MIT Press’ Radium Age series

An interesting series of early science fiction works has appeared from MIT Press: The Radium Age. The series covers science fiction that appeared between 1900 and 1935, before the Golden Age of science fiction.

The series is edited by Joshua Glenn, who is not a science-fiction expert but instead is a “semiotics analyst,” semiotics being the study of “signs,” which is “anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign.” The idea is that with this series we get to see the origins of various SF tropes such as robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopian wastelands, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes. He calls this period “proto science fiction.” I usually think of it as early SF and pre-SF myself.

Each volume is 5.25 by 8 inches, and all have cover artwork by the comic artist Seth. The series started in 2022 and has 23 volumes so far, with another coming out early next year. Each one has an introduction by a different person, and sometimes includes an afterword.

At present, the series consists of the following volumes:

• Voices From the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn; 2022
• A World of Women, by J.D. Beresford; introduction by Astra Taylor; 2022
• The Clockwork Man, by E.V. Odle; introduction by Annalee Newitz; 2022
• The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells; introduction by Sarah Cole; 2022
• Of One Blood, by Pauline Hopkins; introduction by Minister Faust; 2022
• Nordenholt’s Million, by J.J. Connington; introduction by Matthew Battles; 2022
• What Not, by Rose Macaulay; introduction by Matthew De Abaitua; 2022
• Theodore Savage, by Cicely Hamilton; introduction by Susan R. Grayzel; 2023
• The Lost World and The Poison Belt, by Arthur Conan Doyle; introduction by Conor Reid; 2023
• More Voices From the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn; 2023
• The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by G.K. Chesterton; introduction by Madeline Ashby; 2023
• The Night Land (Abridged), by William Hope Hodgson; introduction by Erik Davis; 2023
• Man’s World, by Charlotte Haldane; introduction by Philippa Levine; 2024
• The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali SF, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay; 2024
• The People of the Ruins, by Edward Shanks; introduction by Paul March-Russell; 2024
• The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories, by Francis Stevens; introduction by Lisa Yaszek; 2024
• The Greatest Adventure, by John Taine; introduction by S.L. Huang; 2025
• The Hampdenshire Wonder, by J.D. Beresford; introduction by Ted Chiang; 2025
• Yankees in Petrograd, by Marietta S. Shaginyan; translated by Jill Roese; 2025
• Before Superman, edited by Joshua Glenn; 2025
• Flaxman Low, by E. and H. Heron; introduction by Alexander B. Joy; 2026
• Beatrice the Sixteenth, by Irene Clyde; introduction by Lucy Sante; 2026
• Last and First Men (Abridged), by Olaf Stapledon; introduction by Matthew De Abaitua; 2026
• Mothership Rising: Afrofuturism in the Radium Age, edited by Lisa Yaszek; TBP 2027

This is an eclectic group of works. Some I have already posted on. I already did a post on John Taine’s The Greatest Adventure, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger, thus I have no plans on getting those volumes.

I have posted on William Hope Hodgson as well. This version of The Night Land is abridged; I just don’t know by whom. Hodgson himself did one, titled The Dream of X.

Francis Stevens’s The Heads of Cerberus is on my “to read” pile, but this edition adds four other stories, one of which I didn’t have access to. So this may be worth getting over the Dover Publications edition.

To round things out, I want to cover the pulp and pulp-adjacent works in the two anthologies Voices From the Radium Age and More Voices From the Radium Age.

In Voices From the Radium Age, we get seven stories, most of them pulp or pulp-adjacent, along with an intro by Glenn. Among the stories included is William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (Blue Book, 1907), one of his haunting sea stories. This one was turned into a Japanese horror SF movie, Matango, better known in the U.S. as Attack of the Mushroom People.

From Arthur Conan Doyle is one of his rare horror SF tales, “Horror of the Heights,” from The Strand in 1913. This one is about what a pilot finds in the upper atmosphere. And then from Neil R. Jones is “The Jameson Satellite” (Amazing Stories, 1931), the first of his Professor Jameson series, where a man from “our time” tries to preserve his body cryogenically and sends it off into space, where 40,000,000 years later, a race of beings gives him a new cybernetic body.

In More Voices From the Radium Age, we get nine stories, again many of them pulp or pulp-adjacent. From H.G. Wells is “The Land Ironclads” (The Strand, 1903), which is one of his many “future war” stories, here with remote-controlled tanks vs. today’s drones. From E. Nesbit, a contemporary of Wells, is “The Third Drug” (The Strand, 1908), another early example of the superhuman in early SF.

We also get one of Algernon Blackwood‘s John Silence stories, “A Victim of Higher Spaces” (1914). Silence is one of the early occult detectives, and all his stories have been published in a collection by Dover Publications. From A. Merritt we get “The People of the Pit” (All-Story Weekly, 1918), a nice lost-world story set in Alaska that may have inspired H.P. Lovecraft. Next, from George Allan England we get “The Thing from — ‘Outside'” (Science & Invention, 1923), about a group in the Canadian wilderness being stalked by… something. Then from May Sinclair is “The Finding of the Absolute” (Uncanny Tales, 1923), which is a strange tale with a different take on the afterlife.

As with many such series, there are volumes here I’m interested in; others I already have copies of, so I am not looking to replace them. And there are others I have no interest in whatsoever. I will be doing some further postings on these and will keep an eye out for further volumes. If you haven’t, check these out.