























Amazing Stories









You've probably heard of science fiction's Golden Age, that incredible period in the 1940s and '50s when masters of the genre like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, and Jack Vance were in their primes. But the early 20th century was an even weirder and more fantastic time for science fiction, when the genre was still in flux and the atomic bomb hadn't yet transformed our ideas about the future forever. Sci-fi historian and editor Joshua Glenn has just finished a multi-year project to bring what he calls the Radium Age back into the public eye. He has brought ten Radium Age classics back into print through his indie press HiLo Books, and he has written a number of fascinating guides to the great books of that era. Now, with his definitive list of the 100 best stories and novels of the Radium Age (1904-33), he's bringing the project to a close. But the journey for you, dear reader, is just beginning.

I've always been intrigued by the excavation of forgotten sci-fi, which is why I asked Glenn to write some of his first essays about Radium Age books several years ago for io9. "With Radium Age sci-fi, I wanted to surface and read all the best novels from that overlooked era and then introduce the era to others—so at first, I figured that writing a series for io9 would suffice," he told Ars via e-mail. "But once I realized that some of the best sci-fi from the 1904-33 period had fallen into utter obscurity, I felt compelled to start an imprint and reissue 10 of the titles that seemed most worthy of resurrecting." Now that other publishers have started releasing some of the novels on his best-of list, it seems that Glenn was on the cutting edge of a cultural revival of futuristic tales that are a century old. What's incredible about looking back on the Radium Age is that you realize so many of the science fiction themes we think of as solidly contemporary—from post-humans and the singularity, to zombie-populated dystopias—actually got their start way back in the early 1900s.

Describing some of these themes, Glenn told Ars:

One thing that distinguishes Radium Age from Golden Age science fiction is its faith in the possibility of a post-scarcity, peaceful, tolerant, just social order. For excellent historical reasons, we became very cynical about utopianism after Stalin and Hitler; Golden Age writers prided themselves on being wised-up, compared to their naive predecessors. But the Radium Age wasn’t naive: We find many warnings about dystopian tendencies in the cultural, political, and economic tendencies of the period: Karel Capek and Aldous Huxley worried about the drive towards efficiency in all things that characterized both America and the USSR; Yevgeny Zamyatin and Edgar Rice Burroughs worried about the effects of Soviet-style collectivism on the individual; and Jack London's “The Iron Heel” (1908), which is about fascist plutocrats who take over America, feels particularly relevant right now. But we also find optimism that people can overcome their worst tendencies and build something wonderful together: Rudyard Kipling’s “With the Night Mail” and Hugo Gernsback’s “Ralph 124C 41+” are technocratic utopias, Alexander Bogdanov’s "Red Star” portrays a successful socialist society on Mars; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Herland” portrays a successful socialist society without men. (The evolving role of women is a key theme and sub-theme in Radium Age science fiction, too.) With the benefit of hindsight, we can find problems with these utopias, there’s no doubt about that. But they’re admirable efforts of the imagination, too. My takeaway: While remaining cautious about totalizing visions of social harmony, we shouldn’t conflate “idealistic” with “naive,” nor consider it the opposite of “wised-up.” Radium Age sci-fi is both wised-up and idealistic.

To appreciate these novels, you have to reverse-engineer their historical context and realize that the bomb had not yet dropped and the Soviet Union hadn't yet coalesced into an authoritarian regime. Imagine a world where we were hopeful about the future because we had no fear of weapons of mass destruction. And where we had not yet seen what fascism would do to the West but were still deeply worried about it. Instead of bombs, the spectre of World War I haunts many of these books with its senseless, overwhelming violence; there's a good reason why some of them imagine poison gas as the ultimate horror. The Radium Age was also a time when unionization and strike violence were a part of everyday life in industrialized cities, and these conflicts gave rise to fantasies about what would happen when robots took over manual labor. Robot uprising stories begin during the Radium Age, when worker uprisings were changing the social landscape.

Glenn noted that Radium Age sci-fi dealt a lot with evolution, a theory that was even more controversial a century ago than it is today. This gave rise to the first stories of X-men-style mutants. Glenn told Ars:

Radium Age science fiction is queasily fascinated with the possibility that humans might evolve—mutate—into a superior species! J.D. Beresford’s “The Hampdenshire Wonder,” Hugo Gernsback’s “Ralph 124C 41+”, Muriel Jaeger’s “The Man With Six Senses,” Philip Gordon Wylie’s “Gladiator,” John Taine’s “Seeds of Life,” George Bernard Shaw’s "Back to Methuselah,” S. Fowler Wright’s “The Amphibians,” for example, not to mention almost everything by the great British writer Olaf Stapledon (“The Last and First Men,” “Last Men in London,” “Odd John”). This sort of thing was partly inspired by Lamarckian evolutionary philosophy, which posits a tendency for organisms to become more perfect as they evolve (because such change is needed by “life”), and partly by a fervent post-WWI desire for people to transcend their petty ideological differences and see things from a cosmic perspective... even if that meant growing an egg-shaped head to house our larger brains.

He added that one of the other quirks of Radium Age sci-fi is that it swerves away from the 19th-century classics of H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, and Jules Verne by adding tropes from occult literature. Suddenly, you have sci-fi that includes "communicating with the dead, ESP, magic, astral projection, mind control." Indeed, a popular 1920s and '30s pulp magazine called Weird Tales—edited for a time by H.P. Lovecraft—specialized in this combination of cosmic horror and typical sci-fi tropes. Anyone who has read a Lovecraft story is familiar with the way dark magic and aliens co-exist in his work to create worlds where supernatural nightmares can come from the mind of an ancient alien, paradoxically dead and dreaming, at the bottom of the sea. Today, Glenn said, we're "comfortable with occult themes in science fiction contexts." But "it was new and very weird at the time."

Many authors have said that stories about the future are always essentially about the present, and this is what makes century-old science fiction both terrifically interesting and occasionally very awkward. "I fervently hope that science fiction enthusiasts will be able to hold their noses when encountering some of the sexist, racist, imperialist language and context which characterizes all literature of that particular era," Glenn said. "I’m a fan of this era’s stories not just because it’s fun to see where some of the genre’s tropes—berserk robots, telepaths, mutants, eco-catastrophes, lost worlds—come from. But also because the 100 stories that I’ve identified are well-written, entertaining, and unsettling in the best possible sense." If you want to escape to retro-futures, you could do nothing better than to find the books on Glenn's list and gobble them down this summer.

Listing image by Amazing Stories