Mores Voices from the Radium Age edited and introduced by Joshua Glenn

(MIT Press, 2023)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

Joshua Glenn’s concept of the “Radium Age”—that period (roughly the first three decades of the twentieth century) before sf’s post-1935 “Golden Age”, points away from what Hugo Gernsback was pointing to when he identified, in 1926, the “new” wave of writing he dubbed “scientifiction”—towards a wider field. Glenn’s alternative, “proto-sf” is, for me, less happy, because it implies even more of a sweeping-up of material which we can now identify as sf rather than the kind of iconic wonder-story such as Gulliver’s Travels, or post-Copernican moon-voyages, which later writers drew upon. Perhaps it is safer to simply take the nine stories here, published between 1901, and 1926 and ask what they bring to us.

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Review from BSFA Review 22 - Download your copy here.