Voices from the Radium Age edited by Joshua Glenn

(MIT, 2022)

Reviewed by Duncan Lawie

I am deeply grateful to this volume for presenting me with ‘The Machine Stops’ by E. M. Forster. Yes, the author of those Edwardian classics adapted in the late twentieth century into gorgeous films. I have been hearing, ever since those movies were released, that he had also written a prescient piece of science fiction. It seems even more prescient now. The story describes an atomised society, each person interacting through virtual connections, isolated from every other in their own space and awkward when forced into physical interaction. How of the moment can a setting get? The story centres on a mother who is totally at home in this world and her son, living far away, who wants to break free. Their interactions and the increasing strictures of “the Machine” are used to build a detailed picture of an all too believable future.

‘The Comet’ by W.E.B. Du Bois is the other key story in this collection. It mentions the eponymous comet in the opening paragraphs, before switching to a narrative of a menial being sent to the dankest depths of a bank. The deep vault saves his life; when he emerges, everyone he finds is dead. The search for other survivors is the primary plot driver, whilst the key theme is of how deeply racism is embedded in society. Can a poor black man, and a wealthy white woman come to think of themselves as two equal, fellow humans?

Bringing such stories to wider attention is Joshua Glenn’s mission of re-discovery. The introduction to the collection clarifies the “radium age” as the period from 1900 to 1935—a slight rounding of the time from Marie Curie’s discovery of radium to her death. 1900 overlaps the end of Jules Verne’s life and of H.G. Wells’ focus on SF, whilst 1935 blends into the new pulps, which soon gave way to the “golden age of SF”. That, in conventional chronology, is dated to the start of John W. Campbell’s editorship of Astounding Stories in 1938. Looking back from a later era to the 1930s, those who saw only the mediocre pulps believed that SF arose from the ‘clumsy, primitive, naive’—as Isaac Asimov is quoted. Perhaps those Campbellians did not look beyond the pulps to see further into the origins of their field. Joshua Glenn shows that ‘proto-SF’ was being published much more widely, alongside other kinds of fiction, in a world before it emerged as a genre and became ghettoised.

The majority of the pieces in this volume could equally fit the sobriquet of ‘scientific romance’, a term which Brian Stableford has encouraged since at least the mid-1980s. He uses the longer period of 1890 to 1950 and has a strict view of these works as coming from a British rather than an American context—perhaps, again, to shed the embarrassment of the pulps. Indeed, Arthur Conan Doyle and William Hope Hodgson, present in this volume, are both discussed at length in Stableford’s book on the topic.

The samples here ‘The Voice in the Night’, from William Hope Hodgson, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Horror of the Heights’ could well be described as horror. They provide an interesting contrast. Hope Hodgson’s piece is a classic ‘weird tale’, which focuses on the uncanny awfulness of an all-defeating fungus. Conan Doyle, by contrast, prognosticates the technology of flight, from the early aeroplanes of the story’s publication in 1913. Future planes, he is sure, will be able, with great effort, to reach altitudes higher than Everest—a place of the unknown where his protagonist can discover terrifying beings living in the air at great heights. Both stories use a matter of fact telling to make the impossible more believable. Neither relies on any sense of the supernatural—the natural world is able to provide shocks enough.

There are avatars of other kinds of story too. ‘Sultana’s Dream’ by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, is a utopia. In this case, a feminist Muslim utopia, where the men are immured, thereby making the nation safe. Like ‘The Comet’, it is a healthy reminder that inequality has been recognised and challenged long before any of us were born. The story has other delightful attributes of a utopia, such as reducing work to two hours a day and making cities beautiful and green. All the great things which would come, if only. The “if only” is writ large as the story describes a dream.

‘The Red One’ by Jack London is an unquestioningly racist adventure story. There is, within it, an element of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but here our protagonist is wholly defeated by the tropical world. The alien artefact at the core of the story becomes a focus for a powerful meditation on the scale of the universe which is the story’s main redeeming feature.

The final story, ‘The Jameson Satellite’ by Neil R. Jones comes from those very pulps which close the Radium Age. The writing is of the distinctly repetitious and jejune style which gives them such a poor reputation. Still, like the best of its ilk, it is filled with interesting ideas; a satellite as a tomb, the death of the earth in a timespan of forty million years, and an alien race who transfer their brains into metal bodies which indefinitely extends their lifespans.

Altogether, many of the ideas of SF in the subsequent century are recognisable here—well formed, in neatly constructed tales which, the last story excepted, are effectively written. The result is an entertaining survey of the SF of the first third of the twentieth century.

Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.