![]() ![]() Forster (yes, the same Forster of A Passage to India), which imagines a technological dystopia in which humanity has condemned itself to voluntary social isolation and endless Zoom calls. (More on William Hope Hodgson in a bit.) Glenn’s goal is often to surprise the reader with an unexpected offering, such as “The Machine Stops,” a 1909 story by E. The evenings I spent curled up with these 10 novels and two collections of short stories were captivating, even when the quality of a work occasionally left something to be desired. 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.” The selection of works is not so much an argument for coherence as a catch-all to enable readers to revel in its heterogeneity. Heinlein, and many others-falls a chasm of books of uncertain genre, most of which have fallen out of print and memory. 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. Wells and Jules Verne “proto-SF.” After a few decades, as experiments in the porous genre began to wander far afield from anything that could generously be called “science,” some opted for designations like the broad-minded “speculative fiction” or the forgiving “SF.”Ī new series from MIT Press, lovingly curated by Joshua Glenn, and earlier heralded here at Los Angeles Review of Books, sidesteps disputation about the genre in favor of straightforward chronology. The term is credited to the founder of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback, who deployed it in 1929, mercifully rendering void his earlier portmanteau coinage, “scientifiction.” Technically speaking, publications of older vintage are not science fiction, but it seems absurd to designate the classic 19th-century novels of H. ![]() ONE COULD GET caught up in a purist fervor about what counts as “science fiction,” but it isn’t worth it. ![]()
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