A collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth
century by authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle to W. E. B. Du
Bois.
This collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth
century features work by the famous (Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of
Sherlock Holmes), the no-longer famous ("weird fiction pioneer William
Hope Hodgson), and the should-be-more famous (Bengali feminist Rokeya
Sakhawat Hossain). It offers stories by writers known for concerns other
than science fiction (W. E. B. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black
Folk) and by writers known only for pulp science fiction (the prolific
Neil R. Jones). These stories represent what volume and series editor
Joshua Glenn has dubbed "the Radium Age"--the period when science
fiction as we know it emerged as a genre. The collection shows that
nascent science fiction from this era was prescient, provocative, and
well written.
Readers will discover, among other delights, a feminist utopia predating
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland by a decade in Hossain's story,
"Sultana's Dream"; a world in which the human population has retreated
underground, in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops"; an early entry in
the Afrofuturist subgenre in Du Bois's last-man-on-Earth tale, "The
Comet"; and the first appearance of Jones's cryopreserved Professor
Jameson, who despairs at Earth's wreckage but perseveres--in a metal
body--to appear in thirty-odd more stories.
