Reviewer Kristen Rabe Interviews Joshua Glenn, Series Editor of More Voices from the Radium Age
The past 150 years of modernization has transformed both the planet and our minds. Indeed, with every scientific leap, our collective notion of what’s possible requires an update. Our brains are forced to expand.
And a few of us can’t help but imagine even crazier possibilities—like Jose Arcadia Buendia in 100 Years of Solitude, “who’s unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even miracles and magic.”
IRL, most of those Buendia types end up being science fiction writers.
This week, Josh Glenn takes us back to the early years of technological wonderment and introduces us to the writers whose imaginations were the most free reined of all. Josh is responsible for an MIT series of books on early sci-fi, the latest installment being More Voices from the Radium Age, which earned a neutron-starred review from Kristen Rabe in Foreword.
This anthology is dedicated to what you call “proto-science fiction” stories originally published between 1900 and 1935. What’s distinctive about speculative fiction from this early twentieth-century era?
I’m an enthusiastic reader of early twentieth-century authors—from Henry James to Dorothy L. Sayers, and from E. Nesbit to Robert E. Howard. What I’ve described as proto-science fiction is speculative fiction published after the scientific romances of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and mostly before the term “science fiction” existed. Quite a lot of it is terrifically well-written, smart, and entertaining. This came as a surprise to me, since historians have typically suggested that any fiction written in this genre before the so-called Campbell Revolution of the mid-1930s on isn’t worth reading! (John W. Campbell was a writer and, more importantly, influential sci-fi magazine editor who helped shape our understanding of the genre, for better or worse.) I find it fascinating to watch “science fiction” as we know it emerge, during these years before Campbell’s influence, from a primordial ooze … of horror, romance, westerns, and other outré genre literature.
What inspired you to call this period in science fiction the Radium Age? What were some of the social, political, and scientific currents underway at the time?
When I first started trying to raise awareness about science fiction’s emergent era, c. 1900–1935, I called it the “pre-Golden Age.” But then I stopped believing the hype about science fiction’s so-called Golden Age, which was in many respects less diverse and experimental than the era that had immediately preceded it. While searching for a new moniker, I also happened to be reading up on the extraordinary scientific 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.
Aha! In honor of Curie, I started using the phrase “Radium Age proto-science fiction.” Curie’s theory of radioactivity led to the deeply unsettling insight that the atom is, at least in part, a state of energy in constant motion. That is an apt metaphor for the early twentieth-century’s so-called “vertigo” years—a time when women, people of color, the working class, and colonized peoples everywhere were rising up against oppression. The scientific breakthroughs of the era were also bewildering; the universe that scientists like Einstein and others discovered was incomprehensible to most people.
One of my favorite stories in this collection, Algernon Blackwood’s “A Victim of Higher Space” (1914), describes a character caught between this world and a space-time of infinite dimensions. The story is written with a light touch and a playful, wry humor. What does Blackwood achieve with this story?
Blackwood was a pioneer of what was later termed “weird fiction”—think of H.P. Lovecraft or, more recently, China Miéville. Here, he was riffing on the era’s fascination with theories of higher-dimensional spaces. Since the 1880s, this sort of thing had been popularized by the mathematician Charles Howard Hinton and others; they urged dimension-curious seekers to develop their intuitive perception of hyperspace by meditating upon the “tesseract,” a four-dimensional analog of the three-dimensional cube. (See, for example, “Views of the Tesseract (1904)” at Public Domain Review.)
In Blackwood’s story, a fellow named Mudge, who has successfully revolutionized his means of perception, pays a panicked visit to an “occult detective” named John Silence. Blackwood, incidentally, was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a society devoted to the semi-scientific study and practices of the occult, metaphysics, and the paranormal … so perhaps he empathized with the terrors that Mudge discovered!
Several stories in More Voices from the Radium Age feature strong female characters, and one especially fascinating tale from 1923, “The Finding of the Absolute,” is written by a woman. Was the Radium Age more progressive in addressing women’s equality than the “Golden Age” of science fiction that followed?
The author of the smart, funny, and extremely trippy story you mention, May Sinclair, is a now-forgotten modernist author and critic who was one of the first to use the phrase “stream of consciousness” in a literary context. She was the first British writer to praise T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” and Eliot was a fan of hers too. (So was Borges.)
A number of women wrote proto-sf stories and novels, including Charlotte Haldane, Cicely Hamilton, Pauline Hopkins, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Edith Nesbit, Rose Macaulay, Marietta Shaginyan, and Gertrude Barrows Bennett (who published under the name Francis Stevens). All these female writers have been or will be featured in this series, and there were many others. (The sf scholar and anthology editor Lisa Yaszek and two of her students recently pulled together quite a comprehensive list of “Sisters of the Radium Age,” which is here.) And yes, to answer your question, a greater percentage of people writing proto-sf for pulp magazines during this period were women, as compared with the so-called Golden Age. John W. Campbell was not just racist but misogynistic; his peers were too, it seems.
Valery Bryusov’s 1907 story “The Republic of the Southern Cross” explores dystopian themes. Did Radium Age proto-science fiction help pave the way for today’s boom in dystopian fiction?
Some scholars have argued that “Plato’s Republic,” supposedly a utopia, is in fact a satire of utopias; but yes, dystopian sf as we know it first took shape during this era. Anxieties about scientific breakthroughs and technologies, as well as social and cultural developments in western societies, led to a plethora of gloomy predictions. This sort of thing really took off after the Russian Revolution of 1917–1923, in stories such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Moon Men series (which may seem familiar to fans of the Red Dawn movies) and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.
What’s fascinating about Bryusov’s story is that his imagined society in which efficiency has been extended into all spheres of life predates the Russian Revolution by a decade. He was likely influenced by the theory of scientific management—a capitalism-friendly development popular around the turn of the century—which also caused deep unease.
The stories in this collection are remarkably diverse in subject and style. How can a renewed focus on these often-neglected stories enlarge our vision for science fiction and speculative fiction?
Writing in 1907, the author of The Education of Henry Adams had this to say about his era: “The man of science must have been sleepy indeed, who did not jump from his chair like a scared dog when, in 1898, Mme. Curie threw on his desk the metaphysical bomb she called radium.” I hope that the Radium Age series will have a similarly enlivening effect on science fiction scholars and readers alike, many of whom are (as I once was) sadly uninformed about the origins of the genre. Pleasurable and uncanny thrills and chills await those of us intrepid enough to explore this overlooked body of literature.
Kristen Rabe
