Joshua Glenn
This is the first “Voices of the Radium Age” story collection, which the MIT Press will publish alongside reissued proto-sf novels originally published between 1900 and 1935. As editor of the series and this collection, I hope that readers will come to share my appreciation for what I’ve dubbed the science fiction genre’s formative “Radium Age.”
In selecting the stories for our inaugural collection, I wanted to showcase famous authors (e.g., Arthur Conan Doyle, E. M. Forster, Jack London), who, unbeknownst to today’s readers, contributed to the emergence of what Hugo Gernsback would name “science fiction.” I also wanted to call attention to more obscure writers (e.g., William Hope Hodgson, Neil R. Jones), whose work would prove influential on science fiction’s so-called Golden Age. And it was important that the collection also include writers (e.g., Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, W. E. B. Du Bois) who courageously disrupted the nascent sf genre’s mostly white, male, Western fiefdom.
The scholarly aim of this collection, and the series as a whole, is to persuade today’s readers that many future-, science-, and technology-oriented “fantastic stories” from circa 1900 to 1935 are not only prescient and provocative but also well written. Our unscholarly aim is simply to entertain: in addition to being of great historical interest, these tales are fun to read!
The author of the earliest story in this collection was a Bengali feminist thinker, writer, educator, and activist. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, known after her death as Begum Rokeya (a “begum” is a Muslim woman of high rank), would go on to establish the first school for Muslim girls in Calcutta; and she founded the Muslim Women’s Association, which fought for women’s education and employment and against extreme forms of purdah. “Sultana’s Dream” (published 1905, in the English-language periodical the Indian Ladies’ Magazine; 1908, in book form) is a feminist utopia that precedes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland by a good ten years.
Like the author herself, our narrator, Sultana, is a “purdahnishin”—that is, she practices purdah, whereby women are sequestered in a home’s separate “zenana” area. Transported (in a dream, or perhaps she’s been summoned into the future by a scientist looking to divert the course of history) to Ladyland, Sultana is at first nervous to venture outside. Isn’t it dangerous for women out there? Her female scientist companion, however, reassures her that it’s safe . . . because, thirty years earlier, during a war that killed off most of the city-state’s menfolk, the surviving men were ordered to isolate themselves indoors. They’ve remained there ever since.
Fredric Jameson argues persuasively, in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), that we should privilege those sf narratives that unveil a vision of a truly different world versus those that merely offer a situation-specific response to a concrete historical dilemma. Regarding the latter, he is thinking of scientific romances like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwardand other naive early utopias, as opposed to the wised-up “anti-anti-utopias” of Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, and other New Wave sf writers of the 1960s and 1970s. Begum Rokeya’s story is Bellamy-esque, to be sure, with its weather-controlling technology, solar-powered flying cars, and streets paved with flowers. But it’s instructive to revisit the social ills that concerned the author, particularly since we’ve made so very little progress since then.
The two-hour workday of Ladyland, for example, seems ever less possible for today’s workers, who are not only exploited by their employers but bamboozled into believing that “the hustle” is what gives life meaning. And forget about flying cars. When will we ever see realized what Sultana glimpses: the abolition of fossil-fuel technologies, the green-ifying of cities, the detoxification of masculinity, and the triumph of love and truth over fear and hatred?
William Hope Hodgson, whose short story “The Voice in the Night” first appeared in the November 1907 issue of the US pulp magazine Blue Book, was an English sailor, bodybuilder, poet, and groundbreaking author of what is now called “weird fiction” and sf. His recurring character Carnacki is a forerunner of occult detectives from Sax Rohmer’s Moris Klaw to Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy; his novels The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912) are required reading; and China Miéville has credited Hodgson with the “weird tentacle” meme later popularized by H. P. Lovecraft.
There are certainly weird tentacles—or pseudopods, perhaps—aplenty in “The Voice in the Night,” one of the first-ever yarns about fungal–human symbiosis. A schooner becalmed in an eerie Northern Pacific fog encounters a man, or what’s left of one, who rows out to them from a nearby island. He and his fiancée are the survivors of a shipwreck, and the island to which they’ve drifted on their raft is infected with a lichenous fungus that seems to have sinister intent.
I won’t spoil the plot, but suffice it to say the island is a Boschian hellscape where the vile fungus rises “into horrible, fantastic mounds, which seemed almost to quiver, as with a quiet life, when the wind blew across them. . . . Odd places, it appeared as grotesque stunted trees, seeming extraordinarily kinked and gnarled—the whole quaking vilely at times.”
Brrr. This story, which was a favorite of Hitchcock’s, and which was adapted in 1963 as a Japanese horror movie, is a particularly poignant one during our COVID-19 moment. Realizing that “it would be unallowable to go among healthy humans, with the things from which we were suffering,” the stranded couple must decide whether or not to socially isolate . . . forever.
Speaking of social isolation (and fungi), Vashti, protagonist of E. M. Forster’s novelette “The Machine Stops” (1909, in The Oxford and Cambridge Review; 1928, in the collection The Eternal Moment and Other Stories) hasn’t exited her room in months. “An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk—that is all the furniture,” we read. “And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh—a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus.”
Is Vashti a prisoner? By no means: She’s at liberty to leave her condo underneath Sumatra, and travel the world. Like most of her contemporaries, though, she prefers not to. Twenty years before Aldous Huxley would write Brave New World, Forster gives us a dystopian utopia in which one’s every physiological, safety, esteem, and self-actualization need is met . . . yet one’s social life has been reduced to the equivalent of Snapchat, YouTube, and TED Talks. “She knew several thousand people,” we learn of lucky Vashti. The author’s wit is at its driest when he goes on to add, “in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.”
Living, or at least existing, in a future world, the human population of which has retreated underground, Vashti’s prison is an invisible one . . . the bars of which are fashioned by over-solicitous technology, ...
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