“More Voices from the Radium Age” edited by Joshua Glenn
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Rating: 3/5 Stars
Another set of interesting stories from what the editor calls the Radium Age, when SFF was just beginning to be formed from speculative ideas. Stories that I found interesting from the anthology are by H. G. Wells, Valery Bryusov, Algernon Blackwood and A. Merritt.
- “The Last Days of Earth (1901)” by George C. Wallis: a couple prepare to leave a cold and dying Earth. But their journey would be interrupted by an unexpected event.
- “The Land Ironclads (1903)” by H. G. Wells: a war correspondent on the front line sees a battle between rifles, cannons and mounted calvary against cyclists and land ironclads (metal war machines with artillery). An interesting futuristic note is the use by the ironclad gunners of control by wire to operate the guns.
- “The Republic of the Southern Cross (1907)” by Valery Bryusov: the Antarctic becomes an independent country, with its capital at the South Pole. Life there is strictly regimented and controlled. But then an uncontrollable epidemic hits.
- “The Third Drug (1908)” by E. Nesbit: escaping from robbers, a man stumbles into the house of a doctor, who proceeds to give him a series of drugs in an attempt to turn him to a superman, with inhuman knowledge about the world.
- “A Victim of Higher Space (1914)” by Algernon Blackwood: a doctor gets a visit from an unusual patient: for the patient is both there and neither there, caught by an ability to see higher dimensions and is now a part of them. And the patient wishes to stop visiting those higher dimensions.
- “The People of the Pit (1918)” by A. Merritt: two voyagers north to find a legendary mountain with flowing gold instead encounter an eerie, evil light that urges them towards the mountain. Instead, they rescue a man who has been to the mountain and seen the pit that lies below it; and the inhabitants of the pit.
- “The Thing from—‘Outside’ (1923)” by George Allan England: an expedition to the north struggles to escape as ‘something’ invisible pursues them and slowly drives them mad.
- “The Finding of the Absolute (1923)” by May Sinclair: a man dies, only to find himself in a heaven where his thoughts can span all space and time.
- “The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis (1926)” by Booth Tarkington: a story about the Atlantis, about how two factions fought each other until they caused Atlantis to sink. Only here, the two factions are men and women, fighting over equality and the right of women to wear veils.
Book read from 2024/03/19 to 2024/03/24