“Voices from the Radium Age” edited by Joshua Glenn

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Rating: 3/5 Stars

An anthology of interesting ‘proto-SF’ stories from before the era known as the ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’. These stories show that some ideas about aliens, machine intelligence and the unknown are much older than they seem. However, due to their age, some stories may make modern audiences cringe at the depictions of humans at the time (as being ‘lesser beings’ compared to white people). My favourite stories here are by E. M. Forster and Arthur Conan Doyle, which I have read before in other anthologies, but are still cracking stories that show what SF (and horror) are capable of, even in those early times.

• “Sultana’s Dream (1905)” by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: a woman dreams and is transported to a land where women rule the country and men run the kitchen. It is, of course, a utopia.
• “The Voice in the Night (1907)” by William Hope Hodgson: a sailing vessel is hailed by a lone voice which refuses to reveal himself. But he tells the sailors the story of how he ends up being marooned on an island with nothing to eat but a fungus that slowly reveals its horrors.
• “The Machine Stops (1909)” by E. M. Forster: in a future where all of humanity lives in isolated underground cells, and their every need is catered to by the Machine, one mother reluctantly makes a journey to visit her son, who tells her an incredible story of surviving a trip to the surface of the Earth. But that would not be the last of it, for he would later tell her that the Machine is stopping. And that may well spell doom for humanity.
• “The Horror of the Heights (1913)” by Arthur Conan Doyle: an airman suspects, from the mysterious deaths of fellow flyers, that there is some kind of ‘jungle’ in the air. What he discovers, as later found written down in a stained journal when he journeys high up in the air, would be both wonderful and horrifying.
• “The Red One (1918)” by Jack London: a jungle explorer hears an extraordinary sound coming from the interior of a jungle, leading to a voyage filled with violent encounters with native tribe until he gets to the truth behind who or what is making the sound. But he may not survive to show it to the world.
• “The Comet (1920)” by W. E. B. Du Bois: Earth passes through the tail of a deadly comet, and the only two survivors in the city are a lowly black bank worker and a wealthy white heiress.
• “The Jameson Satellite (1931)” by Neil R. Jones: an eccentric person arranges for his dead body to be sent into space so that it would not be consumed by earthly decay. Millions of years later, an alien race discovers his body and revives him in a body of metal. Now, he has to decide if all he craves is to follow the human race into death, or join the aliens on a voyage of discovery.

Book read from 2023/08/14 to 2023/08/21