Nothing Proto About It

“ONE COULD GET caught up in a purist fervor about what counts as “science fiction,” but it isn’t worth it.”

“In between the “scientific romances” of Wells and Verne and what came to be called the “Golden Age of Science Fiction” (1938–46, or ending in the 1960s if you are generous)—Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, and many others—falls a chasm of books of uncertain genre, most of which have fallen out of print and memory.”

“Identifying an era bookended by Marie Curie’s shared 1903 Nobel Prize for the discovery of radium and her death from radiation-induced leukemia in 1934, Glenn dubs it the “Radium Age.””

“Some true classics are absent from the lineup, such as Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920), which bequeathed the word “robot” to the global lexicon, and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopic We (1924).”

“Although adding more Russophone titles would be welcome, they might somewhat detract from the smorgasbord aspect, since in Russian a genre had already solidified called “scientific fantasy,” which endows those works with greater coherence and intertextual reference.”

“The series’ freedom from genre purism lets us see how a specific set of anxieties—channeled through dystopias, Lovecraftian horror, arch social satire, and adventure tales—spurred literary experimentation and the bending of conventions.”

“these novels targeted specific problematic aspects of the regnant hybrid political economy of colonialism in the South and industrial capitalism in the North: the increasing segregation of industrial labor from agricultural production, the global interconnectivity of trade, and the social fiction of money.”

“J. D. Beresford’s A World of Women, originally published in 1913”

“is chilling to follow the plot of this novel written a century before COVID-19: a virus emerges in China and begins to spread around the world because venal tradesmen and hapless politicians cannot bring themselves to shut down transit.”

“Something similar happens in H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free,”

“here Wells coined the term “atomic bomb.””

“Essentially all Jewish characters in Radium Age literature are suspect, vestiges of a passing age.”

“The second main anxiety, already indicated by the bacterial and viral disasters besieging Nordenholt and the Goslings, concerned humanity’s tenuous sense of control amid the unpredictable vicissitudes of nature.”

“The era was fixated on invasive species, be they insects or crops or Chinese laborers; eugenic movements were but one effort to combat degeneration.”

“Professor Challenger, a genius as likely to crack an inquiring journalist’s skull as the mysteries of the universe.” Note: Deleuze and Guattari’s professor. Hailing from mystery and science fiction—“speculation”/“investigation” as metaphysical research.

“Challenger’s team allies with the tribe of humans living on the mesa to engage in genocide—there is no other word for it—against an entire species of “ape-men” by driving most of them off the cliffs to their doom and enslaving the rest.” Note: Massumi: don’t deterritorialize too far…

“William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912). This is a weird book, much illuminated by Erik Davis’s introduction, and the sole volume in the series that the editors have abridged—by over a third. And thank goodness!”

“Hodgson was clearly an inspiration for generations of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, who learned a thing or two about hideous monsters from texts like this one, and Hodgson’s 1907 short story “The Voice in the Night” (in Voices from the Radium Age), stints on neither horror nor narrative propulsion.”

“Golden Age science fiction authors assume a manly universe of economy and of struggles against nature and war, and you might be tempted to take the Radium Age literature the same way.”

“reading these books one after the other raises a different idée fixe that was surely not a genre convention—for there was as yet no genre—but speaks to a deeply felt cultural sensibility. The Radium Age was thoroughly preoccupied with the emancipation of women.”

“There is tremendous diversity of plots and themes in Golden Age and later science fiction, of course, down to the present. After a long sojourn in the Radium Age, however, it is hard to escape the idea that while the formation of a specific genre of “science fiction” after Gernsback generated a certain imaginative impulse, it also diminished creativity in other directions.”

“The ubiquity of emancipated women in these novels and stories speaks to the importance of the absence of a solidified genre of “science fiction” during the Radium Age. In this series, similar themes to more venerable contemporary genres (like the “New Woman novel”) were introduced in much more varied works and to different audiences.”