The website HiLoBrow (tagline: "middlebrow is not the solution") has long championed what it calls "Radium Age" science fiction — tales written from 1904 to 1933, just after the Verne-Wells-Poe era of "scientific romances," but before the "Golden Age" ushered in by Isaac Asimov and his peers. (HiLobrow is very interested in chronological taxonomies; I've simply adopted their categories.)

Asimov, Kingsley Amis, and other critics of science fiction looked down on Radium Age novels, deeming them outlandish and unsophisticated. But the HiLobrow editors write:

We reject this received wisdom! Though some of our favorite science fiction authors of the 1904-33 era (e.g., Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. "Doc" Smith) were indeed fantastical, many others — including Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle, not to mention Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Capek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E.M. Forster, and Philip Wylie — gave us science fiction that held lowbrow and highbrow elements together in a utopian tension. Alas, the Cold War era forced utopian schemes and dreams of all sorts underground and buried them there.

But you can judge for yourself: HiLoBrow's books division will be reissuing six so-called Radium Age titles this year, beginning with Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague," in May. ("Outside the ruins of San Francisco, a former UC Berkeley professor recounts the chilling sequence of events — a gruesome pandemic which killed nearly every living soul on the planet, in a matter of days — which led to his current lowly state. Modern civilization has fallen, and a new race of barbarians (descended from the western world's brutalized workers) has assumed power everywhere.") It will be followed by Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail" and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Poison Belt."

Each book will include a new introduction and afterword, and striking cover art by Michael Lewy.

(Disclosure: Both Josh Glenn, co-founder of HiLoBrow, and I used to work for the Boston Globe's Ideas section.)