine, one mother reluctantly makes a journey to visit her son, who tells her an incredible story of surviving a trip to the surface of the Earth. But that would not be the last of it, for he would later tell her that the Machine is stopping. And that may well spell doom for humanity.
- "The Horror of the Heights (1913)" by Arthur Conan Doyle: an airman suspects, from the mysterious deaths of fellow flyers, that there is some kind of 'jungle' in the air. What he discovers, as later found written down in a stained journal when he journeys high up in the air, would be both wonderful and horrifying.
- The Red One (1918)" by Jack London: a jungle explorer hears an extraordinary sound coming from the interior of a jungle, leading to a voyage filled with violent encounters with native tribe until he gets to the truth behind who or what is making the sound. But he may not survive to show it to the world.
- The Comet (1920)" by W. E. B. Du Bois: Earth passes through the tail of a deadly comet, and the only two survivors in the city are a lowly black bank worker and a wealthy white heiress.
- "The Jameson Satellite (1931)" by Neil R. Jones: an eccentric person arranges for his dead body to be sent into space so that it would not be consumed by earthly decay. Millions of years later, an alien race discovers his body and revives him in a body of metal. Now, he has to decide if all he craves is to follow the human race into death, or join the aliens on a voyage of discovery.
- "Sultana's Dream (1905)" by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: a woman dreams and is transported to a land where women rule the country and men run the kitchen. It is, of course, a utopia.
- "The Voice in the Night (1907)" by William Hope Hodgson: a sailing vessel is hailed by a lone voice which refuses to reveal himself. But he tells the sailors the story of how he ends up being marooned on an island with nothing to eat but a fungus that slowly reveals its horrors.
- "The Machine Stops (1909)" by E. M. Forster: in a future where all of humanity lives in isolated underground cells, and their every need is catered to by the Machine, one mother reluctantly makes a journey to visit her son, who tells her an incredible story of surviving a trip to the surface of the Earth. But that would not be the last of it, for he would later tell her that the Machine is stopping. And that may well spell doom for humanity.
- "The Horror of the Heights (1913)" by Arthur Conan Doyle: an airman suspects, from the mysterious deaths of fellow flyers, that there is some kind of 'jungle' in the air. What he discovers, as later found written down in a stained journal when he journeys high up in the air, would be both wonderful and horrifying.
- The Red One (1918)" by Jack London: a jungle explorer hears an extraordinary sound coming from the interior of a jungle, leading to a voyage filled with violent encounters with native tribe until he gets to the truth behind who or what is making the sound. But he may not survive to show it to the world.
- The Comet (1920)" by W. E. B. Du Bois: Earth passes through the tail of a deadly comet, and the only two survivors in the city are a lowly black bank worker and a wealthy white heiress.
- "The Jameson Satellite (1931)" by Neil R. Jones: an eccentric person arranges for his dead body to be sent into space so that it would not be consumed by earthly decay. Millions of years later, an alien race discovers his body and revives him in a body of metal. Now, he has to decide if all he craves is to follow the human race into death, or join the aliens on a voyage of discovery.
September 26, 2021
A collection of stories from the early 20th century - before the so-called "Golden Age" of SF, the pulp era - mostly by people who are better known for other things than writing speculative fiction; though most of them are known for writing fiction, and a couple of them were well-known SFF writers of the time who are now less familiar.
Unsurprisingly, most of these century-plus-old stories don't match contemporary taste too closely, and at least one is, by today's standards, highly offensive. That the editor included it anyway - despite acknowledging its extreme racism in the introduction - is a signal that this is, primarily, an academic publication, concerned with what actually existed in the time period rather than what the editor thinks ought (or ought not) to have existed. But the same introduction states that the collection's secondary purpose is to provide some entertainment to fans of the genre.
I have to say I didn't personally enjoy most of the stories that much, mainly because deep thinkers' views of the future in the early 20th century were pretty uniformly bleak (not without good cause) and most of the stories are at least one of apocalyptic, dystopian, or horror, three genres I usually avoid. But even while mostly not enjoying the experience of reading them, I'm able to appreciate the quality of the writing and the historical importance, and that's what I based my four-star rating on.
I'd read a couple of them before: Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Horror of the Heights" and William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night". Both of them prefigure the cosmic horror later published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales by Lovecraft and others. There were fewer and fewer unknown parts of the world by this time, but, as unknown places always have been for humanity, they were populated by imagination with terrible monsters. Hope Hodgson's remote area is the Pacific Ocean; Conan Doyle's, more imaginatively, the high atmosphere, where aeroplanes were only just becoming able to reach.
Two of the stories are by people better known as activists than fiction writers. Early feminist and education-for-women proponent Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's story "Sultana's Dream" portrays a feminist utopia similar to Charlotte Perkins Gilmour's later Herland, though seen through a specifically Bengali Muslim lens; the men are kept shut up in purdah while the women conduct business and run the country. Like many (not all) early feminist utopias, it assumes that women would do a much better job, and that crime and warfare would largely disappear if you got rid of or at least restrained the men.
W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous early-20th-century black thinker who co-founded the NAACP, is represented here by "The Comet," included in one of his books; it's a well-crafted tale that gives strong voice to the black experience of being treated as less than fully human, in the context of an apocalyptic event in which it appears that only a black man and a white woman have survived. Forced by circumstances to see him as a man, and not just a black man, the white woman comes to an epiphany, but the ending brings matters back to the status quo.
In contrast to these forward-thinking stories is "The Red One" by Jack London, which is the stunningly racist (and, almost incidentally, sexist) story I referred to above. The white naturalist/explorer protagonist falls into the hands of "savages" inhabiting Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, and discovers a crashed alien spaceship, but is unable to get out with the knowledge that the "savages" don't appreciate and that could bring great benefits to civilization. I have a suspicion amounting to certainty that if he had brought the alien science out, it would have been used in war within a very short time period, but that's by the by.
I had heard of E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," which has been widely influential on other writers, but I'd never read it before. It's a vision of a dystopian utopia in which humanity, homogenized and pampered by the Machine, has lost its courage and imagination; people live isolated from one another in small underground apartments, connected in an inadequate fashion by the Machine, a vision that has strange resonance in 2021. Forster, as a member of the educated elite, imagines something like social media, except it's more like live vlogging of short pseudo-academic lectures that people broadcast to each other. It's shallow, but not nearly so shallow (or toxic) as actual social media. And then... the story's title tells you what happens. Forster was an excellent writer, and most of it gripped me strongly and conveyed the sense of dystopian and apocalyptic terror powerfully, but he couldn't resist a bit of soapboxing at the end.
The closing story in the book is by Neil R. Jones, a prolific writer of the time who's largely forgotten today (more so than Hope Hodgson, who I'd heard of and read before). A scientist who has had his body shot into orbit around the earth after his death is picked up by aliens millions of years later, when Earth is a dead world. The aliens, whose civilization has long replaced their biological bodies with mechanical ones, does the same for him and brings him back to life, and he has to come to terms with the loss of everything he remembered and decide whether to accompany them on their exploration of the universe. There's not a whole lot of story, but there is some exploration of how such events would impact on a person, which wasn't always a strength of the pulp era that followed.
This is a varied and wide-ranging collection, despite having only a few stories in it, and it shows just how diverse the early-20th-century landscape of speculative fiction was. "Literary" writers were writing speculative fiction (as they always have and still are) to explore intellectual and emotional territory that was harder to access in other ways; activists were using the form as a way of getting people to think about a different world; and popular writers were prefiguring the pulp adventures that would dominate the mid-century.
Although most of the stories weren't particularly to my personal taste, I'm still glad I read them, because they're an important part of our history as humans and as spec-fic fans. Part of the reason that we aren't more aware of the SFF of this period is that it didn't yet have its own dedicated magazines, but often appeared in "mainstream" venues like Blue Book (Hope Hodgson), The Strand Magazine (Conan Doyle) and The Oxford and Cambridge Review (Forster). It's good that people like the editor of this collection are taking the time and effort to unearth these stories, especially the less-known ones, and make them available again.
Unsurprisingly, most of these century-plus-old stories don't match contemporary taste too closely, and at least one is, by today's standards, highly offensive. That the editor included it anyway - despite acknowledging its extreme racism in the introduction - is a signal that this is, primarily, an academic publication, concerned with what actually existed in the time period rather than what the editor thinks ought (or ought not) to have existed. But the same introduction states that the collection's secondary purpose is to provide some entertainment to fans of the genre.
I have to say I didn't personally enjoy most of the stories that much, mainly because deep thinkers' views of the future in the early 20th century were pretty uniformly bleak (not without good cause) and most of the stories are at least one of apocalyptic, dystopian, or horror, three genres I usually avoid. But even while mostly not enjoying the experience of reading them, I'm able to appreciate the quality of the writing and the historical importance, and that's what I based my four-star rating on.
I'd read a couple of them before: Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Horror of the Heights" and William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night". Both of them prefigure the cosmic horror later published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales by Lovecraft and others. There were fewer and fewer unknown parts of the world by this time, but, as unknown places always have been for humanity, they were populated by imagination with terrible monsters. Hope Hodgson's remote area is the Pacific Ocean; Conan Doyle's, more imaginatively, the high atmosphere, where aeroplanes were only just becoming able to reach.
Two of the stories are by people better known as activists than fiction writers. Early feminist and education-for-women proponent Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's story "Sultana's Dream" portrays a feminist utopia similar to Charlotte Perkins Gilmour's later Herland, though seen through a specifically Bengali Muslim lens; the men are kept shut up in purdah while the women conduct business and run the country. Like many (not all) early feminist utopias, it assumes that women would do a much better job, and that crime and warfare would largely disappear if you got rid of or at least restrained the men.
W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous early-20th-century black thinker who co-founded the NAACP, is represented here by "The Comet," included in one of his books; it's a well-crafted tale that gives strong voice to the black experience of being treated as less than fully human, in the context of an apocalyptic event in which it appears that only a black man and a white woman have survived. Forced by circumstances to see him as a man, and not just a black man, the white woman comes to an epiphany, but the ending brings matters back to the status quo.
In contrast to these forward-thinking stories is "The Red One" by Jack London, which is the stunningly racist (and, almost incidentally, sexist) story I referred to above. The white naturalist/explorer protagonist falls into the hands of "savages" inhabiting Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, and discovers a crashed alien spaceship, but is unable to get out with the knowledge that the "savages" don't appreciate and that could bring great benefits to civilization. I have a suspicion amounting to certainty that if he had brought the alien science out, it would have been used in war within a very short time period, but that's by the by.
I had heard of E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," which has been widely influential on other writers, but I'd never read it before. It's a vision of a dystopian utopia in which humanity, homogenized and pampered by the Machine, has lost its courage and imagination; people live isolated from one another in small underground apartments, connected in an inadequate fashion by the Machine, a vision that has strange resonance in 2021. Forster, as a member of the educated elite, imagines something like social media, except it's more like live vlogging of short pseudo-academic lectures that people broadcast to each other. It's shallow, but not nearly so shallow (or toxic) as actual social media. And then... the story's title tells you what happens. Forster was an excellent writer, and most of it gripped me strongly and conveyed the sense of dystopian and apocalyptic terror powerfully, but he couldn't resist a bit of soapboxing at the end.
The closing story in the book is by Neil R. Jones, a prolific writer of the time who's largely forgotten today (more so than Hope Hodgson, who I'd heard of and read before). A scientist who has had his body shot into orbit around the earth after his death is picked up by aliens millions of years later, when Earth is a dead world. The aliens, whose civilization has long replaced their biological bodies with mechanical ones, does the same for him and brings him back to life, and he has to come to terms with the loss of everything he remembered and decide whether to accompany them on their exploration of the universe. There's not a whole lot of story, but there is some exploration of how such events would impact on a person, which wasn't always a strength of the pulp era that followed.
This is a varied and wide-ranging collection, despite having only a few stories in it, and it shows just how diverse the early-20th-century landscape of speculative fiction was. "Literary" writers were writing speculative fiction (as they always have and still are) to explore intellectual and emotional territory that was harder to access in other ways; activists were using the form as a way of getting people to think about a different world; and popular writers were prefiguring the pulp adventures that would dominate the mid-century.
Although most of the stories weren't particularly to my personal taste, I'm still glad I read them, because they're an important part of our history as humans and as spec-fic fans. Part of the reason that we aren't more aware of the SFF of this period is that it didn't yet have its own dedicated magazines, but often appeared in "mainstream" venues like Blue Book (Hope Hodgson), The Strand Magazine (Conan Doyle) and The Oxford and Cambridge Review (Forster). It's good that people like the editor of this collection are taking the time and effort to unearth these stories, especially the less-known ones, and make them available again.
Read
September 6, 2025This book was awful because it made me conjure up a story idea whilst im in the midst of writing my current book which is TERRIBLE because now I have to shelve this idea I had and not let it distract me from my current project
November 5, 2021
"Voices from the Radium Age" (edited by Joshua Glenn, published by MIT Press) is a valuable and entertaining collection of seven science fiction tales originally published between 1905 and 1931. Although two of the authors, Jack London and Arthur Conan Doyle, are quite well known, the remaining short stories still felt familiar. Specifically, I have read "The Machine Stops" (1909) by E. M. Forester in several other anthologies as well, and over one hundred years after original publication it still feels fresh. I'm not sure if I should brag about it, but I have seen the movie which Glenn mentioned that was based on " The Voice in The Night" (1907). The "last person alive on the planet" theme of "The Comet" (1920) also feels comfortably familiar with an uncomfortable but important social message. As the latest published piece in this collection "The Jameson Satellite" (1931) absolutely has the feel of stories from the "Golden Age of Science Fiction". Perhaps this is not surprising, as Jameson stories continue well into this Age.
All in all, this was an informative, understandable, and entertaining collection of stories. Some stories contained a couple of words which are not in common use today, but most of them were mentioned in passing in the introduction. I find it exciting that this book is the first in an upcoming series of other science fiction stories from this era. I recommend this book for people who enjoy the perspective of reading stories from an earlier time and learning more about the foundations of modern science fiction literature.
I thank the publisher and editor for providing an electronic review copy of this collection.
All in all, this was an informative, understandable, and entertaining collection of stories. Some stories contained a couple of words which are not in common use today, but most of them were mentioned in passing in the introduction. I find it exciting that this book is the first in an upcoming series of other science fiction stories from this era. I recommend this book for people who enjoy the perspective of reading stories from an earlier time and learning more about the foundations of modern science fiction literature.
I thank the publisher and editor for providing an electronic review copy of this collection.
October 7, 2022
I stumbled across this new MIT Press line of books at a bookstore recently. They're doing a series of reprints of science fiction from the first few decades of the twentieth century, and as a fan of science fiction both old and new this was right up my alley. I've been requesting as many of the books as I can from the library and I figured why not start reading with the anthology.
Much of the goal of this series, as explained by Joshua Glenn in his introduction, is to bring more attention to the period before the Golden Age of science fiction. He wants to show that the Radium Age is just as exciting and diverse as other eras of sci-fi, and in that regard he's picked a pretty good set of stories. I did feel like I didn't quite like Glenn's series intro or his intro to the actual book, especially since the latter gave away too much about the stories. But as a selector of what to include, he's doing a good job with the series.
This book is surprisingly on the short side compared to what one might expect, though I suspect there could be subsequent volumes if the Radium Age series continues. There's seven stories, two of which I'd read before and five which were new to me. The first, Sultana's Dream, is an early feminist women's utopia from India. It's interesting to see something from a culture where I'm not too familiar with their sci-fi tradition, and I feel like I learned some new things, but the actual story is a bit too short and underdeveloped and I didn't like how it was so focused on switching the relative power of men and women rather than establishing equality. The second story, The Voice in the Night, feels like it might be more at home in a horror anthology. It feels like a prototype of Lovecraft and other cosmic horror, as it depicts a normal man encountering humans who have been infected by fungi, bringing to mind various tales of corruption and Lovecraft's fungoid monsters from Yuggoth.
The next two tales, The Machine Stops and The Horror of the Heights, are the ones I've encountered before. They're probably my favorites of the collection, especially the former. The Machine Stops depicts an eerily prescient world where humanity has built machines to do everything and take care of all our wants and needs. Almost all human communication is mediated by the machine, reminding me rather too much of the world of video calls that 2020 was for me. As the title makes clear, the drama of the story comes from how humanity deals with - or fails to deal with - the godlike machine breaking down.
The Horror of the Heights is a story I first encountered in a horror anthology, but unlike the mushroom men story, it feels suited to be here as well. Written in the 1910s, it extrapolates airplane technology while exploring the idea that there is much more in our atmosphere than we know. It reminds me of the Kenneth Oppel Airborn series, which explored a similar idea of ecosystems of the sky, but from a place of wonder rather than horror. Interestingly, this story is written by Arthur Conan Doyle, who has a second presence in this series thanks to his Professor Challenger books.
The last three stories all touch on themes that have become common touchpoints of science fiction. The Red One is another story that in some ways feels like a prototype of cosmic horror, especially since it shares the racism common in the early examples of that genre. Written by Jack London, who did a fair bit of sci-fi in addition to his more famous works, it depicts a white man stumbling into a darkest Africa full of people depicted as subhuman savages who worship an ancient alien artefact as a god. It's a sort of big dumb object story set on Earth, though beyond the strange noises the object makes when struck, no real information as to its origins or contents are ever found by the narrator. It's one of those stories where the effect the author intended is probably different from what I got out of it, and it makes me curious to think what the story would look like from the point of view of the Africans.
WEB DuBois's The Comet feels like an episode of the Twilight Zone, and also reminds me of Doyle's Professor Challenger. A black man who works in a bank is sent into a vault right when a comet's tail passes through the atmosphere, wiping out almost all life in New York City. It's Time Enough At Last but instead of a misanthrope receiving a karmic punishment, it's an exploration of race relations and how the differences between people become meaningless when the world has ended. At just 20 pages, it's nice and effective and makes a good read.
Finally The Jameson Satellite, apparently the first in a series of tales, explores cyborgs and space travel. It's an origin story for the last human survivor of Earth, a man who shot himself into space on his death in 1958, only to spend 40 million years orbiting in his coffin. He's revived by a species of Cybermen style aliens who have conquered death and yet ceased all evolution by trading their biological bodies for metal ones containing their brains. For all that Jameson at first is torn at loosing his humanity, he pretty quickly signs up for a life as an immortal space probe. Though knowing what I know about the real 50s, I'm a little concerned that a man from that era in a robot body is the last legacy of Earth. I'm left curious about the subsequent adventures of the character and how much they live up to a rather intriguing premise.
Over all, this is a neat little book with a pretty good selection of stories. There were some I liked more than others, and really my main complaint is that the whole package feels a little two short. I can't help comparing this to The Future is Female. However, I should remember that that collection covered around twice the time span as this one, and it was meant to stand alone while this is just part of a larger set of works. I guess the upside of the short length, just under 200 pages, is this serves as a nice taste of the sort of things a reader will experience in this series and allow you to determine if you want more. I for one do plan to read at least some of the novels, so in that regard I guess this has worked pretty well for me.
Much of the goal of this series, as explained by Joshua Glenn in his introduction, is to bring more attention to the period before the Golden Age of science fiction. He wants to show that the Radium Age is just as exciting and diverse as other eras of sci-fi, and in that regard he's picked a pretty good set of stories. I did feel like I didn't quite like Glenn's series intro or his intro to the actual book, especially since the latter gave away too much about the stories. But as a selector of what to include, he's doing a good job with the series.
This book is surprisingly on the short side compared to what one might expect, though I suspect there could be subsequent volumes if the Radium Age series continues. There's seven stories, two of which I'd read before and five which were new to me. The first, Sultana's Dream, is an early feminist women's utopia from India. It's interesting to see something from a culture where I'm not too familiar with their sci-fi tradition, and I feel like I learned some new things, but the actual story is a bit too short and underdeveloped and I didn't like how it was so focused on switching the relative power of men and women rather than establishing equality. The second story, The Voice in the Night, feels like it might be more at home in a horror anthology. It feels like a prototype of Lovecraft and other cosmic horror, as it depicts a normal man encountering humans who have been infected by fungi, bringing to mind various tales of corruption and Lovecraft's fungoid monsters from Yuggoth.
The next two tales, The Machine Stops and The Horror of the Heights, are the ones I've encountered before. They're probably my favorites of the collection, especially the former. The Machine Stops depicts an eerily prescient world where humanity has built machines to do everything and take care of all our wants and needs. Almost all human communication is mediated by the machine, reminding me rather too much of the world of video calls that 2020 was for me. As the title makes clear, the drama of the story comes from how humanity deals with - or fails to deal with - the godlike machine breaking down.
The Horror of the Heights is a story I first encountered in a horror anthology, but unlike the mushroom men story, it feels suited to be here as well. Written in the 1910s, it extrapolates airplane technology while exploring the idea that there is much more in our atmosphere than we know. It reminds me of the Kenneth Oppel Airborn series, which explored a similar idea of ecosystems of the sky, but from a place of wonder rather than horror. Interestingly, this story is written by Arthur Conan Doyle, who has a second presence in this series thanks to his Professor Challenger books.
The last three stories all touch on themes that have become common touchpoints of science fiction. The Red One is another story that in some ways feels like a prototype of cosmic horror, especially since it shares the racism common in the early examples of that genre. Written by Jack London, who did a fair bit of sci-fi in addition to his more famous works, it depicts a white man stumbling into a darkest Africa full of people depicted as subhuman savages who worship an ancient alien artefact as a god. It's a sort of big dumb object story set on Earth, though beyond the strange noises the object makes when struck, no real information as to its origins or contents are ever found by the narrator. It's one of those stories where the effect the author intended is probably different from what I got out of it, and it makes me curious to think what the story would look like from the point of view of the Africans.
WEB DuBois's The Comet feels like an episode of the Twilight Zone, and also reminds me of Doyle's Professor Challenger. A black man who works in a bank is sent into a vault right when a comet's tail passes through the atmosphere, wiping out almost all life in New York City. It's Time Enough At Last but instead of a misanthrope receiving a karmic punishment, it's an exploration of race relations and how the differences between people become meaningless when the world has ended. At just 20 pages, it's nice and effective and makes a good read.
Finally The Jameson Satellite, apparently the first in a series of tales, explores cyborgs and space travel. It's an origin story for the last human survivor of Earth, a man who shot himself into space on his death in 1958, only to spend 40 million years orbiting in his coffin. He's revived by a species of Cybermen style aliens who have conquered death and yet ceased all evolution by trading their biological bodies for metal ones containing their brains. For all that Jameson at first is torn at loosing his humanity, he pretty quickly signs up for a life as an immortal space probe. Though knowing what I know about the real 50s, I'm a little concerned that a man from that era in a robot body is the last legacy of Earth. I'm left curious about the subsequent adventures of the character and how much they live up to a rather intriguing premise.
Over all, this is a neat little book with a pretty good selection of stories. There were some I liked more than others, and really my main complaint is that the whole package feels a little two short. I can't help comparing this to The Future is Female. However, I should remember that that collection covered around twice the time span as this one, and it was meant to stand alone while this is just part of a larger set of works. I guess the upside of the short length, just under 200 pages, is this serves as a nice taste of the sort of things a reader will experience in this series and allow you to determine if you want more. I for one do plan to read at least some of the novels, so in that regard I guess this has worked pretty well for me.
August 13, 2024
Sultana's Dream, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, 3 🌟
" transported (in a dream, or perhaps she's been summoned into the future by a scientist looking to divert the course of history) to Ladyland, Sultana is at first nervous to venture outside. Isn't it dangerous for women out there? Her female scientist companion, however, reassures her that it's safe... because, 30 years earlier, during a war that killed off most of the city-state's menfolk, the surviving men were ordered to isolate themselves indoors. They've remained there ever since." In purdah.
How sad that it was just a dream.
The Voice in the Night, William Hope Hodgson,
4 🌟
" . . . A schooner Becalmed in an eerie Northern Pacific fog encounters a man, or what's left of one, who rows out to them from a nearby Island. He and his fiance are the survivors of a shipwreck, And the island to which they've drifted on their raft is infected with a lichenous fungus that seems to have Sinister intent."
The Machine Stops, E.M.Forster, 2 🌟
" is vashti a prisoner? By no means: she's at Liberty to leave her condo underneath sumatra, and travel the world. Like most of her contemporaries, though, she prefers not to. 20 years before Aldous HuxLey would write Brave New World, Forster gives us a dystopian Utopia in which one's every physiological, safety, esteem, and self-actualization need is met... yet one's social life has been reduced to the equivalent of snapchat, youtube, and Ted talks.'She knew several thousand people,' we learn of Lucky vashti. The author's wit is at its driest when he goes on to add, 'in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.' "
I'll take this as an allegory for the world as it is now. We have destroyed the climate and the planet is sickened, and yet we are so busy with our lives so we don't even see the darkness coming down upon us.
The Horror of the Heights, Arthur Conan Doyle, 2 🌟
Previously read in another anthology.
"... curious about why high-flying Pilots who'd penetrated the upper atmosphere have died mysteriously( decapitated, covered with slime, gibbering with fright ) he posits the existence of stratospheric 'air jungles' which telescopes cannot detect.
...
What, exactly, does he discover? Taking his monoplane up to 40,000 ft, our Aeronaut encounters... well, I'll just repeat that his experience involves tentacles. Lots of tentacles."
The Red One, Jack London, 3 🌟
"... Bassett has arrived in the Solomon Islands aboard a 'blackbirder,' a ship whose mission it is to coerce Islanders to work as slaves or poorly paid laborers in European colonies. Having landed on guadalcanal, a freak of wind allows him to hear a sound that would normally only be audible deep in the islands interior. A decade before lovecraft's Indescribable 'color out of space,' Bassett realizes that there are 'no words nor semblances in his vocabulary and experience with which to describe the totality of that sound.' foolishly, he enters the jungle."
"... the wonderful sound had pealed forth - if by peal, he had often thought since, an adequate description could be given of the enunciation of so vast a sound so melting sweet. Sweet it was, as no sound ever heard. Vast it was, of so mighty a resonance that it might have proceeded from some Brazen-throated Monster. and yet it called to him across that Leagues-wide savannah, and was like a benediction to his long-suffering, pain racked spirit."
The Comet, W.E.B. DuBois, 4 🌟
Last-man-on-earth story.
An African-American employee is chosen for the mission of going into the underground vaults of a New York bank to search old records. Meanwhile, overhead, passes near Earth a comet composed of poisonous gases.
The Jameson Satellite, Neil R. Jones, 3 🌟
" 40 million years from now, a crew hailing from the planet's Zor, whose inhabitants at some earlier time had 'built their own mechanical bodies, and by operation upon one another had removed their brains to the metal heads,' come across a satellite orbiting a lifeless earth. They revive its inhabitant, a cryopreserved professor jameson, and transfer his brain into a mechanical body. Although tempted to take the Zoromes up on their offer of 'an immortality of never-ending adventures in the vast, endless universe among the galaxy of stars and planets,' as he gazes upon what's left of his planet, Jameson finds himself disconsolate, even suicidal."
" 'why jump?' asked the machine man. 'the Dying World holds your imagination within a morbid clutch. It is all a matter of mental condition. Free your mind of this fascinating influence and come with us to visit other worlds, many of them are both beautiful and new. You will then feel a great difference.' "
" transported (in a dream, or perhaps she's been summoned into the future by a scientist looking to divert the course of history) to Ladyland, Sultana is at first nervous to venture outside. Isn't it dangerous for women out there? Her female scientist companion, however, reassures her that it's safe... because, 30 years earlier, during a war that killed off most of the city-state's menfolk, the surviving men were ordered to isolate themselves indoors. They've remained there ever since." In purdah.
How sad that it was just a dream.
The Voice in the Night, William Hope Hodgson,
4 🌟
" . . . A schooner Becalmed in an eerie Northern Pacific fog encounters a man, or what's left of one, who rows out to them from a nearby Island. He and his fiance are the survivors of a shipwreck, And the island to which they've drifted on their raft is infected with a lichenous fungus that seems to have Sinister intent."
The Machine Stops, E.M.Forster, 2 🌟
" is vashti a prisoner? By no means: she's at Liberty to leave her condo underneath sumatra, and travel the world. Like most of her contemporaries, though, she prefers not to. 20 years before Aldous HuxLey would write Brave New World, Forster gives us a dystopian Utopia in which one's every physiological, safety, esteem, and self-actualization need is met... yet one's social life has been reduced to the equivalent of snapchat, youtube, and Ted talks.'She knew several thousand people,' we learn of Lucky vashti. The author's wit is at its driest when he goes on to add, 'in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.' "
I'll take this as an allegory for the world as it is now. We have destroyed the climate and the planet is sickened, and yet we are so busy with our lives so we don't even see the darkness coming down upon us.
The Horror of the Heights, Arthur Conan Doyle, 2 🌟
Previously read in another anthology.
"... curious about why high-flying Pilots who'd penetrated the upper atmosphere have died mysteriously( decapitated, covered with slime, gibbering with fright ) he posits the existence of stratospheric 'air jungles' which telescopes cannot detect.
...
What, exactly, does he discover? Taking his monoplane up to 40,000 ft, our Aeronaut encounters... well, I'll just repeat that his experience involves tentacles. Lots of tentacles."
The Red One, Jack London, 3 🌟
"... Bassett has arrived in the Solomon Islands aboard a 'blackbirder,' a ship whose mission it is to coerce Islanders to work as slaves or poorly paid laborers in European colonies. Having landed on guadalcanal, a freak of wind allows him to hear a sound that would normally only be audible deep in the islands interior. A decade before lovecraft's Indescribable 'color out of space,' Bassett realizes that there are 'no words nor semblances in his vocabulary and experience with which to describe the totality of that sound.' foolishly, he enters the jungle."
"... the wonderful sound had pealed forth - if by peal, he had often thought since, an adequate description could be given of the enunciation of so vast a sound so melting sweet. Sweet it was, as no sound ever heard. Vast it was, of so mighty a resonance that it might have proceeded from some Brazen-throated Monster. and yet it called to him across that Leagues-wide savannah, and was like a benediction to his long-suffering, pain racked spirit."
The Comet, W.E.B. DuBois, 4 🌟
Last-man-on-earth story.
An African-American employee is chosen for the mission of going into the underground vaults of a New York bank to search old records. Meanwhile, overhead, passes near Earth a comet composed of poisonous gases.
The Jameson Satellite, Neil R. Jones, 3 🌟
" 40 million years from now, a crew hailing from the planet's Zor, whose inhabitants at some earlier time had 'built their own mechanical bodies, and by operation upon one another had removed their brains to the metal heads,' come across a satellite orbiting a lifeless earth. They revive its inhabitant, a cryopreserved professor jameson, and transfer his brain into a mechanical body. Although tempted to take the Zoromes up on their offer of 'an immortality of never-ending adventures in the vast, endless universe among the galaxy of stars and planets,' as he gazes upon what's left of his planet, Jameson finds himself disconsolate, even suicidal."
" 'why jump?' asked the machine man. 'the Dying World holds your imagination within a morbid clutch. It is all a matter of mental condition. Free your mind of this fascinating influence and come with us to visit other worlds, many of them are both beautiful and new. You will then feel a great difference.' "
March 17, 2022
This anthology collects several public-domain stories to illustrate the variety of science fiction that was published before the "Golden Age" that started with Hugo Gernsback's run as editor of Amazing Stories. Here we see that science fiction was not necessarily the province of white English-speaking men, although those were certainly the majority of writers and readers in those days (and frankly, pretty much through the bulk of the 20th Century).
"Sultana's Dream" by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (The Indian Ladies' Magazine, 1905 - short story)
3 Stars
This story has been reprinted a few times in recent years as an example of early feminist writing. Hossain was a Bengali (in what is now Bangladesh) writer famous for her efforts to educate girls and women and promote gender equality. The story is a dream wherein the narrator travels to a feminist utopia called Ladyland. There's really no plot, just descriptions of how Ladyland came to be and the living conditions therein. Over a hundred years later, it is still a fantasy for women in many cultures.
"The Voice in the Night" by William Hope Hodgson (The Blue Book Magazine, November 1907 - short story)
4 Stars
Hodgson is well known for his weird fiction such as The Night Land and the series of ghost stories featuring Carnacki the Ghost-Finder. He also wrote many stories based on his experiences as a merchant seaman. This is a creepy horror story of two sea travelers marooned on an island, fighting an insidious enemy. The tale is told to the sailors of another vessel which happens to be nearby.
"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster (The Oxford and Cambridge Review, Michaelmas Term 1909 - novelette)
4 Stars
In a world in which the human population has retreated underground, one man dares to discover the secret of the Earth's surface, while his mother lives a utopian life where every need is met by the Machine that runs everything. This is a cautionary tale about the dangers of an industrial world taking over an agricultural world, a valid fear in 1909. Much of the parable rings as true or perhaps truer today, when human isolation is common and communication is virtual.
"The Horror of the Heights" by Arthur Conan Doyle (The Strand Magazine, November 1913 - short story)
3 Stars
When this story was first published, airplanes were still very new and the sky was full of unknowns. Doyle postulates that living gasbags live in the upper atmosphere, ready to devour unwary aviators. This is the journal of one such unlucky flyer.
"The Red One" by Jack London (Cosmopolitan, October 1918 - novelette)
3 Stars
A scientist-explorer on the island of Guadalcanal finds a mysterious object—a giant red sphere that occasionally emits beautiful sounds. But he is succumbing to injuries and fever from his time in the jungle, trying to recuperate in a native village, hoping to eventually return to civilization with the news of his discovery. As one might expect, things don't go too well for him. Be warned that there are some very disparaging and racist descriptions of the natives.
"The Comet" by W. E. B. Du Bois (Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, 1920 - short story)
4 Stars
A poor Black man and a rich white woman are apparently the last people on Earth after the world passes through tail of a comet. The ending becomes a commentary on race relations as the two are rescued by other survivors, of whom several are inclined to lynch the Black man for daring to help a white woman, even in this extreme circumstance. Be warned that there are some offensive racial slurs in this story.
"The Jameson Satellite" by Neil R. Jones (Amazing Stories, July 1931 - short story)
2 Stars
This is the first of thirty-odd stories starring Professor Jameson, who after death is launched into a stable orbit around the Earth in an attempt to preserve himself cryogenically in the cold vacuum of space. Forty-million years later, a race of alien machine men find Jameson's capsule and proceed to transplant his brain into a machine body. Jameson observes the wreckage of the Earth and the now red dying sun it orbits, and eventually decides to join the machine men on their exploration of the galaxy. The story is written very crudely, with a lot of dry exposition and repetition. Like many other early examples of science fiction, it is less a story and more a travelogue without benefit of much drama or conflict.
"Sultana's Dream" by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (The Indian Ladies' Magazine, 1905 - short story)
3 Stars
This story has been reprinted a few times in recent years as an example of early feminist writing. Hossain was a Bengali (in what is now Bangladesh) writer famous for her efforts to educate girls and women and promote gender equality. The story is a dream wherein the narrator travels to a feminist utopia called Ladyland. There's really no plot, just descriptions of how Ladyland came to be and the living conditions therein. Over a hundred years later, it is still a fantasy for women in many cultures.
"The Voice in the Night" by William Hope Hodgson (The Blue Book Magazine, November 1907 - short story)
4 Stars
Hodgson is well known for his weird fiction such as The Night Land and the series of ghost stories featuring Carnacki the Ghost-Finder. He also wrote many stories based on his experiences as a merchant seaman. This is a creepy horror story of two sea travelers marooned on an island, fighting an insidious enemy. The tale is told to the sailors of another vessel which happens to be nearby.
"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster (The Oxford and Cambridge Review, Michaelmas Term 1909 - novelette)
4 Stars
In a world in which the human population has retreated underground, one man dares to discover the secret of the Earth's surface, while his mother lives a utopian life where every need is met by the Machine that runs everything. This is a cautionary tale about the dangers of an industrial world taking over an agricultural world, a valid fear in 1909. Much of the parable rings as true or perhaps truer today, when human isolation is common and communication is virtual.
"The Horror of the Heights" by Arthur Conan Doyle (The Strand Magazine, November 1913 - short story)
3 Stars
When this story was first published, airplanes were still very new and the sky was full of unknowns. Doyle postulates that living gasbags live in the upper atmosphere, ready to devour unwary aviators. This is the journal of one such unlucky flyer.
"The Red One" by Jack London (Cosmopolitan, October 1918 - novelette)
3 Stars
A scientist-explorer on the island of Guadalcanal finds a mysterious object—a giant red sphere that occasionally emits beautiful sounds. But he is succumbing to injuries and fever from his time in the jungle, trying to recuperate in a native village, hoping to eventually return to civilization with the news of his discovery. As one might expect, things don't go too well for him. Be warned that there are some very disparaging and racist descriptions of the natives.
"The Comet" by W. E. B. Du Bois (Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, 1920 - short story)
4 Stars
A poor Black man and a rich white woman are apparently the last people on Earth after the world passes through tail of a comet. The ending becomes a commentary on race relations as the two are rescued by other survivors, of whom several are inclined to lynch the Black man for daring to help a white woman, even in this extreme circumstance. Be warned that there are some offensive racial slurs in this story.
"The Jameson Satellite" by Neil R. Jones (Amazing Stories, July 1931 - short story)
2 Stars
This is the first of thirty-odd stories starring Professor Jameson, who after death is launched into a stable orbit around the Earth in an attempt to preserve himself cryogenically in the cold vacuum of space. Forty-million years later, a race of alien machine men find Jameson's capsule and proceed to transplant his brain into a machine body. Jameson observes the wreckage of the Earth and the now red dying sun it orbits, and eventually decides to join the machine men on their exploration of the galaxy. The story is written very crudely, with a lot of dry exposition and repetition. Like many other early examples of science fiction, it is less a story and more a travelogue without benefit of much drama or conflict.
October 30, 2021
There is a case to be said for the evolution of science fiction to be at its strongest when science fact is changing the quickest – which makes the decades between Queen Victoria and WW2 to be the most stand-out, surely. Not for nothing did the world change from the work of the Curies, and Einstein et al. And in a world that knows the Poe-Verne-Wells triumvirate very well, and indeed what happened in the Golden Age, the years in between are the most neglected. Hence this series-launching compilation, published alongside three novels from the time.
And you get an immediate show of power when it comes to reach, with a short piece from Bangladesh, 1905, from an authoress who has a national day in her name there now. This however is such a feminist utopia – powered flight, no men allowed out of their lock-ups whatsoever, and even no mosquitos – that it overloads itself to the point of sexism. William Hope Hodgson comes next, and it's much more sensible to call his drama a horror than sci-fi, with something unearthly met by a small boat's crew one misty night in the Pacific. I am sure I read something with the very same outcome when at school, but not with the author's typical nautical framing, to my mind.
Hope Hodgson knew what he was talking about as a sailor, Conan Doyle the aviator convinces less so. Still, his hokum of an early pilot finding lethal yet beautiful floating creatures at the ceiling of powered flight is very readable. Jack London offers a quite old-fashioned, turgid slice of survival-horror-by-way-of-Conrad, made sci-fi only by an unearthly sound resonating across a nightmarish jungle island. WEB Du Bois looks for all the world like he's inventing The Twilight Zone, before getting really clumsy with racial issues. And Neil R Jones brings us to the age of the pulps, with the first in his series concerning a human space traveller – who starts the story forty million years before it ends, by getting his corpse shot into permanent orbit. The science here is utterly inept, the writing very tell-don't-show.
The merit of this book – and this whole academic series – will be bringing to you authors and pieces you'll not have encountered before, and that at times despite copious chances. F'instance I've never knowingly read E M Forster, but his piece – tucked away nonchalantly in the middle here – is outstanding. Who knew, with a society in single-person cubicles beneath a destroyed Earth's surface, with the entire needs of mankind – and allegedly edifying lectures – available at the press of a button, that he would have predicted social media? Said lectures are about as real to the world as Instagrams, and the whole Machine that runs mankind (apart from the lead woman's errant son) is clearly F*c*book – or Meta as it thought to call itself the week I read this brilliant drama.
Overall here, some fabulous writing is countered by some much too close to awful. The standard swings quite erratically at times, suggesting a low star rating, if one be deemed appropriate. But no – even with the wokeness of the spoilerific introduction – I appreciated this book's existence greatly. As a calling card for an imprint of nearly-lost novels to come, this doesn't quite convince on quality control, but does show the materials will always strike a chord with modern moral issues, or at least give us a glimpse into something fantastical, even if that proves with hindsight to be hooey. Indeed, if there are more wells of this kind to be plumbed I am all for it. Three and a half stars for now.
And you get an immediate show of power when it comes to reach, with a short piece from Bangladesh, 1905, from an authoress who has a national day in her name there now. This however is such a feminist utopia – powered flight, no men allowed out of their lock-ups whatsoever, and even no mosquitos – that it overloads itself to the point of sexism. William Hope Hodgson comes next, and it's much more sensible to call his drama a horror than sci-fi, with something unearthly met by a small boat's crew one misty night in the Pacific. I am sure I read something with the very same outcome when at school, but not with the author's typical nautical framing, to my mind.
Hope Hodgson knew what he was talking about as a sailor, Conan Doyle the aviator convinces less so. Still, his hokum of an early pilot finding lethal yet beautiful floating creatures at the ceiling of powered flight is very readable. Jack London offers a quite old-fashioned, turgid slice of survival-horror-by-way-of-Conrad, made sci-fi only by an unearthly sound resonating across a nightmarish jungle island. WEB Du Bois looks for all the world like he's inventing The Twilight Zone, before getting really clumsy with racial issues. And Neil R Jones brings us to the age of the pulps, with the first in his series concerning a human space traveller – who starts the story forty million years before it ends, by getting his corpse shot into permanent orbit. The science here is utterly inept, the writing very tell-don't-show.
The merit of this book – and this whole academic series – will be bringing to you authors and pieces you'll not have encountered before, and that at times despite copious chances. F'instance I've never knowingly read E M Forster, but his piece – tucked away nonchalantly in the middle here – is outstanding. Who knew, with a society in single-person cubicles beneath a destroyed Earth's surface, with the entire needs of mankind – and allegedly edifying lectures – available at the press of a button, that he would have predicted social media? Said lectures are about as real to the world as Instagrams, and the whole Machine that runs mankind (apart from the lead woman's errant son) is clearly F*c*book – or Meta as it thought to call itself the week I read this brilliant drama.
Overall here, some fabulous writing is countered by some much too close to awful. The standard swings quite erratically at times, suggesting a low star rating, if one be deemed appropriate. But no – even with the wokeness of the spoilerific introduction – I appreciated this book's existence greatly. As a calling card for an imprint of nearly-lost novels to come, this doesn't quite convince on quality control, but does show the materials will always strike a chord with modern moral issues, or at least give us a glimpse into something fantastical, even if that proves with hindsight to be hooey. Indeed, if there are more wells of this kind to be plumbed I am all for it. Three and a half stars for now.
April 9, 2022
Is this cool, or what? Proto-science fiction from a century ago, edited by Joshua Glenn with cover illustrations by Seth, from MIT Press. Seth and Glenn have worked together three times before, to my knowledge, with a third partner, Mark Kingwell, on their books, The Wage Slave's Glossary, The Idler's Glossary, and The Adventurer's Glossary, all of which exemplify the ideal that books should entertain and instruct. For some time now (15 years or more?), Glenn has also run the HiLoBrow.com website, devoted to a broad range of cultural topics, practices, and materials, to which Glenn applies his semiotic analyses, including to his longstanding love of adventure stories and their variations.
Inaugurating the series, Voices from the Radium Age avoids being yet another oldies act recycling the stories any casual fan of science fiction already knows about. Instead, Glenn uses this series as an opportunity to re-assess the pre-history of science fiction, especially in terms of revisiting the notion of science fiction itself, which was, essentially, codified by the enormously influential editor, John Campbell. Thus, rather than cull examples of SF before Campbell in terms of criteria Campbell would later have applied, Glenn looks at SF in its nascent state, when the idea of speculating on future events hadn’t been swept into a small corner of formulaic genre, and writers willing to speculate came from backgrounds and interests wide and far.
Thus, Voices from the Radium Age includes stories by men and women from America, Europe, and Asia, recognized litterateurs and low-budget hacks: Arthur Conan Doyle, W.E.B. DuBois, Jack London, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, William Hope Hodgson, and Neil R. Jones. Some stories deal metaphorically with contemporary themes (such as feminism), some predict future dystopias based on current obsessions with technology, others tell unsettling campfire stories involving fungi and/or tentacles.
In addition to being fun to read, the stories also offer opportunities to assess the assumptions and prejudices of the time during which they were written (between 1900-1935, Glenn’s designated “Radium Age”), why certain assumptions were held and the evidence that invalidated them, and what we now need to do to avoid dystopia. Other books in the series currently include A World of Women by J. D. Beresford, The World Set Free by H. G. Wells, and The Clockwork Man by E. V. Odle. I just found out about the series, so I haven’t yet had a chance to read them (although a Penguin edition of The World Set Free has been on my shelves for the past 40 years).
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
Inaugurating the series, Voices from the Radium Age avoids being yet another oldies act recycling the stories any casual fan of science fiction already knows about. Instead, Glenn uses this series as an opportunity to re-assess the pre-history of science fiction, especially in terms of revisiting the notion of science fiction itself, which was, essentially, codified by the enormously influential editor, John Campbell. Thus, rather than cull examples of SF before Campbell in terms of criteria Campbell would later have applied, Glenn looks at SF in its nascent state, when the idea of speculating on future events hadn’t been swept into a small corner of formulaic genre, and writers willing to speculate came from backgrounds and interests wide and far.
Thus, Voices from the Radium Age includes stories by men and women from America, Europe, and Asia, recognized litterateurs and low-budget hacks: Arthur Conan Doyle, W.E.B. DuBois, Jack London, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, William Hope Hodgson, and Neil R. Jones. Some stories deal metaphorically with contemporary themes (such as feminism), some predict future dystopias based on current obsessions with technology, others tell unsettling campfire stories involving fungi and/or tentacles.
In addition to being fun to read, the stories also offer opportunities to assess the assumptions and prejudices of the time during which they were written (between 1900-1935, Glenn’s designated “Radium Age”), why certain assumptions were held and the evidence that invalidated them, and what we now need to do to avoid dystopia. Other books in the series currently include A World of Women by J. D. Beresford, The World Set Free by H. G. Wells, and The Clockwork Man by E. V. Odle. I just found out about the series, so I haven’t yet had a chance to read them (although a Penguin edition of The World Set Free has been on my shelves for the past 40 years).
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
May 17, 2025
Science fiction faces a strange conundrum: No matter how far in the future the stories are set, the writing is still firmly a product of its own era. Characters who possess knowledge and technology far beyond that of the present day still reflect all the faults and foibles of the author’s own time period. That is apparent in these stories from the early 20th Century. The period of the 1940s-1960s is generally considered the so-called “Golden Age” of science fiction. The stories in MIT Press’s “Radium Age” series come just before that. The earliest story here is from 1905. The latest, Neil R. Jones’s The Jameson Satellite is from 1931, and definitely sets the stage for the space adventures that would populate the Golden Age. The real gem here is E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops from 1909.
November 3, 2023
This is a fun anthology of stories from the first thirty years of the 20th century, before 'science fiction' was an acknowledged genre. It has some classics such as E.M. Forster's 'The Machine Stops' and William Hope Hodgson's 'The Voice in the Night', as well as W.E.B. DuBois's 'The Comet'. Probably the most scientifically accurate is the Professor Jameson story, 'The Jameson Satellite', by Neil Jones, which has a man preserving his body for eons by shooting it into space in a capsule, as well as accurate distances for the Solar System and plausible deterioration of orbits. One blemish in the book is the Jack London story, 'The Red One', which is offensively racist today, and doesn't really work that well as a satisfying story anyhow.
March 5, 2023
I picked this book up to read "Santana's Dream", by Bengali author Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Of the seven stories included, it was probably my favorite, which is why I'm rating the whole book 4 stars.
Science fiction has always included social commentary, even in the early 20th century.
After reading this feminist piece of fiction from 1905, I was left with a sense of melancholy that we are still dreaming those dreams of a more equitable future...
Science fiction has always included social commentary, even in the early 20th century.
After reading this feminist piece of fiction from 1905, I was left with a sense of melancholy that we are still dreaming those dreams of a more equitable future...
September 7, 2024
"The Radium Age" is the term that Joshua Glenn has coined for the science fiction stories written from 1900–1935. This is a collection of those stories, and they are really fascinating:
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
William Hope Hodgson
E. M. Forster
Arthur Conan Doyle
Jack London
W. E. B. Du Bois
Neil R. Jones.
My favorite stories were "The Machine Stops" by Forster, "The Comet" by Du Bois, and "The Jameson Satellite" by Jones. Really thought-provoking stuff by some great writers.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
William Hope Hodgson
E. M. Forster
Arthur Conan Doyle
Jack London
W. E. B. Du Bois
Neil R. Jones.
My favorite stories were "The Machine Stops" by Forster, "The Comet" by Du Bois, and "The Jameson Satellite" by Jones. Really thought-provoking stuff by some great writers.
June 22, 2023
Like any anthology, some are better than others, but they’re all quite good. Easy to put down since nothing connects the stories at all beyond the introduction. All very imaginative and clever in their execution, regardless.
Also while the introduction does make note of it, it DOES NOT adequately prepare you for Jack Landon’s cringey racist language. Heads up.
Also while the introduction does make note of it, it DOES NOT adequately prepare you for Jack Landon’s cringey racist language. Heads up.
July 4, 2025
I see why the author thinks these are undervalued stories. However, aside from a few gems (Langston Hughes is the best) they are all pretty rough. this is especially compared with Golden age and New Wave science fiction.
January 15, 2023
Some of the stories are a bit dated, but as a fan of science fiction it is interesting to see the early stages of the genre.
April 30, 2023
Amazing collection of science fiction short stories!
September 6, 2023
Most of the stories just did not hold my attention.
December 10, 2025
The Machine Stops is the standout story from this collection.
February 18, 2025
loved the comet by web du bois!
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