During science fiction's Golden Age (roughly, 1935-65), scores of novels and stories depicted vast natural disasters. If 9/11 was the real-life version of a New York catastrophe we'd seen in SF many times before, Al Gore's melting-glaciers slideshow in An Inconvenient Truth was, uncannily, only the latest of many global-warming cataclysms about which SF fans had read in novels about, for example, sea-dwelling aliens (John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes), nuclear testing (Charles Eric Maine's The Tide Went Out), even the stalling-out of the Earth's rotation (Brian Aldiss's Hothouse).

J.G. Ballard's 1960s disaster tetralogy, and Golden-Age classics like George R. Stewart's Earth Abides helped legitimate and popularize the eco-disaster novel. But the writing of the natural disaster, as Blanchot might put it, is a pre-Golden Age phenomenon. Richard Jefferies' 1885 romance After London vividly depicted an England that had reverted to neo-medieval civilization after a Planet X-like "dark body" disrupted the Earth's climate; and Camille Flammarion's popular Omega: The Last Days of the World (1893-94 French, 1897 English) imagined the dissipation of the Earth's atmosphere after a comet strike. The Panama Canal project also sparked fears: In 1890, H.C.M.W.'s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire was among the first of many portrayals of the disastrous effects of merging the Atlantic with the Pacific via the Canal. Still, it wasn't until the early 20th century that the eco-catastrophe emerged as a literary sub-genre.

Here's a rundown — in no particular order — of 10 eco-catastrophes from SF's Pre-Golden Age (1904-33) that are particularly enjoyable and/or significant. Those influential examples on which I focused in my post on PGA apocalypses aren't written up here.

1) PLANT-KILLING VIRUS, in J.J. Connington's Nordenholt's Million (1923; 1948 reprint shown here).
As denitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth spread around the world, causing agricultural blight, British car manufacturer Jack Flint is invited to become director of operations at a huge survivalist colony located in England's Clyde Valley. Superficially, Nordenholt's Million is a direct precursor of John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1956), and many other Golden-Age SF novels. [PGA fictions on the same topic include: Edgar Wallace's The Green Rust (Aug. 7-28, 1919), and Charles J. Finger's The Spreading Stain (1927).] But Connington is also issuing a timely warning — he was writing between the two world wars — about right-wing politicians and rapacious businessmen eager to use any disaster as an excuse to dispense with democracy, liberty, and justice.

Flint discovers that his employer, the ruthless plutocrat Stanley Nordenholt, has blackmailed the country's politicians in order to establish his stronghold, of which he becomes dictator in all but name. What's more, Nordenholt's henchmen purposely wreck what remains of British civilization, leading to scenes of horrific mass violence and agony; and the colony's workers are treated like serfs. (Does this sound a lot like Ayn Rand's 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, except not so favorably disposed to the industrialists and capitalists? Does to me, too.) In the end, the plant-killing plague comes to the end of its cycle. But things may never get back to normal. Nordenholt's collectivized serfs - Connington was also worried about the Soviet Revolution - snap. They refuse to work, blow up the factories on which their fragile community depends, and join weird religious cults. Fun facts: Connington was the pseudonym of Alfred Walter Stewart, the British chemist who coined the term isobar as complementary to isotope.

2) METEORITE, in Fred MacIsaac's The Hothouse World (serialized Feb. 21-March 28, 1931; 1950 reprint shown here).
George Putnam, a science student who's been in suspended animation since 1951, wakes up a century later in a technologically advanced utopia. He discovers that the domed city in which he now lives was built and stocked - by a foresighted group of scientists and their families - shortly before a comet struck the Earth in '87. Much of the planet's atmosphere was dissipated, and human and animal life perished in the new Ice Age. Alas, the utopian city turns out to be repressive (hello, Logan's Run, countless others). When it becomes apparent that there are habitable areas outside the dome, the population riots and Putnam attempts to escape, along with a dissident scientist and - of course - the president's beautiful daughter.

3) DYING SUN, in Gabriel De Tarde's Underground Man (w. 1884, p. 1896 in the Revue internationale de sociologie as Fragment d'histoire future, p. 1905 in English).
By the year 2489, Plato's Republic has been realized, for better or worse: a worldwide neo-Hellenic culture of sophistication and creativity dominates; selective breeding is practiced; and weak and stupid individuals of every race are sent to fight wars. As a result, intuition and survival skills have been bred out of the population. So when astronomers determine that the sun is going out, the citizens of this dystopian utopia rapidly lose the will to go on.

A sudden drop in temperature wipes out entire populations; the world is covered in ice and snow. Europe's survivors flee to the Sahara and the Middle East, where the only plan their greatest minds can devise is an inadequate one: a huge, furnace-heated concrete bunker, situated over a rich coal deposit. "Of the beautiful human race, so strong and noble, formed by so many centuries of effort and genius by such an extended and intelligent selection, there would soon have been only left... a few hundreds of haggard and trembling specimens, unique trustees of the last ruins of what had once been civilization." [I should point out that the survivalist bunker mentality is presented more favorably in other PGA fictions, including Clare Winger Harris's "A Runaway World" (July 1926), Morrison Colladay's "When the Moon Fell" (1929), and John and Ruth Vassos's Ultimo (1930).] Humankind is saved when a fellow named Miltiades, whom the narrator describes as "one of those who piously guard, deep in their heart, the seeds of dissidence" (even in a utopian social order, that is), urges the others to tunnel beneath the surface of the planet, closer to the earth's warm center.

Once life has been established underground, a new civilization evolves. While every spring a few individuals who desire engagement with "nature" voyage to the surface of the planet, never to return, the rest of the populace prefer to contemplate artistic and scientific representations of the natural world. Recordings of natural life on the planet's surface are discovered, but the underground men and women decide that artificial versions of these sights and sounds are far superior. Tarde's Underground Man is, in other words, a prequel of sorts to Plato's Myth of the Cave. So when a "madman" reports that he's been to the surface of the planet, where he's seen a revived sun melting the ice, the reader is not surprised when many of the citizens of this overly idealistic (in the Platonic sense) civilization refuse to investigate.

Fun facts: Tarde was a French sociologist, criminologist, and social philosopher who gave us such influential concepts as the "group mind" and economic psychology. Bruno Latour describes Tarde as "a truly daring but also, I have to admit, totally undisciplined mind."

4) GREEN TECHNOLOGY, in Andre Maurois' The Next Chapter: The War Against the Moon (1927; in English translation, 1928).
A meditation on the gullibility of the masses, and the dangerous influence of newspapers. Ben Tabrit, a great Moroccan scientist, invents a revolutionary "wind-accumulator"; this is in 1963, during a period of worldwide peace engineered by five benevolent newspaper barons known as the Dictators of Public Opinion. Thanks to a combination of worldwide boredom, the prospect of unemployment in the coal and oil industries (because of wind energy), and squabbling among nations about ownership of the world's windiest places, a new world war seems imminent.

Two of the DPOs conspire to avert war by uniting the human race against a common outside enemy. (Hello, Alan Moore's Ozymandias.) The enemy? The imaginary inhabitants of the Moon, whom hoax newspaper stories soon accuse of wiping out remote villages around the world with powerful death rays. All goes well, and a Worldwide Wind Company is established. But then the scientist Tabrit invents a death ray of his own, and fires it at the Moon. Unfortunately, it turns out that the Moon really is inhabited, and the Moon-men blast the city of Darmstadt. The Earth retaliates. The novella's final sentences: "On February 7th, the cities of Elbeuf (France), Bristol, Rhode Island, and Upsala (Sweden) were burned to ashes by the Moon. The era of Inter-Planetary War had begun." Fun facts: Maurois was a distinguished French litterateur. Other eco-catastrophes involving aliens: Homer Eon Flint's Out of the Moon (Dec. 1923 - Jan 1924), in which Lunarians plan to cause a solar flare that will incinerate or severely damage the Earth; and Flint's The King of Conserve Island (Oct. 12, 1918), in which a war between Earth and its Jupiter colony is averted by a device that makes the sun go dim.

5) CAPITALIST SCHEME, in William Wallace Cook's "Tales of Twenty Hundred" (serialized Dec. 1911-May 1912).
In 2050, financial and industrial magnate Vincent Blake and his fiancée, Arlie Fortescue, dodge one kidnapping and assassination attempt after another as Blake proceeds with plans to stabilize climatic conditions by "straightening the axis of the planet." Although Cook, a prolific dime novelist, tended to satirize Vernian romances whenever he turned to SF, in these six linked stories he's earnestly imagining a future world improved by technology in the hands of benevolent capitalists.

But is Cook in earnest? The Blake character would today be portrayed as a villain, while the kidnappers and hit men - who are agents of the Federated States of South America, the leaders of which are fully aware that Blake's supposedly benevolent plans will benefit only his backers (the US, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, Japan), and will create chaos elsewhere - would be portrayed as heroes. Even at the time, fictional capitalists with climate-change schemes were suspect; for example, the shady protagonists of William Hawley Smith's 1904 SF novel, The Promoters, who speculate in land that will become valuable once they've thawed the Arctic, are villainous. So are the Boston Irish crooks who attempt to profit from their advance knowledge of a chlorophyll-killing plague about to be visited on Earth from outer space, in George Allan England's 1918 The Nebula of Death.

So don't be fooled by Cook's tacked-on happy ending, in which Martians - who heartily approve of Blake's climatic-change plans - appear out of nowhere in order to rescue Vincent and Arlie from a trap. This isn't, in other words, a romance-of-capitalism fable, or a straightforward Edisonade (like, say, George Griffith's 1906 The Great Weather Syndicate, in which a robber baron and British inventor battle a sinister syndicate and also Kaiser Wilhelm in their race to control the world's weather). Instead, "Tales of Twenty Hundred" is - or so I'd like to believe - a comedy of the blackest sort. Fun fact: Cook cranked out 66,000 words a week, thanks to a semi-aleatory writing mode of writing whose secrets he later revealed in a gonzo fiction-writing manual delightfully titled Plotto.

6) THE PANAMA CANAL, in Louis Pope Gratacap's The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream (1908).
Despite geologists' warnings that the Panama Canal will cause the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to merge, with cataclysmic results, the Canal is finished. (Canal enthusiast Teddy Roosevelt is one of the book's characters.) Sure enough, entire countries must be evacuated because of climatic changes: "The sheltering power of the Gulf Stream was removed from Great Britain, and the frost of the Arctic world, so long repulsed, but now no longer compressed within the Arctic circle, expanded with instantaneous certainty, spreading the shroud of its killing cold over the same latitudes in Europe that for ages had slept beneath its spell in America." The novel's rather drippy protagonist, a businessman named Leacraft, is an eyewitness.

The Evacuation of England isn't thrilling. As E.F. Bleiler notes, "Leacraft's insipid romance is buried amid overlong didactic digressions." But its depiction of a new Ice Age is eerily realistic. Fun facts: Gratacap was a naturalist associated with New York's American Museum of Natural History for over 40 years; when he died in 1917, he was head of the museum's departments of mineralogy and conchology. Other SF novels: The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars (1903), The Mayor of New York (1910), The New Northland (1915), and the supernatural future tale The End - How the Great War was Stopped (1917). He also wrote works of theology (e.g., The Analytics of a Belief in a Future Life) and politics (e.g., Why the Democrats Must Go). READ IT

7) MARTIAN INVASION, in Austin Hall's "The Man Who Saved the Earth" (serialized Dec. 13, 1919).
Opalescent globes of force appear across the world, removing large chunks of land and ocean. One such globe, in the course of sucking up enormous quantities of ocean water, causes the Gulf Stream to be diverted, among other changes with radical effects. Charles Huyck, a maverick scientist, realizes that Martians - whose planet is dying, as proposed by Percival Lowell - are stealing Earth's natural resources. Devising a long-range solar weapon, Huyck disables the Martians' globe-creating apparatus. Fun fact: The Blind Spot, a novel that Hall wrote with fellow hack Homer Eon Flint, has been called (by Damon Knight) "the worst science fiction novel ever published."

8) MAD SCIENTIST, in Murray Leinster's "A Thousand Degrees Below Zero" (serialized July 15, 1919).
August, of a year in the near future: An extreme cold wave strikes New York, blocking the harbor with ice. Similar events occur in Gibraltar, Yokohama, elsewhere. A villainous scientist named Wladislas Varrhus takes credit for the cold weather, and threatens worse if he is not recognized as ruler of the world. Varrhus is ignored, until authorities determine that he has, indeed, mastered liquid hydrogen and superconductivity. Efforts are made to stop him, but they fail. Finally, Varrhus's sinister black plane is shot down in an air battle. More PGA eco-catastrophes caused by mad scientists: Burnie L. Bevill's "Restoring the Moon" (Sept. 1922), Leinster's "The Storm That Had To Be Stopped" (March 1, 1930), and Edmond Hamilton's "The Plant Revolt" (April 1930; a precursor of Day of the Triffids).

Fun facts: Murray Leinster (William Fitzgerald Jenkins) was a prolific pulp writer, one of the few SF writers from the 1930s to survive in the John W. Campbell era of higher standards; he's credited with the invention of parallel universe (or alternate worlds) stories, as well as some of the earliest descriptions of computers and the Internet. He was also an inventor, best known for the front-projection process used in special effects.

9) GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVALS, in S. Fowler Wright's Deluge: A Romance (1927).
A global upheaval turns oceans into deserts, and sinks land masses everywhere except what remains of the English midlands, which are transformed into an archipelago. (Hello, Waterworld.) With a marked lack of idealism, Wright - who also translated Dante's Inferno, and who uses this novel to criticize 1920s British society - tells the story of a new Adam and Eve: Martin Webster, a lawyer who attempts to find his wife; and Claire Arlington, an athlete ("like a valkyrie") and one of the few women to survive the flood. The two store up food, fend off feral dogs, and battle sex-starved and flood-maddened miners, laborers, and vagabonds. If it wasn't so un-cozy, you'd have to call Wright's novel an early example of the cozy catastrophe - because the author is obviously thrilled that modern civilization, with its motorcars and bureaucrats, is gone.

Fun fact: A shocked Time Magazine review of the time contains the following fun description of Deluge. "Follows matter enough for a dozen penny dreadfuls, threepenny thrillers: a fight with sledgehammer and dirk in the lurid shadows of a gypsy fire-Claire's body gleaming white but for the dark cords that bind her ankles and wrists; a struggle in the dank blackness of a railway tunnel which a gang of Claire's suitors blockade at one end, while others sneak in opposite: 'Kill the man, but save the wench! . . .' A relic of civilized scruple holds Martin from killing a hairy giant furnaceman, because he has sprawled over the tracks and technically is down. But Claire sees the prostrate giant heave a rock, and, with no scruples, jabs him, hacks, thwacks, kills, saving Martin's life."

10) COSMIC DUST, in Bruno Hans Bürgel's "The Cosmic Cloud" (German story published circa 1921; serialized, in English translation, Fall 1931).
A cloud of cosmic dust permeates the solar system, circa 2300, and most of Europe and the former north and south temperate zones are covered in ice. By the year 3000 life is nearly extinct, except in Africa, where a mixed-race civilization survives. A scientist, Johannes Baumgart, proposes a voyage to the Moon, because of his theory that intelligent life with advanced technology exists there. In a proto-Ballardian ending, the voyage is a failure. Earth is doomed! Fun facts: Bürgel was a factory worker who studied astronomy in his spare time, and was eventually hired as an observer at Germany's first public observatory. His 1908 book, From Distant Worlds; A Popular Science of the Sky, which argued that millions of inhabited worlds may exist within the universe, was a popular success.

Joshua Glenn is co-editor of the website Hilobrow.com. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary. He's also written for io9 about Pre-Golden Age SF's coolest robots, super-est supermen, mad mentalists, best apocalypses, and most amazing cover art.

ALSO OF INTEREST

Here's a more complete list of PGA eco-catastrophes. For kicks, I've included stories and novels in which climatic and atmospheric change, weather control, and solar or "green" energy technology rate a mention. Confused about my eccentric SF periodization scheme? Here's a guide.

NINETEENTH CENTURY (1804-1903)

* Faddei Bulgarin, Plausible Fantasies of a Journey in the 29th Century (1824)
* Edgar Allan Poe, "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (Dec. 1839)
* Alexander Pitts Bettersworth, The Strange MS. By ___ M.D. (1883)
* Richard Jefferies, After London, or Wild England (1885)
* A. Bleunard, Babylon Electrified 1888 French, 1890 English)
* H.C.M.W., The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1890)
* Chauncey Thomas, The Crystal Button: Or, Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-Ninth Century (1891)
* Robert Barr, "The Doom of London" (Nov. 1892)
* Byron A. Brooks, Earth Revisited (1893)
* John Jacob Astor, A Journey in Other Worlds (1894)
* Louis Boussenard, Ten Thousand Years in a Block of Ice (1889, French)
* Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World (1893-94 French, 1897 English)
* Lysander Salmon Richards, Breaking Up (1896)
* John Mills, "The Aerial Brickfield" (June 1897)
* H.G. Wells, "The Star" (1897)
* Otto Mundo, The Recovered Continent: A Tale of the Chinese Invasion (1898)
* Robert Barr, "Within an Ace of the End of the World" (April 1900)
* M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901)
* George C. Wallis, "The Last Days of Earth" (1901)
* Fred M. White, "The Dust of Death" (April 1903)
* Ira S. Bunker, A Thousand Years Hence (1903)

THE NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13)

* William Hawley Smith, The Promoters: A Novel Without a Woman (1904)
* George Griffith, The Great Weather Syndicate (1906)
* Louis Pope Gratacap, The Evacuation of England (1908)
* H. Percy Blanchard, After the Cataclysm (1909)
* William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land (1912)
* Garrett P. Serviss, The Second Deluge (1912)
* William Wallace Cook, "Tales of Twenty Hundred" (Dec. 1911-May 1912)
* Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt (1913)

THE TEENS (1914-23)

* George Allen England, Darkness and Dawn (1914)
* George Allen England, The Nebula of Death (Feb.-May 1918)
* Homer Eon Flint, The King of Conserve Island (Oct. 12, 1918)
* Edgar Wallace, The Green Rust (Aug. 7-28, 1919)
* Murray Leinster, "A Thousand Degrees Below Zero" (July 15, 1919)
* Austin Hall, "The Man Who Saved the Earth" (Dec. 13, 1919)
* Murray Leinster, The Mad Planet (June 12, 1920)
* Burnie L. Bevill, "Restoring the Moon" (Sept. 1922)
* J.J. Connington, Nordenholt's Million (1923)
* Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C41+ (1923)
* Homer Eon Flint, Out of the Moon (Dec. 1923 - Jan 1924)

THE TWENTIES (1924-33)

* Clare Winger Harris, "A Runaway World" (July 1926)
* S. Fowler Wright, Deluge: A Romance (1927)
* Charles J. Finger, The Spreading Stain (1927)
* Otfrid Von Hanstein, Utopia Island (1927 German, 1931 English)
* Andre Maurois, The Next Chapter (1927 French; 1928 English)
* Edmond Hamilton, "The Time-Raider" (Oct. 1927-Jan. 1928)
* Edmond Hamilton, "The Polar Doom" (Nov. 1928)
* Ray Cummings, A Brand New World (Sept. 22-Oct. 27, 1928)
* Morrison Colladay, "When the Moon Fell" (1929)
* Leslie F. Stone, "When the Sun Went Out" (1929)
* Ray Cummings, The Snow Girl (Nov. 1929)
* Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930)
* John and Ruth Vassos, Ultimo (1930)
* Murray Leinster, "The Storm That Had To Be Stopped" (March 1, 1930)
* Edmond Hamilton, "The Plant Revolt" (April 1930)
* Bruno Hans Bürgel, "The Cosmic Cloud" (1921 German, 1931 English)
* Fred MacIsaac, The Hothouse World (Feb. 21-March 28, 1931)

In the late 19th century, scholars and scientists in Europe and America turned their collective attention not only to the mind, but to the paranormal. In 1882, the term "telepathy" was coined by a founder of the Society for Psychical Research; a boom in occult, proto-SF, and SF romances featuring various kinds of extra-sensory perceptions followed. Since 1892, as near as I can make out, at least one telepathy-related SF novel has been published every single year. (With one exception: 1910.) As with the SF superman, the telepath is an uncanny figure: alluring, impressive, inspiring, but also terrifying. We love and hate them. We want them out of our heads!

Here's a rundown - in no particular order - of 10 of my favorite telepaths from 1904-33 SF. There's a more complete list at the end. Also: Read about Pre-Golden Age SF's coolest robots, super-est supermen, best apocalypses, and most amazing cover art; and also my eccentric SF periodization scheme.

1) ZEE, in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871). The unnamed narrator finds his way into a too-perfect subterranean civilization peopled by the Vril-ya. Zee, a scholarly young female, takes him under her wing (literally, at times). Having taken refuge from a Deluge millennia earlier, the Vril-ya have evolved into a master race who can focus their wills to use "Vril," a Force-like source of energy, for anything and everything from healing to destroying, from shaping matter to powering machines, and from mesmerization to telepathy.

("Zee asked me if, in my world, it was not known that all the faculties of the mind could be quickened to a degree unknown in the waking state, by trance or vision, in which the thoughts of one brain could be transmitted to another, and knowledge be thus rapidly interchanged.") Though he discovers that the Vril-ya, whose advances have rendered them amoral, are running out of habitable space and plan to (re)claim the surface of the planet, the narrator is released by Zee. Fun facts: Bulwer-Lytton's popular novel influenced J.R.R. Tolkien (the rings of power), Nazi mystics, Hollow Earth theorists, Tesla's research into remote control, and England's "fluid beef" product Bovril (Bovine + Vril).
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2) STELLA, in George Allan England's The Empire in the Air (serialized 1914). Paul Kramer, a daredevil flyer is abducted — or, rather, sublimated — into the fourth dimension while attempting to set a new altitude record over Boston. His fiancee, Stella, is highly mediumistic, so Kramer is able to warn her of an attack by beings from "beyond the universe."

In search of life energy, these globs of solidified light "at absolute zero" plan to disintegrate the Earth. How to stop them? Communicating via Stella, Kramer instructs fellow aviators to fly up to the altitude where he disappeared and join him in the fourth dimension. They do so, and — by focusing their collective will power — are able to fire the atmospheric dust left in the Earth's atmosphere, via the eruption of Krakatoa. This destroys the invading aliens, and Earth is saved. Fun fact: England is the author of three other excellent early SF novels, The Air Trust, Darkness and Dawn, and The Flying Legion.
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3) DR. KINNEY & CO., in Homer Eon Flint's The Devolutionist (novella, serialized 1921). Flint was one the outstanding pre-Amazing Stories pulp SF writers. His "Dr. Kinney" series (The Lord Of Death, The Queen Of Life, The Devolutionist, and "The Emancipatrix") explore theories about, for example, the survival of the fittest and benign dictatorships... on other planets. Having learned how to visit other worlds telepathically, without leaving Earth — i.e., by means of Venusian technology — Kinney and his companions enter the minds and share the sensations of the inhabitants of a human-like civilization on a double planet. One planet (Hafen) is the abode of capitalists; the other (Holl) of workers. Not content merely to study the goings-on, Kinney & co. help the workers' revolutionary party stop the Hafenites from invading the nearby planet Alma, which is inhabited by "'cooperative democrats'; that is, they do not compete with each other for a living, but work together in all things, in complete equality." Then a Hafenite WMD separates the twin planets. Fun facts: Flint reportedly died as a result of an involvement in a bank robbery attempt. In 1965, Ace published The Devolutionist, and The Emancipatrix together, under a single title; best title ever?
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4) ?, in Muriel Jaeger's The Man with Six Senses (1927). Muriel Jaeger's Pre-Golden Age SF novels sound fascinating, and terrific. She was at Oxford with one of my favorite mystery writers, Dorothy L. Sayers, which makes me imagine that her style is equally erudite yet funny. Her first novel, The Question Mark (1926), has been described as a "Libertarian socialist utopia" and a "scientific romance." I also like the sound of Jaeger's SF novels Sisyphyus, or the Limits of Psychology (1929), Hermes Speaks (1933), and Retreat from Armageddon (1936). But they're all deeply out of print, and expensive; so I've never read any of 'em.

Still, I'm including The Man with Six Senses on this Top Ten list because SF scholars call it one of the first attempts at thoughtfully, even painstakingly extrapolating what it might mean to have extra-sensory perceptions... leading to the conclusion that it might be more of a burden than a blessing. Alas, these scholars don't mention the young male protagonist's name, so I can't provide it here. Fun fact: Jaeger's SF novels were published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press.
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5) ORO and YVA, in H. Rider Haggard's When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot (serialized 1918-19). A fantasy novel of the discovery and awakening of two Atlanteans who have been in a state of suspended animation for 250,000 years. In one of the few SF tales by the author of King Solomon's Mines and She, Humphrey Arbuthnot and companions discover the last two survivors of an Atlantis-like advanced civilization; they have been in a state of suspended animation for 250,000 years. Now awoken, the scientist Oro — who'd been the civilization's priest-king — uses his paranormal mental abilities (clairvoyance, teleportation, mind control) to study WWI-era Europe and its colonies. Dismayed by the miserable and degenerate state of affairs he sees, Oro decides to destroy humankind. His daughter Yva (Eve) sacrifices herself to prevent him from doing so. By no means Haggard's best work, but even his least original material is more thrilling than most.
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6) DROWSY, in J.A. Mitchell's Drowsy (1917). Cyrus Alton, a telepath nicknamed Drowsy because of his drooping eyelids, grows up to attend MIT and become a brilliant scientist. He invents a spaceship equipped with an antigravity mechanism, and flies to the moon, returning with a fantastic diamond... and then, impelled by a psychic bond with a childhood sweetheart, rescues her before she joins a convent.

Of greater interest, though, is Mitchell's account of Drowsy's childhood. Is he the first of a new species: homo superior? Like the title character of Beresford's Hampdenshire Wonder, the boy's evolved worldview offends his narrow-minded elders. Especially when, for example, he cuts his favorite illustrations out of a Bible; or insists on the morality of untruths; or demands to know why "teacher doesn't tell us things worth knowing." Like Daniel Clowes's Enid Coleslaw, that is to say, Drowsy is a cranky middle-aged freethinker in a child's body. Fun facts: The author, a Harvard dropout and idler, founded the original LIFE Magazine, later purchased by Henry Luce, in 1883. Also: With Horace Greeley, Mitchell founded the Fresh Air Fund.

7) TIZOC, in Herbert Clock and Eric Boetzel's Light in the Sky (1929). An unnamed narrator is kidnapped, and wakes up in an Aztlan, an underground civilization where the Aztecs — he discovers — have been living ever since they fled from Cortez in the time of Montezuma's defeat. In the intervening centuries, they've invented airships, solar power, sleep rays, and rejuvenation/immortality, not to mention an atomic-energy-style weapon called the Eighth Color. Aztlan's leader is Tizoc, Montezuma's brother, a telepath who has mastered the electromagnetic spectrum.

Discovering that he's a descendant of Cortez whose ritual sacrifice will mark the re-emergence of the Aztecs into the surface world, which they plan to conquer, the narrator plans to escape. (Up to this point, the novel closely rips off The Coming Race.) Tizoc reads his mind and reveals something that even his own son doesn't know: Instead of conquering the surface world, he plans to benefit it with Aztec science. Then Tizoc is killed by his son, and Aztlan is destroyed. Fun fact: Everett F. Bleiler says of this novel that "One has the impression that the authors sought to write the wildest possible story."
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8) REZ, in Paul Ernst's The Black Monarch (serialized Feb.-June 1930). Yet another Coming Race-style yarn. In 1992, Dr. Sanderson, foster-son of an inventor who's created a machine that can respond to thought waves, detects the presence of an immensely evil being in Algeria. He and an adventurer, Neil Emory, discover a subterranean civilization beneath that country; it is ruled by Rez, an immortal ancient Egyptian whose brain is so enlarged that he's replaced his own skull with a metal contraption. Rez has highly developed paranormal powers — he converses telepathically, and, with the aid of a huge diamond crystal, controls the wills of his small, robot-like subjects. From his underground lair he's manipulating the world into a war that will smash civilization as we know it. Despite being overpowered and tortured by Rez, Sanderson and Emory must find a way to defeat him. Fun facts: From 1939-42, under the name Kenneth Robeson, Ernst would write the original 24 Avenger stories for the magazine of that title. Pulp expert Don Hutchison has called Ernst "a prolific manufacturer of potboilers-made-to-order."

9) HARRY MAXWELL, in Lilith Lorraine's The Brain of the Planet (1929). In 1935 Harry Maxwell, a radical and brilliant young scientist, becomes convinced that telepathy is merely a technical question, a matter of positive (sending) and negative (receiving) minds. He and some friends build a wireless transmission station in Mexico... but instead of broadcasting radio waves, they broadcast thought waves that derive their energy from the collective unconscious. Their message? Altruism. Left- and right-wing fanatics everywhere drop dead upon impact; everyone else responds positively. Before you know it, a united world state governs a populace in which everyone is socially, economically, and sexually fulfilled. Fun fact: Lorraine, whose real name was Mary M. Wright, was a poet, Texas crime reporter, and early feminist utopian; she ended up with an FBI file because of her socialist views. She chose the pen name Lilith in honor of a fellow "troublemaker," i.e., the Biblical Adam's first wife.

10) THE SNAKE MOTHER, in A. Merritt's The Face in the Abyss (1931). This semi-occult SF novel, which combines "The Face in the Abyss" (serialized Sept. 1923) and its sequel, "The Snake Mother" (serialized Oct.-Dec. 1930), is set in the Peruvian Andes. Treasure-hunter Nicholas Graydon rescues Suarra, handmaiden to Adana, the Snake Mother of Yu-Atlanchi, from his own companions. Adana is the last of a race of superintelligent serpent people whose servants, the Old Race, are immortal. Although possessed of fragments of their former superior science, they are now obsessed with sex, hunting mutants with dinosaurs, and dream machines. Adana, who possesses spectacular paranormal abilities, is humankind's only defense against Nimir, a Sauron- or Voldemort-like mage who'd conquer the world if he could inhabit a physical body. He wants Graydon's, but a band of Old Race outlaws and mutated spiders thwart him. Fun facts: Merritt was once considered the greatest SF writer of modern times; he had a magazine - A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine - named after him. E.F. Bleiler praises his "sweeping ideas, high emotion, and perpetual suggestions of deeper phenomena beneath the surface of events."
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Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer and independent scholar. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary. Read his previous posts about Pre-Golden Age science fiction here.

ALSO OF INTEREST

NINETEENTH CENTURY (1804-1903)

* Edward Bellamy, "To Whom This May Come" (serialized Feb. 1888)
* Francis W. Doughty, Mirrikhor, A Woman from Mars: A Tale of Occult Adventure (1892)
* William Harben, "In the Year Ten Thousand" (serialized Nov. 1892)
* W.S. Lach-Szyrma, Under Other Conditions: A Tale (1892)
* Byron A. Brooks, Earth Revisited (1893)
* William Livingston Alden, "A Modern Vampire" (serialized March 1894)
* George Du Maurier, Trilby (1894: fantasy - first appearance of Svengali)
* John Strange Winter, A Seventh Child (1894: occult)
* Gustavus W. Pope, Romances of the Planets, No. 1. Journey to Mars (1894)
* Theron Clark Crawford, "The Disappearance Syndicate" (1894)
* Tremlett Carter, The People of the Moon (1895)
* A. Garland Mears, Mercia, The Astronomer Royal (1895)
* M. Auberre Hovorre, The Milltillionaire (c. 1895)
* Robert Cromie, The Crack of Doom (1895)
* Arthur Conan Doyle, The Parasite (1895: fantasy)
* James Buckham, "A Telepathic Wooing" (1896)
* Thomas F. Anderson, "A Mental Mischance" (serialized Sept. 1896)
* George Du Maurier, The Martian (1897)
* Weatherby Chesney, "The Witch" (1898)
* Henry Athey, With Gyves of Gold: A Novel (1898)
* Charles L. McKesson, Under Pike's Peak: Or, Mahatma, Child of the Fire Father (1898)
* Anne Adolph, Arqtiq: A Story of the Marvels of the North Pole (1899)
* Henry S. Drayton, In Oudemon: Reminiscences of an Unknown People by an Occasional Traveler (1900)
* Charles Cole, Visitors from Mars (1901)
* Harry E. Rice, Eve and the Evangelist: A Romance of A.D. 2108 (1901)
* Barry Pain, The Great White Way (1901)
* Eden Philpotts, "A Story Without an End" (serialized 1901)
* J. George Frederick, "The Dupe of a Realist" (serialized March 1902)
* Charles Godfrey Leland, Flaxius: Leaves from the Life of an Immortal (1902)
* Mabel Ernestine Abbott, "Those Fatal Filaments" (1903)

THE NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13)

* W.G. Worfel (as The Baron), Munchausen XX (1904)
* Gabriel de Tarde, Underground Man (1905, in translation)
* Rev. William Shuler Harris, Life in a Thousand Worlds (1905)
* John F. Armour, Edenindia: A Tale of Adventure (1905)
* Edwin Lester Arnold, Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905)
* Don Mark Lemon, "The Essence of Advertising" (serialized August 1906)
* Louis Tracy, Karl Grier: The Strange Story of a Man with a Sixth Sense (1906: occult)
* John Mastin, The Immortal Light (1907)
* Edgar Earl Christopher, The Invisibles (1908)
* Frank Hatfield, The Realm of Light (1908)
* John Mastin, Through the Sun in an Airship (1909)
* James Rock, Thro' Space (1909)
* Herman K. Viele, On the Lightship (1909)
* Garrett P. Serviss, A Columbus of Space (serialized 1909, as novel 1911)
* Ronald Legge, The Hawk: A Story of Aerial War (1909)
* J.D. Beresford, The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911)
* Gustave Frederick Mertins, A Watcher of the Skies (1911)
* William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land (1912)
* Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (serialized 1912; as novel 1917)
* Morgan Robertson, "Absolute Zero" (serialized, 1913)

THE TEENS (1914-23)

* George Allan England, The Empire in the Air (1914)
* Herbert Gubbins, The Elixir of Life, or 2905 AD (1914)
* Stephen McKenna, The Sixth Sense (1915)
* Garrett P. Serviss, The Moon Maiden (1915)
* Hugo Gernsback, "Martian Amusements" (serialized June 1916)
* J.A. Mitchell, Drowsy (1917)
* Clifford Smyth, The Gilded Man: A Romance of the Andes (1918)
* H. Rider Haggard, When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot (1919)
* Leslie Burton Blades, "Fruits of the Forbidden Tree" (serialized Nov. 1919)
* Homer Eon Flint, The Queen of Life (novella, 1919)
* Denby Brixton, The Unknown Revolution (1919: novella)
* T.S. Stribling, The Green Splotches (novella, 1920)
* Homer Eon Flint, The Devolutionist (novella, 1921)
* J.D. Beresford, "Young Strickland's Career" (1921)
* Norbert Jacques, Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (1922: horror)
* Gilbert Collins, The Valley of Eyes Unseen (1923)
* H.G. Wells, Men Like Gods (1923)
* Ganpat (Martin Louis Gompertz), Harilek: A Tale of Modern Central Asia (1923)
* Ivan Narodny, The Skygirl - A Mimodrama - In Three Acts on a Star (performed 1923, as novel 1925)

THE TWENTIES (1924-33)

* Norman Elwood Hammerstrom & R.F. Searight, "The Brain in the Jar" (1924)
* Rena Oldfield Pettersen, Venus (1924)
* Leslie Beresford, The Venus Girl (1925)
* Lady Anne Bonny, Wings of Power (novella, 1925)
* S. Fowler Wright, The Amphibians (1925)
* J.C. Smith, Thus Far (1925)
* Elwood F. Pierce, "The Dream of Death" (serialized July 1925)
* Robert Spencer Carr, "The Composite Brain" (serialized March 1925)
* T.S. Stribling, Christ in Chicago (1926)
* Julian Huxley, The Tissue-Culture King (1926)
* J.P. Marshall, The World in the Balance (1927)
* Arthur Conan Doyle, The Maracot Deep (serialized 1927-28, as novella 1929)
* Muriel Jaeger, The Man with Six Senses (1927)
* Alfred Ollivant, To-Morrow: A Romance of the Future (1927)
* Wilford Allen, "The Arctic Death" (serialized June 1927)
* Maurice Lincoln, Nothing Ever Happens (1927)
* Ray Cummings, Beyond the Stars (serialized 1928; as novel 1963)
* Bertram Russell, The Bat-Men of Thorium (novella, 1928)
* Herbert Clock and Eric Boetzel, The Light in the Sky (1929)
* Otis Adelbert Kline, The Planet of Peril (1929)
* Roy Rockwood, By Air Express to Venus (1929)
* George B. Tuttle, The Roc Raid (1929)
* Hand P. Dreyer, The Secret of the Sphinx (1929)
* Ray Cummings, The Sea Girl (serialized 1929; as novel 1930)
* Paul Ernst, The Black Monarch (1930)
* Otis Adelbert Kline, The Prince of Peril (1930)
* S. Fowler Wright, "P.N. 40" (1930)
* Edmond Hamilton, "The Man Who Saw the Future" (1930)
* Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930)
* Talbot Mundy, Jimgrim (serialized 1930-31)
* A. Merritt, The Face in the Abyss (1931)
* Charles Fort, Wild Talents (1932: nonfiction)
* Olaf Stapledon, Last Men in London (1932)
* Pansy E. Black, The Man from the Meteor (1932)
* Edmond Hamilton, "The Man with X-Ray Eyes" (1933)

EARLY GOLDEN AGE/LATE PGA

* J.B. Rhine. Extra-Sensory Perception (1934, nonfiction influenced Campbell)
* André Maurois, The Thought-Reading Machine (1937; 1938 in English)
* Please suggest others from the years 1934-40!

Dreamed up by American and European SF writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - at a time when Lamarckian-Bergsonian evolutionary philosophy, which posits a tendency for organisms to become more perfect as they evolve (because such change is needed or wanted, e.g., by "life"), remained popular - many of the first fictional supermen were portrayed by their creators as examples of a more perfect species towards which humankind has supposedly long aimed. Pre-Golden-Age superman was, that is to say, homo superior, an evolved human whose superiority was mental, physical, or both.

Aye, there's the rub: for, as Nietzsche has Zarathustra predict, "Just as the ape to man is a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment, man shall be just that to [superman]." Olaf Stapledon, Philip Wylie, George Bernard Shaw, and other PGA SF authors agreed that the superman - whose values and worldview the rest of us can't share, or even comprehend - would seem cold, inhuman, alien. Even, or especially when, he or she is trying to help us.

The influence of Pre-Golden Age supermen remains a powerful one. Consider Adrian Veidt, in the forthcoming Watchmen movie adaptation. Unlike most superheroes we'll see on the big screen in the next year or so - e.g., Wolverine, Wonder Woman, Captain America, not to mention Superman himself - Ozymandias, as Veidt was known in his costumed adventurer days, isn't merely a mutant, a godling, a scientific experiment, or an alien visiting a planet where he's uniquely able to kick ass. Instead, he's an Übermensch - a self-overcoming individual, that is to say, who has not only mastered his perfect body but (to quote Peter Cannon... Thunderbolt, the Charlton comic that inspired Moore's Ozymandias) "harnessed the unused portions of the brain." Fortunately or unfortunately for humankind (that's the issue), he has also revalued our human, all too human values.

"I think you could see that it was an evil thing to do and maybe a patronizing thing to do," Watchmen illustrator and co-creator Dave Gibbons said a few months ago, when asked about Ozymandias's catastrophic scheme to save the world. He continued:

I think that probably is one of the worst of his sins, that it's kind of looking down on the rest of humanity, scorning the rest of humanity. I think for that reason that [Veidt's former comrade, the masked vigilante] Rorschach, by persisting in his single-minded devotion to what he sees as the truth is ... actually painted in a very human manner. At the end of it, your loyalty lies very much with this very flawed, psychopathic human being who knows his faults, who knows the faults of the rest of humanity, rather than somebody like Adrian, who considers himself to be above humanity and who has taken a rather cold and calculating view of everything.

Ozymandias may sound like Tom Cruise (who was interested in the role). What he's utterly unlike, however, is your typical comic-book superhero - who, despite his or her superhuman abilities, tends to reflect and personify our own, human values. That's because Superman was an invention of SF's gung-ho, can-do Golden Age. His pre-Golden Age literary precursors, however, were a different story altogether.

Here's a list - in no particular order - of the 10 most influential and problematic supermen and women from 1904-33. There's a complete list at the end. Also: Read about Pre-Golden Age SF's coolest robots, apocalypses, and cover art; my eccentric periodization scheme; and more.

***

1) HUMPTY, in Olaf Stapledon's Last Men in London (London: Methuen, 1932). Stapledon writes insightfully about homo superior - he's credited with coining the term - in three of the four novels for which he's remembered. I've already written, in this series, about Last and First Men and Odd John, so that leaves Humpty. He's a young "supernormal," a London teenager in whom there is "some promise of a higher type." According to Stapledon, all "submerged supermen" are adolescent misfits, because: they don't take themselves seriously, they don't want to get ahead, they despise athletics, they're puzzled and bored by religion and patriotism, they don't regard sexuality as shameful, and they remain idealistic long after childhood. They're Lost-Generation-style idlers, in other words. But with really big heads. In a Good Will Hunting-like coda to the novel, whose protagonist is Paul, a teacher telepathically possessed by a member of an evolved human species (the Last Men) living in the distant future, the brilliant Humpty outlines a plan to found a new human species that will control the world and eliminate or domesticate the "subhuman hordes"... then succumbs to despair.
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2) THE WONDER, in J.D. Beresford's The Hampdenshire Wonder (Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1911). Victor Stott is a giant-headed "supernormal" child mutated in the womb by his parents' desire to have a son born without habits. After surveying science, philosophy, history, literature, and religion, the Wonder says, "So elementary... inchoate... a disjunctive... patchwork." His adult interlocutors are shattered by his statements about the nature of the universe and human progress; his philosophy begins with rejecting "the interposing and utterly false concepts of space and time," and ends with the notion that life and all matter are merely "a disease of the ether." Unable to live without illusions, everyone rejects the Wonder's disenchanting insights; he also makes an enemy of the local clergyman, who may murder him. "He was entirely alone among aliens who were unable to comprehend him, aliens who could not flatter him, whose opinions were valueless to him." Scholars call this the first SF novel of real importance about intelligence; it's the ancestor of Clarke's Childhood's End and Van Vogt's Slan.
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3) RALPH, in Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (Stratford Co.: Boston, 1923. Serialized in Modern Electrics, 1911-12.) Ralph One-to-foresee-for-one (get it?) is a great American scientist, and a superior type; the "plus" at the end of his name proves it. Though we're told he's got an impressive physique and "gigantic mind," we never learn what makes him tick, or how he feels about his inferiors. The only thing that Gernsback, a pioneering SF magazine publisher after whom SF's Hugo awards were named, cares to write about is the technical marvels he's dreamed up. This grown-up Edisonade lurches from one future-tech showcase to another: fluorescent lights, microfilm, radar, television, even a Hypnobioscope that allows you to avoid subscribing to newspapers in your sleep. The polar fleece-wearing citizens of solar-powered, geothermally heated New York don't fear or resent Ralph; in fact, they've erected a glass-and-steelonium luxury tower for him in Union Square. Ralph, in short, is a bore, and so is his techno-utopian society. Except maybe when his girlfriend is kidnapped by a Martian.
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4) ZOZIM and ZOO, in George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (Constable: London, 1921). Shortly after WWI, the secret of Creative Evolution - in Shaw's formulation, the process by which an organism can will its own entelechy, or self-potentiation - is discovered. By the year 3100 the long-lived elite have developed perfect physiques and advanced mentalities. Zozim and Zoo are Boomer-like superhumans (he's nearly 100, she's 50, but they act like young adults) who assist a sham oracle in overawing the short-livers seeking its advice. It's all part of a plot to colonize and supersede ordinary humans! But like the proto-Yippies they are, Z and Z are upfront about the put-on. Zoo: "[Zozim] has to dress-up in a Druid's robe, and put on a wig and a long false beard, to impress you silly people.... I have no patience with such mummery; but you expect it from us; so I suppose it must be kept up." It's Wild in the Streets meets Highlander. Fun fact: RFK was quoting Shaw's play when he said, ""You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'"
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5) THE AMPHIBIAN, in S. Fowler Wright's The Amphibians (Merton Press: London, 1925). Half a million years in the future, a nameless, time-traveling protagonist discovers that the Earth's dominant intelligent species are the Dwellers (humanoid giants with equally giant intellects, self-destructively devoted to science) and the furry Amphibians (not merely mentally and physically more evolved than modern man, they're also morally superior). Though they regard the time traveler as a primitive (hello, Planet of the Apes), one of the Amphibians accompanies him across a Divine Comedy-like landscape of incredible horrors and warfare between monstrous species. It's an allegorical adventure, in which conflicting philosophies of life and morality are debated: the Spock-like Amphibian is dispassionate and sees things from a transcendental perspective, while the Kirk-like Primitive is emotional and impulsive. Fun fact: Everett F. Bleiler calls The World Below (The Amphibians + its sequel, published together in '29) "undoubtedly the major work of science fiction between the early Wells and the moderns."
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6) BORK/DE SOTO, in John Taine's Seeds of Life (1951; serialized in Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1931). "We do not like the thought of being relegated to a minor place in the evolutionary scheme; we half expect that a race of geniuses would treat us cruelly, as we treat dumb animals," writes Peter Nicholls. "Taine's Seeds of Life is a prototype of this kind of story." Maybe not, but it's a ripping yarn that may have influenced everything from Flowers for Algernon to Spider-Man. Neils Bork, a pathetic lab technician, attempts suicide via X-rays and is transformed into a supermind in the body of a swarthy Adonis; he renames himself De Soto. ("De Soto was but a partial, accidental anticipation of the more sophisticated and yet more natural race into which time and the secular flux of chance are slowly transforming our kind.") He invents wireless energy transfer devices, secretly planning to use them to bombard humankind with "dysgenic" rays that will devolve unborn children. Then De Soto's own evolution reverses itself: "I never used to think, but saw the inevitable consequences of any pattern of circumstances - no matter how complicated - immediately, like a photograph of the future." He repents of his superioristic ways, and is killed by his own reptilian offspring. Fun fact: John Taine was the pseudonym of CIT mathematician Eric Temple Bell.
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7) HUGO, in Philip Wylie's Gladiator (Knopf: New York and London, 1930). Wylie is best known as coauthor of When Worlds Collide, and as a crank(y) essayist obsessed with Soviet nukes and "Mom-ism." The only thing you ever hear about this pre-Golden Age SF classic is that it's "thought to be the book from which 'Superman' was derived." Make no mistake: Siegel & Shuster lifted everything except Superman's cape from Gladiator. Thanks to an experiment by his scientist father (who studies grasshoppers and ants), Hugo Danner is nearly invulnerable, runs faster than a train, leaps higher than trees, and hurls boulders like baseballs. Also, his father gives him Nietzschean advice only, e.g.: "The stronger, the greater, you are, the harder life is for you." So... Hugo creates a fortress of solitude in Colorado, drops out of school, wanders the planet, then joins the French Foreign Legion at the outbreak of WWI ("He felt himself almost the Messiah of war . . . He was like a being of steel"). Later, he adopts a secret identity, moves to Metropolis Manhattan, and vows to become "an invisible agent of right - right as best I can see it." Despairing, however, of flawed mortals and their politics - I'd probably call him an anarcho-monarchist - Hugo heads to the Yucatan to start a colony of superbeings, "the new Titans." But then he changes his mind and curses God... on a mountaintop, shown at left, instead.
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8) EARANI, in Erle Cox's Out of the Silence (E.A. Vidler: Melbourne, 1925; serialized in The [Melbourne] Argus, 1919). Alan Dundas stumbles upon the subterranean repository of a long-vanished, fantastically advanced civilization. He awakens Earani from a state of suspended animation. Her intelligence and abilities are as astounding as her beauty. (Hello, Leelo in The Fifth Element.) In fact, Earani was the end result of her civilization's worldwide eugenics program, which she intends to put back into practice, as soon as she conquers the planet. ("This world of yours is full of pain and misery.... Is any price too great that buys a perfect and wholesome humanity?" Earani demands of Australia's prime minister. "You hold that to carry out my mission would be a crime. I hold that to fail in doing so would be a crime.") Alan, who falls in love with Earani, is undisturbed by her plan to wipe out the "colored races" and inferior whites; one is not sure what the author himself thinks about this subject. In the end, Earani is backstabbed (literally) by another woman.
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9) POLLARD, in Edmond Hamilton's "The Man Who Evolved" (Wonder Stories, April 1931). Dr. John Pollard is a biologist trying to crack one of the two great mysteries of evolution: "What is the cause of evolutionary change?" Having determined that the answer is "the cosmic rays," and having built a cosmic ray-gathering contraption, Pollard invites two friends (one of whom is the narrator) to witness as he investigates the second question: "What is the future course of man's evolution going to be?" Pollard first evolves himself into a superman, with a godlike physique and immense intellectual power; then into a shriveled body supporting an enormous head; then a huge head with almost no body, which plans to "master without a struggle this man-swarming planet, and make it a huge laboratory in which to pursue the experiments that please me"; then into a brain with tentacles, a Dr. Manhattan-like being whose perspective is so cosmic that it no longer cares to dominate the world. ("The only emotion, if such it is, that remains to me still is intellectual curiosity...") Alas, after evolving himself one more time, Pollard devolves back into simple protoplasm. Fun fact: Isaac Asimov described this as "the first science fiction short story... that impressed me so much it stayed in my mind permanently."
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10) HERVE, in Noëlle Roger's Le nouvel Adam (1924; translated as The New Adam, London: Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd., 1926). When Herve Silenrieux, a hapless medical student working for Dr. Flecheyre at Paris's Institut Pasteur, attempts suicide by shooting himself in the head, Flecheyre implants in him an experimental combination of glands that he believes will stimulate the brain - and in so doing, create an evolved human. Indeed, Herve becomes incredibly brilliant... but wholly logical and unpleasant. For example, he no longer hesitates to kill patients for experimental data. Dismissed from the hospital, Herve develops a death ray, which he tests on villagers in the French countryside; after that, he detonates lumps of lead with the force of an atomic bomb, setting off a series of earthquakes. Attempting to prevent Herve from wiping out the human race, Flecheyre confronts him; Herve's forcefield detonates the lead bullets in Flecheyre's pistol, and both men die. Fun fact: Noëlle Roger is the pseudonym of Hélène Dufour Pittard, a Swiss-Canadian journalist.

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer and independent scholar. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary. Read his previous posts about Pre-Golden Age science fiction here.

ALSO OF INTEREST

"Some individuals, it is true, are more special. This is natural selection. It begins as a single individual, born or hatched like every other member of their species, anonymous, seemingly ordinary. Except they're not. They carry inside them the genetic code that will take their species to the next evolutionary rung. It's destiny." - fictional geneticist Mohinder Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurth), expressing an un-Darwinian view of evolution in the first episode of Heroes, 9/23/06.

NINETEENTH CENTURY (1804-1903)

* Don Quichotte, "The Artificial Man: A Semi-Scientific Story" (1884)
* Edward Payson Jackson, A Demigod: A Novel (1886)
* Ernest G. Harmer, Professor Bommsenn's Germ (1888).
* Joseph Shield Nicholson, Thoth: A Romance (1888)
* Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World (1893).
* Frank Challice Constable, The Curse of Intellect (1895)
* Oto Mundo, The Recovered Continent: A Tale of the Chinese Invasion (1898)
* Louis Boussenard, Ten Thousand Years in a Block of Ice (1898)
* Alfred Jarry, The Supermale (1902)
* Aston Forrest, The Extraordinary Islanders. Being an Authoritative Account of the Cruise of the 'Asphodel," as Related By Her Owner (1903)
* Godfrey Sweven, Limanora: The Island of Progress (1903)

THE NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13)

* H.G. Wells, The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth (1904)
* Alfred William Lawson, Born Again: A Novel (1904)
* Tyman Currio (John Russell Coryell?), Weird and Wonderful Story of Another World (1905-06)
* E. Nesbit (as E. Bland), "The Third Drug" (1908)
* M.P. Shiel, The Isle of Lies (1909)
* J.D. Beresford, The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911)
* William Greene, "The Savage Strain" (1911)
* Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (1911-12)

THE TEENS (1914-23)

* Harry Keeler, "John Jones's Dollar" (1915)
* J.A. Mitchell, Drowsy (1917)
* Frederic Carrel, 2010 (1914)
* George Allan England, The Fatal Gift (1915)
* Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Land That Time Forgot (1918; 1924)
* Marie Corelli, The Young Diana: An Experiment of the Future (1918)
* Austin Hall, Into the Infinite (1919)
* Erle Cox, Out of the Silence (1919)
* G. Stanley Hall, "The Fall of Atlantis" (1920)
* George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (1921)
* Georges Lebas, Jean Arog, le premier surhomme (1921)
* E.V. Odle, The Clockwork Man (1923)
* H.G. Wells, Men Like Gods (1923)

THE TWENTIES (1924-33)

* John Lionel Tayler, The Last of My Race: A Dream of the Future (1924)
* Noelle Roger, Le nouvel Adam (1924, translated as The New Adam (1926)
* S. Fowler Wright, The Amphibians: A Romance of 500,000 Years Hence (1925)
* J.C. Snaith, Thus Far (1925)
* Henry Carew, The Vampires of the Andes (1925)
* Guy Dent, Emperor of the If (1926)
* Muriel Jaeger, The Man with Six Senses (1927)
* Edmond Hamilton, "Evolution Island" (1928)
* Wallace West, "The Incubator Man" (1928)
* Edmund Snell, Kontrol (1928)
* Philip Wylie, Gladiator (1930)
* Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930)
* John Gloag, To-Morrow's Yesterday (1930)
* John Taine, The Iron Star (1930)
* Paul Ernst, The Black Monarch (1930)
* John Hargraves, The Imitation Man (1931)
* John Taine, Seeds of Life (1931)
* Edmond Hamilton, "The Man Who Evolved" (1931)
* Olaf Stapledon, Last Men in London (1932)
* Philip Wylie, The Savage Gentleman (1932)
* Lester Dent's Doc Savage series, which began in March '33.
* Muriel Jaeger, Hermes Speaks (1933)
* John Russell Fearn, The Intelligence Gigantic (1933)

EARLY GOLDEN AGE/LATE PGA

* Olaf Stapledon, Odd John (1935)
* Claude Houghton, This was Ivor Trent (1935)
* Stanley G. Weinbaum, "The Adaptive Ultimate" (1936)
* M.P. Shiel, The Young Men Are Coming (1937)
* H.G. Wells, Star-Begotten (1937)

Forget WALL-E and GORT. Forget sexy Summer Glau and Tricia Helfer in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Battlestar Galactica. OK, don't forget them. But check it out: Long before Autobots, Fembots, and the Urkelbot, PGA SF authors obsessed over electricity-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men or "robots" (a term introduced in 1921) that might free us from the burden of labor... or else run amuck and destroy/enslave us. Before Yul Brynner, Daryl Hannah, and Brent Spiner played troubled biomechs, replicants, and skin-jobs in Westworld, Blade Runner, and Star Trek: TNG, SF novels and stories published from 1904-33 asked what, exactly, distinguishes an "android" - a term, meaning "human-like," first popularized in an 1886 French SF novel - from one of us? And before the Six Million Dollar Man, the Terminator, and the Borg popularized the obscure 1960s notion of the "cyborg," PGA SF authors had already inserted human brains into machines, and vice versa, creating existential crises of every variety for their characters.

Here's a list - in no particular order - of 10 of the most compelling and uncanny robot, android, and cyborg-oriented novels, stories, and plays that were published in the decades immediately before SF's so-called Golden Age. There's a more complete list at the end, too. Suggestions, criticisms welcome! Read more in this series.

1) L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1907). The third Oz book, and the first in which we meet one of Baum's most delightful characters: "He was only about as tall as Dorothy herself, and his body was round as a ball and made out of burnished copper. Also his head and limbs were copper, and these were jointed or hinged to his body in a peculiar way, with metal caps over the joints, like the armor worn by knights in days of old." From a printed card attached to its neck, Dorothy learns that Tiktok is a "Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating, Perfect-Talking Mechanical Man Fitted with out Special Clock-Work Attachment. Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live." Though one of the earliest fictional appearances of true machine intelligence, Tiktok (above, with Nome King) is not a free agent like his (equally metallic, yet living) new friend, the Tin Man, to whom he confides that "When I am wound up I do my du-ty by go-ing just as my ma-chin-er-y is made to go." Fun fact: Baum revisited this story for his 1913 musical, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, in which Tiktok sings: "Always work and never play!/Don't demand a cent of pay!"
READ IT | OZ IMAGES

2) Karel Čapek, R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots (1921 premiere as R.U.R.: Rossumovi univerzální roboti; in translation, 1923). This surreal morality play takes place in the 1960s or so, and it's set in the factory of a (USA?) manufacturing concern that has shipped hundreds of thousands of "Robots" - biological humanoids designed for cheap labor - around the world. (We'd call Čapek's Robots "androids," now; see Spock-like sketch of one from the '22 New York production, at left.) The Robots, which have a limited life span, are supposedly soulless. Not so, claims Helena Glory, a liberal activist who marries the factory's GM (who envisions a utopia in which humans won't have to do any work). At Helena's urging, R.U.R.'s scientists develop Robots tricked out with extra humanity... at which point they rise up and exterminate humankind. In an epilogue, Alquist, R.U.R.'s construction engineer and the last surviving human, give his blessing to two new-model Robots, Primus and Helena, who have discovered love. Warning them to avoid the sins that destroyed his own species, Alquist sends them forth to be fruitful and multiply. Fun fact: The term robot, coined by Čapek's brother, Josef, comes from the Czech for "serf labor."
READ IT | R.U.R. IMAGES

3) Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (1926; in translation, 1927). Set in a dystopian city-state, this Expressionist novel asks us to imagine a perverse synthesis of the era's seminal dichotomy: Henry Adams's dynamo-vs.-virgin question. Metropolis's Pharaonic master, Joh Fredersen, deplores those weaknesses that make his dehumanized laborers (they wear standard uniforms, and answer to numbers) inferior to machines. So he orders the mad inventor-magician, Rotwang, to build him "machine men." Instead, Rotwang constructs an alluring female-shaped machine whom he names Parody, or Futura: "The being was, indubitably, a woman... But, although it was a woman, it was not human. The body seemed as though made of crystal, through which the bones shone silver." After rendering Futura's face in the exact likeness of Maria (a flesh-and-blood woman who is both the conscience of the rebellious workers and the object of Fredersen's pinko son's affection), the villainous technocrats program their synthetic Virgin/Dynamo to act as an agent provocateuse. The workers revolt, and Futura/Maria is destroyed. But in the end, the Virgin (sentimental religiosity) triumphs over the Dynamo (technology-driven development). Hooray? Fun fact: Von Harbou and her husband, film director Fritz Lang, developed the scenario for Metropolis, then she wrote the novelization while he directed the brilliant 1927 movie.
LEARN MORE | READ IT

4) Frigyes Karinthy, Voyage to Faremido: Gulliver's Fifth Voyage (Utazás Faremidóba; Gulliver ötödik útj, 1916; in translation, 1965). It's 1914, and Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver is eager to go to sea again. He signs on as a surgeon on a British ship, only to be torpedoed in the Baltic, then picked up by a UFO and transported to Faremido, a planet ruled by intelligent machine-folk. They regard organic life as a loathsome disease of matter, so they're tickled about the Great War, which looks likely to exterminate humankind. Agreeing that the Faremidoans (whose society is peaceful, and whose fa-re-mi-do language is musical) are superior beings, Gulliver accepts an injection of their own brain-matter - quicksilver and minerals - into his head. Now a proto-cyborg himself, Gulliver is sent back to England, where he finds it difficult to adjust to the irrational horrors of everyday life. Fun fact: The sequel to this Hungarian novella is Capillária (1921), in which Gulliver gains insight into sexual politics when he visits a submarine civilization whose women dominate and eat their menfolk. Also see Karinthy's recently reissued autobiographical novel, A Journey Round My Skull.
BUY IT | READ IT (HUNGARIAN)

5) S. Fowler Wright, "Automata: I-III" (Weird Tales, September 1929). The first episode of this three-part series - by the British author of The Amphibians, Deluge, and Dawn - is set in the present or near future. Addressing the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the distinguished scientist Dr. Tilwin announces that humankind's prerogatives will soon be taken over by machines, which are already superior to us in certain ways. Intelligent machines are omnipresent in the second episode, set at some point after the 20th century. By this time, human procreation has almost stopped (Wright, a would-be Wellsian social prophet, was a fierce critic of birth control) and children are increasingly rare. In the final episode, one of the last humans on Earth is drawing a picture - one of the few tasks that machines can't perform, because it requires imagination. Alas, because he doesn't properly finish his assignment, he is condemned to be executed. Fun facts: Robots didn't come hardwired with systems of ethics until Isaac Asimov and John W. Campbell made it so in the '40s. Also, Wright translated Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio.
ABOUT SFW | BUY SFW BOOKS

6) Jean de La Hire, The Nyctalope on Mars (Le Mystère des XV, 1911). Léo Saint-Clair, alias the Nyctalope, is an indomitable Doc Savage-style crimefighter gifted with night vision. As we learn somewhat late in the series, he's also equipped with an artificial heart, which he gained after being tortured and nearly assassinated, and which prevents him from aging. In this, the first of a series of exploits published through the mid-1940s, the Nyctalope - pictured at left, in a different adventure - battles Oxus, leader of the sinister Society of the Fifteen, who is plotting to conquer Earth from his secret base on Mars. Later, however, he allies himself with Oxus and the planet's benign inhabitants in order to defeat H. G. Wells' evil Martians. Then he gets married. Phew! In subsequent SF adventures, the Nyctalope will travel to the planet Rhea, where he'll end a war between the day- and night-siders; discover a lost civilization of Amazons in Tibet; and have himself cryopreserved so that, 170 years later, he can defeat an enemy who has also been frozen (hello, Demolition Man and Austin Powers). A pioneering pulp superhero and cyborg. Fun fact: Nyctalopia is a real medical condition that causes you to see poorly - or well - in the dark.
LEARN MORE | BUY THE 2008 ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

7) Sax Rohmer, The Day the World Ended (London and New York, 1930). Three international crimefighters - Lonergan, an American secret service agent; Gaston Max, a dandified French police detective; and Brian Woodville, an English journalist - are investigating a series of strange events: radio silence in the USA, reports of man-bats in the Black Forest, the sudden death of everyone in a French village. It turns out that Anubis, a dwarfish evil genius, is plotting to establish a utopian society populated by surgically altered and highly conditioned humans (i.e., androids). How? By destroying the rest of the Earth's population with a sonic weapon. The trio infiltrate Anubis's German castle, populated by 7-foot-tall guards and "soulless" houris - hello, Westworld and Stepford Wives - and call in an air strike. Fun fact: Rohmer was best known for his (racist) thrillers about Dr. Fu Manchu.
BUY IT | ABOUT ROHMER | READ ROHMER |

8) Neil R. Jones, "The Jameson Satellite" (Amazing Stories, July 1931). In 1958, Professor Jameson arranges for his body to be cryopreserved - in a rocket orbiting the Earth - after he's dead. Forty million years later, a crew hailing from the planet Zor, whose inhabitants had "built their own mechanical bodies, and by operation upon one another had removed their brains to the metal heads from which they directed the functions and movements of their inorganic anatomies," discover the satellite. The Zoromes transfer Jameson's brain into a machine body, then take him to visit the lifeless Earth, an experience that nearly drives him mad, until he realizes that "He could be immortal if he wished! It would be an immortality of never-ending adventures in the vast, endless Universe among the galaxy of stars and planets." Indeed, Jones would publish 21 more "Professor Jameson" stories; cover illustration for 2d installment, at left. Fun fact: Isaac Asimov claimed the Zoromes, who are thoroughly objective, gave him his "feeling for benevolent robots who could serve man with decency."
READ IT | BUY THE BOOKS

9) Gaston Leroux, The Machine to Kill (1924 as Le machine à assassiner; 1935 translation). France's top police detective, Lebouc, is on the trail of a human-looking mechanical man (pictured at left) whose skull houses the brain of Benedict Masson, a guillotined murderer. Animated with radioactive serum, the cyborg - named Gabriel by its creator, a clockwork expert named Norbert - has carried off Norbert's daughter, Christine. She's the one who witnessed Benedict burying a corpse in his basement... so does Gabriel/Benedict want revenge? And what's with the Hindu vampire cult that kidnaps Christine - did they commit the murders for which Benedict died? G/B is captured by Lebouc, but escapes and rescues Christine from the cultists before destroying itself by leaping into a river. The End? No! Christine, who has fallen in love with the cyborg, reassembles G/B's remains, and prepares to reanimate it... only to discover that her husband has destroyed its brain. Fun fact: Leroux is best known for his 1910 horror tale, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, on which the movies and Broadway show are based.
READ IT (FRENCH) | MORE LEROUX

10) W.K. Mashburn, "Sola" (Weird Tales, April 1930). Though he despises women and can't stand their company, Dr. Franz Dietrich desires them sexually. So he invents a flesh-like substance, which a sculptor helps him shape into a gorgeous female android. Having wired Sola with complex responses - the apparatus is supposed to react in particular ways, immediately upon perceiving his telepathically projected emotions - the mad scientist invites a group of colleagues over to dinner. Growing tipsy, Dietrich flies into an embarrassed fury, because he thinks Sola is unresponsive, and tries to destroy it. But his colleagues - and eventually, the entire town - pitch in to raise his self-esteem by treating Sola as a member of the community. Oh wait, I'm thinking of Lars and the Real Girl. What actually happens is that Sola's emotion receptors are activated by the professor's rage, and his own creation crushes him to death. A classic example of what McLuhan - in The Mechanical Bride (1951) - would call "the curious fusion of sex, technology, and death."

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based freelance journalist and independent scholar, who writes frequently about science fiction. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary.

ALSO OF INTEREST

NINETEENTH CENTURY

* E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann (1814) - lifelike clockwork
* Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) - human, assembled and reanimated
* Edgar Allan Poe, "Maelzel's Chess Player" (1836) - Poe disputes machine intelligence
* Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man That Was Used Up" (1843) - human, artificial body
* Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844) - mechanical butterfly
* Herman Melville, "The Bell Tower" (1855) - automaton bell-ringer comes to life?
* Edward S. Ellis, The Steam Man of the Prairies (1865) - man-shaped engine
* H. D. Jenkins, "The Automaton of Dobello" (1872) - 14th-century automaton as ghost
* Julian Hawthorne, "An Automatic Enigma" (1878) - human disguised as automaton
* E.P. Mitchell, "The Ablest Man in the World" (1879) - Babbage's analytical engine in head; first cyborg?
* Jacques Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffmann (1881) - lifelike clockwork
* Don Quichotte, "The Artificial Man: A Semi-Scientific Story" (1884) - human, artificially grown
* Luis Senarens, Frank Reade and His Electric Man (1885) - electricity-powered mecha?
* Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve (1886) - popularized "android"
* Howard Fielding, "Automatic Bridget" (1889) - robot housemaid amuck
* Cyrus Cole, The Auroraphone (1890) - humanoid "dummies" rebel
* William Douglas O'Connor, "The Brazen Android" (w. 1857, p. 1891) - steam-powered mecha? First steampunk?
* Jerome K. Jerome, "The Dancing Partner" (1893) - dancing robot amuck
* M.L. Campbell, "The Automatic Maid-of-All-Work" (1893) - robot housemaid amuck
* G.H.P., The Artificial Mother: A Marital Fantasy (1894) - robot nursemaid amuck
* Elizabeth Bellamy, "Ely's Automatic Housemaid" (1899) - robot housemaids amuck

THE NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13):

* H.P. Fitzgerald Marriott, The Iron Detective of Germany: A Comedy of the Near Future (1908)
* Ambrose Bierce, "Moxon's Master" (1909)
* Henry A. Hering, "Mr. Broadbent's Information" (1909)
* Charles Hannan, The Electric Man (1910)
* Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Monster Men (1913, 1929)

THE TEENS (1914-23):

* L. Frank Baum, Tik-Tok of Oz (1914)
* Perley Poore Sheehan & Robert H. Davis, Blood and Iron (1917)
* Jean de La Hire, Lucifer (1921-22)
* Jean de La Hire, Le Roi de la Nuit (1923)
* E.V. Odle, The Clockwork Man (1923)

THE TWENTIES (1924-33):

* John Lionel Tayler, The Last of My Race (1924)
* Jean de La Hire, L'Amazone du Mont Everest (1925)
* Ivan Narodny, The Skygirl, A Mimodrama (1925)
* Edmond Hamilton, Across Space (1926)
* Edmond Hamilton, The Metal Giants (1926)
* Jean de La Hire, L'Antéchrist (1927)
* Maurice Renard & Albert Jean, Blind Circle (1925)
* David H. Keller, "The Psychophonic Nurse" (1928)
* Edmond Hamilton, The Comet Doom (1928)
* Amelia Reynolds Long, "The Twin Soul" (1928)
* Francis Flagg, The Chemical Brain (1929)
* Jean de La Hire, Titania (1929)
* Stephen Leacock, "The Iron Man and the Tin Woman" (1929)
* William Salisbury, The Squareheads (1929)
* Jean de La Hire, Belzébuth (1930)
* Otis Adelbert Kline, The Prince of Peril (1930)
* Ainslee Jenkins, "Men of Steel" (1930)
* Abner J. Gelula, "Automaton" (1931)
* Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) - maybe
* Jean de La Hire, Gorillard (1932)
* John Wyndham, "The Lost Machine" (1932)
* David H. Keller, Revolt of the Pedestrians (1932)
* Neil R. Jones, "The Planet of the Double Sun" (1932)
* Neil R. Jones, "The Return of the Tripeds" (1932)
* Jean de La Hire, L'Assassinat du Nyctalope (1933)
* Jean de La Hire, Les Mystères de Lyon (1933)
* Neil R. Jones, "Into the Hydrosphere" (1933)
* Neil R. Jones, "Time's Mausoleum" (1933)
* J. Storer Clouston, Button Brains (1933)

PLUS:
* Gustave Le Rouge & Gustave Guitton, The Billionaire's Conspiracy (1899-1900)
* Harle Oren Cummins, "The Man Who Made a Man" (1902)
* Harl Vincent, "Rex" (1934)
* A. Merritt, "The Last Poet and the Robots" (1934)

Not included: myths (the Golem, Pygmalion) or fantasies (L. Frank Baum's Tin Man) where no attempt at achieving scientific verisimilitude, however feeble, is made. Also: I have mostly left automatons (or mecha) - defined as mechanical apparatuses programmed or devised to do certain operations that rely on control from outside; no possibility of independent action - off this list.

FOR FURTHER READING:

You can read my previous posts about Pre-Golden Age science fiction here.

Readers, here is the long-awaited second installment in my Pre-Golden Age SF series. I can't afford first editions of PGA SF novels, but I've managed to collect images of their dustjackets and "boards" (as bookbinders call the paper- or cloth-covered stiff cardboard forming a book's covers). The following 10 SF novels boast the most thrilling and evocative cover (board or dustjacket) illustrations and design from 1904-33.

I invite your criticisms; please note, though, that this is a survey of PGA SF first editions. Later Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks don't count.

Pre-Golden Age SF's Top Ten Book Covers

1. Norman Matson's Doctor Fogg (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929). A shy and retiring Chicago scientist manages to communicate with an advanced alien civilization, whose scientific secrets he refuses to share with Earth's flawed political powers; and he accidentally "broadcasts" a gorgeous naked blonde alien with whom he falls in love. What does the fun dustjacket illustration have to do with it? Nothing! But I love the speeding meteors, which converge cozily at the center of the image; the void of space absolutely chock-full of stars and planets; the awkwardness of the gentleman at top right compared with the insouciance of the woman beneath. I also admire the crimson-orange/navy blue/silver color scheme. Making the characters' hair, the men's neckties, the woman's dress the same color as the slightly italicized title? An inspired decision. NB: The board illustration is also super-cool: it's a silver planetoid with the words "Doctor Fogg" inside.

2. Karel Čapek's Krakatit (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1925). An English translation of the Czech author's 1924 novel. A scientist discovers the most powerful explosive ever, but he refuses to share it with (see above) Earth's flawed political powers. The Art Deco jacket design captures both the excitement and terror of such a discovery. The stylish typeface says, "Not to worry, the future is awesome!" But K. Romney Towndrow's artwork - an explosion rending the very planet in half - says, "Yes, worry." Still, this is a satire, so we're not encouraged to take things too seriously; the illustration kinda reminds us of limelights in a canyon of skyscrapers. It's as though we were approaching a 1925 Hollywood movie opening, perhaps Marion Fairfax's The Lost World. Fun facts: The book was adapted as a 1947 movie (d. Otakar Vávra) and a 1960 opera (Václav Kašlík); both are supposed to be tremendous. The 1925 US edition of Krakatit has a more restrained, but still fun, jacket.

3. Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1917). I'm not impressed with the original book jacket illustrations for Burroughs's Barsoom series. Sure, they feature lone heroes confronting hordes of alien warriors, not to mention half-naked damsels menaced by multi-limbed aliens, but... Frank Frazetta's later work on the same titles demonstrates just how tame the original jacket illustrations were. They make the swords-and-sandals-in-space genre feel middlebrow and uplifting, which is precisely what we hi-lobrows do not enjoy. Peel away the Barsoomian jackets, though, and you'll often find more compelling boards underneath. A Princess of Mars was Burroughs's first published story - it was serialized in 1912, under a pseudonym - and everything great about his writing is captured here. That Arts & Crafts typeface, so pseudo-medieval and chivalrous! That red planet, so mysterious and alluring! Stop the world, Edgar, I want to get off.

4. L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz (Reilly & Britton, Chicago, 1914). Illustrated - like 39 of the 40 canonical Oz editions - by John R. Neill, Baum's picaresque concerns the efforts of the Shaggy Man (a proto-hippie who disdains all possessions except his Love Magnet) to rescue his brother from the Nome King. Tik-Tok, a copper-bodied clockwork man, first appeared in Ozma of Oz (1907), then starred in a 1913 stage musical. In this book, despite Neill's sweet, startling dustjacket illustration, Tik-Tok is (as ever) an emotionless though fiercely loyal servant. Exactly like Karel Čapek's flesh-and-blood "robots." Fun fact: Though often described as the first robot to appear in modern literature (if you don't count living-metal creatures, like the golden maidservants who attend Hephaestus in The Iliad, that is), Tik-Tok was preceded by Edward S. Ellis's Steam Man of the Prairies in 1868.

5. Rudyard Kipling, With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909). This SF novella by Kipling - best known for The Jungle Book, Kim, and the Just-So Stories - first appeared in McClure's magazine in 1905. In 2000, lighter-than-air craft traverse the globe; the plot follows a mail dirigible on its adventures. Never Kippled? This ain't the place to start. However, Kipling did get so excited by his own nerdy vision that the book's appendices include ersatz instructions to aviators, not to mention advertisements for imaginary dirigible and aeronautical products. Detailed illustrations and pictorial endpapers make this a gorgeous production, indeed. "A beautiful object, most strange and peculiarly inspiring," writes one rare bookseller, of the 1909 Night Mail. The same could be said of the gilt-and-silver zeppelin that materializes - Millennium Falcon-like - from the star-spangled indigo depths of the book's cloth-covered boards. Wow!

6. Olaf Stapledon's Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest (Methuen & Co., Ltd., London, 1935). Perhaps my favorite Argonaut Folly fiction, Odd John concerns the efforts of an international band of teenage and twentysomething "supernormals" (or "wide-awakes") to form an island colony, where they can devote themselves to "world-building" ("individualistic communism," not to mention the founding of a new mutant species) and "intelligent worship." The jacket illustration captures Stapledon's notion of the titular John: half-child and half-philosopher, ruthless but not malicious, "a creature which appeared as urchin but also as sage, as imp but also as infant deity," a fallen angel with a face that is "half monkey, half gargoyle, yet wholly urchin, with its huge cat's eyes, its flat little nose, its teasing lips." Cue David Bowie: "Look at your children/See their faces in golden rays/Don't kid yourself they belong to you/They're the start of a coming race." Homo Superior, that is.

7. E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922). More admired than read, Ouroboros is a linguistically adventurous saga recounting the infinite war between the king of Witchland and the lords of Demonland... on the planet Mercury. Call it Nietzschean SF: somewhere out there, the author would have us believe, another world is possible, one in which the self-overcoming values and worldview of Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, and Scandinavian Vikings will never be corrupted. (As Lord Juss puts it: "For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.") The end of Eddison's novel is also its beginning, hence the title and Keith Henderson's heavy-metal jacket illustration - a snake devouring itself tail-first. Like they so often do in medieval engravings, Celtic sculptures, Egyptian scrolls, Aztec glyphs, and on Agent Scully's lower back. Wish I could afford a 1st edition.

8. George Babcock, Yezad: A Romance of the Unknown (Bridgeport, Conn. & New York: Co-Operative Publishing Co., Inc., 1922). Almost as much as I love the Satan-vs.-Martians jacket illustration ("from painting by the author"), I love the novel's description: "Highly eccentric romance of reincarnation, which includes an account of the colonization of the Moon by near-perfect humans of Mars and the unhappy circumstances of the descent of our ancestors to Earth." Mars, it seems, was once a technologically advanced utopia. Then, 20 million years ago, it lost its atmosphere, so the Martians relocated - but, in doing so, degenerated into our beast-like ancestors. (Isn't this the plot of Jack Kirby's The Eternals? And Scientology?) As for the devil on the dustjacket, the occult point of Babcock's novel is to inform us that we are divided creatures, within whom Bonality and Malality (good and bad aspects) struggle. Moral: Don't let Malality triumph, or it might break Martian-filled eggs with its pitchfork.

9. Harold Steele Mackaye, The Panchronicon (Scribner, New York, 1904). I'm informed that The Panchronicon concerns a pair of New Hampshire spinsters who are given the opportunity to travel through time via a solar-powered airship-thing from the 27th-century. See, first you fly the Panchronicon to the North Pole; then you orbit the Earth widdershins (anti-sunwise, like Christopher Reeve does in the 1978 Superman); and presto, you're in 16th-century England, where you're able to disprove the Bacon-was-Shakespeare theory. Meanwile, your drunken shipmate, Copernicus Droop, can attempt to patent the phonograph and the bicycle. Sounds fun... but as you've perhaps intuited, I'm not convinced that the book is actually worth the effort of reading. Still, the cover board illustration is awesome. If this is what 27th-century time-travel technology looks like - part houseboat from Arthur Ransome's Big Six, part Terry Gilliam machine, part Owlship - then western civilization is inarguably headed in the best of all possible directions. Sign me up.

10. E.V. Odle, The Clockwork Man (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1923). "Of the many works of scientific romance that have fallen into utter obscurity," writes Brian Stableford, in Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950, "this is perhaps the one which most deserves rescue." Eight thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads, devices which permit us to move through time and space - at the cost of a certain amount of agency. If one of these devices should go awry, a "clockwork man" might appear in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village, behaving strangely. Worse, like the titular character in Philip K. Dick's 1969 story "The Electric Ant," the clockwork man might tinker with his own mechanism. Bad idea! NB: This book is extremely rare; I've never seen a copy for under $500... and that's without the dustjacket. The illustration is like a Bildungsroman cover re-jiggered by Hannah Höch. Cool.

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based freelance journalist and independent scholar, who writes frequently about science fiction. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary.

AFTERWORD

Since publishing the first post in this series, I've been inundated with suggestions about terrific-sounding novels from 1904-33 concerned with, for example, Artificial Life, Homo Superior, Mad Scientists, Outer Space, and Lost Worlds. Commenting on my Top Ten Apocalypses post, for example, io9 reader Mathmos suggested:

It doesn't fit the Apocalypse category, but I like the title: The Devolutionist and the Emancipatrix by Homer Eon Flint.

A Francophone friend of mine emailed to say:

Don't forget Gustave Le Rouge (1867-1938). Friend of Verlaine, influence on Cendrars and on the Surrealists. Best books take premises from Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs and go crazy. A war fought mostly in the air (before 1914) between rival Mormon millionaires in Utah vying for control of sub-Atlantic railroad lines! A sculptor of human flesh! The planet Mars ruled by a Great Brain and populated by vampires!

And a fellow PGA SF aficionado forwards these lines from Amazon or Wikipedia:

Leo Saint-Clair, alias the Nyctalope, was created in 1911 by Jean de La Hire, one of France's most prolific serial writers. Gifted with night vision, hypnotic powers and an artificial heart, Saint-Clair is a fearless hero who battles colorful super-villains.... In The Nyctalope on Mars (1911), Leo faces the megalomaniacal Oxus, master of the secret society of the Fifteen, who is plotting to conquer Earth from his secret base on Mars. After defeating the Fifteen, the Nyctalope must then face an ever more fearsome foe: H. G. Wells' Martians.

All of which makes me worry: What have I overlooked? How can I declare which Alien Invasion and Cosmic Perspective novels from 1904-33 are the best of their kind before I've read Gustave Le Rouge's Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars, and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist? I'm going to read these two books, among others, before New Year's Eve. I'll be back, newly confident and opinionated, next month. But keep the suggestions coming.

Happy New Year! And please stay tuned.

Hollywood adaptations of Brave New World and When Worlds Collide, based on books released at roughly the same time as Princess of Mars, are also in development. Novels of this period are re-exerting their power over the collective imaginary.

Welcome to the first episode of an irregular series of posts that will survey science fiction novels published from the beginning of the 20th century until the advent of science fiction's so-called Golden Age. Not to be confused with SF's Pulp Era (i.e., the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s), I've named the years 1904-33 its Pre-Golden Age, or PGA. For our first foray into this era, let's consider ten great novels of the apocalypse.

Hold on, though: The 20th century began in 1901, while the Golden Age is widely agreed to have kicked off in or shortly after '38, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories. So why doesn't the PGA begin in '01 and end in '37? Why 1904-33, instead? Glad you asked. I've got a whole post explaining why this era is meaningful. Click the link if you want more historical background, or just plunge right into the apocalypse below.

Many of these novels are in the public domain, and I've indicated where you can find them in full text online, as well as where you can pick up a printed copy if you like.

1. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930). In his awe-inspiring, tragicomic first novel, Stapledon, a British philosopher and progressivist, ventriloquizes the future history of humankind as related to him telepathically by one of the Last Men - alien descendants of ours who will inhabit Neptune, where they'll face extinction as the sun burns out, some two billion years hence. So what does fate hold in store for us, the First Men? Well, the post-WWI "passionate will for peace and a united world" won't last long, Stapledon's narrator informs readers. Within a century aerial bombs and poison gas will have laid waste to Europe (including Russia), leaving the Chinese and Americans to compete for global military and economic domination. Eventually, a World State will be founded, and peace and prosperity will reign... until Earth's natural energy sources get used up! At that point, civilization will collapse and the First Men will devolve into superstitious savages living in the shadow of their ancestors' skyscrapers - "though for the most part they were of course by now little more than pyramids of debris overgrown with grass and brushwood" - until, after nearly 100,000 years, they'll re-civilize themselves and discover atomic energy. Which they'll use, "after a bout of insane monkeying with the machinery," to inadvertantly annihilate all but 35 men and women, whose mutated descendants will be the Second Men. This sort of thing goes on, and on, and on, entertainingly and soberingly, for 18 generations of humankind. Multiple apocalypses, and all for the price of one novel! Read more about Last and First Men in the Homo Superior installment of this series.
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2. William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land: A Love Tale (1912). Hodgson, a British sailor, strongman, and visionary, paints a macabre, fascinating portrait of a frozen future Earth whose few remaining human inhabitants live in a vast underground space created by earthquakes, lit by the glare of lava bubbling up from below, and inhabited by dinosaurs. Worse, at some point in the distant past, overreaching scientists breached "the Barrier of Life" that separated our dimension from one populated by "monstrosities and Forces" - Watching Things, Silent Ones, Hounds, Giants, "Ab-humans," Brutes, enormous slugs and spiders - collectively known as the Slayers. (At least one of them, as far as I can tell from the 1972 Ballantine paperback cover shown here, resembles Pac-Man.) The unnamed narrator, along with apparently every other surviving human, lives trapped in the Last Redoubt, a eight-mile-high metal pyramid-city constructed by their ancestors using now-forgotten technologies. The pyramid is protected from the Slayers, who surround and observe it constantly, by mysterious Powers of Goodness, and also by a massive force-field powered by the "Earth Current" - a Tesla-esque force drawn from the planet itself. Our hero is telepathic, and one day he receives a distress signal that appears to issue from a woman living in a long-forgotten community of humans sequestered in a distant Lesser Pyramid whose power supply is running out. Arming himself with a lightsaber-meets-brushcutter gizmo called a Diskos, and eating nothing but protein pills and powdered water, he sets forth on a mission impossible - into the Night Land.
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3. M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901; read why I consider this a PGA novel here). When Brian Aldiss quipped, in reference to PGA SF, that "the period was a welter of variously colored plagues," this is one of the two catastrophes that he must have had in mind; Jack London wrote the other one. Not a pandemic but a deadly vapor that sweeps across the planet - perhaps as some kind of chthonic punishment (as in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening) for humanity's failure to respect Nature's mysteries - the purple cloud leaves behind only one living human, Adam Jefferson, who'd been away in the Arctic. Sporting an Englishman's idea of a Turkish pasha's get-up (complete with mustachios not shown here, for some reason, on the cover of the June '49 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries), Adam divides his ample time between roaming the world in search of other survivors, building himself a tropical-island castle that would have made Mad King Ludwig jealous, speculating on the nature of the Earth itself (is it intelligent? out to get him?), and burning cities down for fun. It's not much of a plot, but the writing is a delight, as purple as the poison cloud itself: "For oftentimes, both waking and in nightmare, I did not know on which orb I was, nor in which age, but felt my being adrift in the great gulf of space and eternity and circumstance, with no bottom for my consciousness to stand upon, the world all mirage and a strange show to me, and the frontiers of dream and waking lost." (This is how reading the best PGA SF makes you feel, in my experience.) Adam eventually discovers his Eve... but refuses to mate with her, because the human race doesn't deserve a second chance. Will he change his mind? Fun facts: Shiel was an Englishman born and raised in Barbados, an anti-Semite and racist (he coined the phrase "Yellow Peril"), and - according to some critics - a fascist. Ironically, this novel was an inspiration for the classy, anti-racist SF movie, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, in which Harry Belafonte won't mate with the world's last woman... because she's white.
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4. Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large (1922 as Továrna na absolutno; in English in 1927). In the near future (i.e., the Thirties), a Czech scientist invents "perfect combustion," and an industrial concern starts manufacturing an atomic reactor that provides cheap energy - with an unexpected byproduct: God. To be precise, it's the Absolute, the spiritual essence that permeates every particle of matter... or did, anyway, until matter began to be annihilated by the super-efficient Karburetor. Instrumental rationality, and the capitalist cult of efficiency, are satirized brilliantly by Čapek, the Czech absurdist whose 1921 play R.U.R. first gave us the word "robot." As they're released from imprisoning matter by the Karburetors and Molecular Disintegration Dynamos cranked out in the thousands by Ford Motors (the novel's Czech title means "the factory of the Absolute") and other manufacturers around the world, God-particles infect humankind with wonder-working powers and ecstatic religious sentiments. What's more, the Absolute begins operating factories itself, producing far too many finished goods for anyone to consume: "It wove, spun, knitted, forged, cast, erected, sewed, planed, cut, dug, burned, printed, bleached, refined, cooked, filtered, and pressed for twenty-four to twenty-six hours a day." As a result, economies collapse, unemployment is universal, and from 1944 through 1953, fanatical sects whose -isms (including rationalism, nationalism, and sentimentalism) are religious only in the broadest sense do battle. Every single country on the planet is drawn into the Greatest War, during which everyone invades everyone else, atomic weapons are deployed, and civilization collapses. Now, that's instrumental rationality operating at peak efficiency.
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5. Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Moon Maid (1926). Those of us who grew up reading apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic potboilers like Lucifer's Hammer or Battlefield Earth might find the preceding four titles - as fun to read as they are - a tad slow-moving. Perhaps that's because they weren't written by Americans, or serialized in American pulps? Burroughs's The Moon Maid is a multi-generational, three-books-in-one saga that literally gallops from Julian 5th's crash-landing on the moon, where he makes a daring getaway (with a moon maid in tow) from subhuman Kalkars who dwell in the asteroid's hollow interior; to the same Julian's doomed effort to defeat a Kalkar invasion of Earth; to Julian 9th's failed but inspiring rebellion against the mongrel descendants of the Moon Men, who've presided over the Earthlings' return to a medieval agrarian lifestyle; to the final triumph of Red Hawk (Julian 20th), the leader of a primitive tribe of freedom-fighters who, 400 years after the invasion, finally defeats humankind's overlords - Battlefield Earth-style - in the ruins of Los Angeles. The Julian 9th story, one hears, was originally written after the Bolshevik revolution, and was rejiggered later to fit into the Moon Maid saga: it's a red-blooded example of anticommunist SF that predates Ayn Rand's We the Living and Orwell's Animal Farm by decades. ("We would slay all the Kalkars in the world, and we would sell the land again that men might have pride of ownership and an incentive to labor hard and develop it for their children, for well we knew by long experience that no man will develop land that reverts to the government at death, or that government may take away from him at any moment.") No matter what you may think of its politics, The Moon Maid has been described as "Burroughs' masterpiece of science fiction and a too-often overlooked pioneer work of social extrapolation in science fiction" - which is true.
MOON MAID - FULL TEXT | MOON MEN - FULL TEXT | RED HAWK - FULL TEXT | BISON EDITION | FIND A COPY

6. Philip Gordon Wylie & Edwin Balmer, When Worlds Collide (1933). Wylie and Balmer's masterpiece is, for the most part, a pre-apocalyptic novel. The plot details the efforts of The League of the Last Days - an international band of 1,000 brilliant scientists, action heroes, and fertile women (I exaggerate, but not much; the main female character is named Eve!), who've discovered that two rogue planets are entering the sun's orbit, and that while one of these planets (Bronson Alpha) will collide with the Earth, a remnant of humankind might be able to survive on the other (Bronson Beta) - to design, construct, and outfit rocket-arks that will transport a few of their number to safety. We are treated to two terrifying apocalyptic scenes: One, when the rogue planets first pass by the Earth, triggering stupendous cataclysms; and the other, when worlds collide: "The very Earth bulged... It became plastic. It was drawn out egg-shaped. The cracks girdled the globe. A great section of the Earth itself lifted up and peeled away... The two planets struck." But it's the post-apocalyptic scenes that I enjoy most: a deserted, Ballardian Chicago whose skyscrapers are knocked out of plumb; violent, half-naked mobs battling the National Guard in Pittsburgh; an army of hate-filled Midwesterners that nearly succeeds in wrecking the rocket-ship project. Plus, I dig the quasi-Nietzschean philosophizing: "What are morals, fundamentally, Tony?" demands Eve of the novel's protagonist, her fiancé. "Morals are nothing but the code of conduct required of an individual in the best interests of the group of which he's a member. So what's 'moral' here wouldn't be moral at all on Bronson Beta." Eve is explaining, you see, why she won't be faithful to Tony even if they do survive doomsday. Sequel: After Worlds Collide (1934). Fun facts: The book influenced the strip Flash Gordon, while Siegel & Shuster lifted key ideas from both When Worlds Collide and Wylie's earlier SF novel, Gladiator when they created Superman. George Pal's 1951 movie adaptation of Worlds is a sci-fi classic (it inspired the Rocky Horror lyrics "'But When Worlds Collide,'/Said George Pal to his bride,/'I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills'"); one fears that Stephen Sommers's forthcoming adaptation won't be an improvement.
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7. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt: Being an account of another adventure of Prof. George E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Prof. Summerlee, and Mr. E.D. Malone, the discoverers of "The Lost World" (1913). Doyle's first Professor Challenger tale, The Lost World, was a romp through a South American jungle crawling with prehistoric monsters and beast-men. Why, critics have wondered ever since, did he follow it with a yarn that takes place almost entirely in a locked room? (That's Challenger, et al., crowded comically together on the book's spine.) Challenger discovers that the planet is about to be engulfed in a poisonous belt of "ether" (astrophysicists now prefer the term "dark matter"). Inviting his comrades to his home outside London, where he and his wife have laid up a supply of oxygen canisters, which may or may not save their lives, Challenger tells them: "We are assisting at a tremendous and awful function. It is, in my opinion, the end of the world." Barricading themselves into his wife's boudoir, like astronauts strapping themselves into a rocket, the adventurers sit and wait, debating everything from the possibilities of the universe to the "abysses that lie upon either side of our material existence," to the "ideal scientific mind"; meanwhile, the world goes to rack and ruin. True, Poison Belt is a Wellsian exercise, i.e., not nearly as action-packed as Doyle's usual output. But unlike other apocalyptic fictions, which model proper (heroic) action in the face of certain disaster, Doyle's novella models proper behavior - think of Nevil Shute's On the Beach ('57), for example. Also, the coda, in which humankind becomes more socialist, less fanatically religious and political, and generally wiser, is sweet; and Challenger's personal qualities - his scholarly sprezzatura, overweening egotism, and nerves of steel - make him fine company, whether in the jungle or in his wife's boudoir.
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8. Jack London, The Scarlet Plague (1915). Although Mary Shelley and M.P. Shiel beat him to the punch, London's post-apocalyptic plague novel has proved more influential on subsequent SF apocalypses - from Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz ('59) to Hoban's Riddley Walker ('80), to Mike Judge's 2006 movie Idiocracy, for example - whether they're of the pandemic, atomic, or natural-disaster variety. One suspects that Scarlet Plague influenced the Moon Men section of Burroughs's Moon Maid trilogy, too, since the plot begins in 2073, 60 years after a plague has reduced the world's population to a few scattered bands of neolithic scavengers. London's vision, like Burroughs's is an anti-Marxist one: See what happens when the proletariat take over? Everything gets worse, not better! In the post-apocalyptic social order, women are degraded and beaten: Vesta Van Warden, wife of the richest man in America before the plague, we learn from the ancient James Howard Smith, became the chattel of one of her former servants, a man known only as Chauffeur. Predatory nomads - members of the Chauffeur Tribe - named Hoo-Hoo and Har-Lip roam among the ruins of San Francisco. And poor Smith, formerly a professor of literature at UC Berkeley, is reviled by his juniors for being literate: "What I want to know," Edwin continued, "is why you call crab 'toothsome delicacy'? Crab is crab, ain't it? No one I never heard calls it such funny things." Not one of London's most rollicking adventures, but fun and provocative.
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9. Edward Shanks, People of the Ruins (1920). Like London's Scarlet Plague, Shanks's pessimistic postwar novel explores a western society in steep decline. During a workers' strike in 1924 London, our protagonist - Jeremy Tuft, an "investigator in physics" - is accidentally frozen by an experimental suspended-animation ray (as demonstrated on the cover of the June 1947 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries); he wakes up in a medieval-style idiocracy, 150 years hence. Not only have his fellow Englishmen forgotten most of what they used to know, before a worldwide workers' revolution and famine led to civilization's collapse, but they don't particularly care to re-learn any of it. People of the Ruins is, I'd say, an early Sleeper- or Idiocracy-like satire on Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward or Wells's The Sleeper Wakes, novels in which a Rip Van Winkle figure finds himself in a wonderful techno-utopia. However, though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his era's doctrine of Progress ("He had held the comfortable belief that mankind was advancing in conveniences and the amenities of life by regular and inevitable degrees"), Tuft soon decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful, safer ("We used to feel that we were living on the edge of a precipice - every man by himself, and all men together, lived in anxiety"). In this sense, People of the Ruins is an early example of the "cozy catastrophe." Either way, it's worth reading - but doesn't get exciting until the brutish northern English tribes join forces with the Welsh and invade London!
GOOGLE BOOKS

10. H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914). "It is full of lively ingredients; it has no organic life," writes Aldiss of this book. "Wells the One-Man Think-Tank has burst into view. His books are no longer novels but gospels." Yeah, I probably wouldn't include this book in this Top Ten list if I'd managed to acquire and read J.D. Beresford's Goslings (a plague kills every male in London), or Cicely Hamilton's Theodore Savage (a post-apocalyptic novel by a noted feminist), or John Collier's Tom's A-Cold (I like the title). But I haven't - they're very rare. Also, The World Set Free is the best of Wells's four(!) PGA apocalyptic novels, so its lively ingredients are worth a look. Building on the recent discovery that "the atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final and - lifeless - lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy," Wells conjures a 1950s England in which clean, efficient atomic engines have transformed life for the better. Alas, government and education, not to mention social justice, have not kept pace with advances in science and technology, and in the late '50s a world war breaks out. Atomic bombs that never stop exploding wipe out the world's great cities. Worldwide civilization is on the brink of collapse - "the community as a whole was aimless, untrained, and unorganized to the pitch of imbecility"; "there were rumors of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes" - when, miraculously, a New World Order is formed. But more about that another time. Fun fact: Hungarian-German-American astrophysicist Leó Szilárd, who worked on the Manhattan Project, claimed that The World Set Free helped him conceive of the nuclear chain reaction.
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Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based freelance journalist and independent scholar, who writes frequently about science fiction. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary.

ALSO OF INTEREST

THE NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13):
* Gabriel Tarde, Underground Man (1904 as Fragment d'histoire future; 1905 in English)
* George Long, Valhalla: A Novel (1906)
* Van Tassel Sutphen, The Doomsman (1906)
* H.G. Wells, In the Days of the Comet (1906)
* H.G. Wells, The War in the Air (1908)
* James Elroy Flecker, The Last Generation: A Story of the Future (1908)
* George Barr McCutcheon, Her Weight in Gold (1911; novella: The Wrath of the Dead)
* Garrett P. Serviss, The Second Deluge (1912)
* J.D. Beresford, Goslings (1913, pub. in US as A World of Women)

THE TEENS (1914-23):
* George Allan England, Darkness and Dawn (1914)
* Herbert Gubbins, The Elixir of Life, or 2905 A.D.: A Novel of the Far Future (1914)
* Maurice LeBlanc, The Tremendous Event (1920 as Le Formidable Evenement; 1922 in English)
* Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage (1922)
* Ella Scrysmour, The Perfect World: A Romance of Strange People and Strange Places (1922)
* C.F. Ramuz, The Triumph of Death (1922 as Presence de la Mort; in English, 1946; pub. in US as The End of All Men)
* J.J. Connington, Nordenholt's Million (1923)
* P. Anderson Graham, The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923)

THE TWENTIES (1924-33):
* H.M. Egbert, Draught of Eternity (1924)
* Martin Hussingtree, Konyetz (1924)
* V.T. Murray, The Rule of the Beasts (1925)
* Edgar Wallace, The Day of Uniting (1926)
* Shaw Desmond, Ragnarok: The Armageddon of the Gods (1926)
* C.E. Jacomb, And A New Earth: A Romance (1926)
* S. Fowler Wright, Deluge: A Romance (1927)
* Charles J. Finger, The Spreading Stain: A Tale for Boys and Men with Boys' Hearts (1927)
* Pierrepont B. Noyes, The Pallid Giant: A Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow (1927)
* Philip Francis Nowlan, Armageddon 2419 A.D. (August 1928, novella in Amazing Stories)
* J.W. Chancellor, Through the Visograph (1928)
* Paul Creswick, The Turning Wheel (1928)
* S. Fowler Wright, Dawn (1929)
* Lionel Britton, Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (1930)
* F. Wright Moxley, Red Snow (1930)
* Thomas Alva Stubbins, The Story of the Tomb of Gold (1932)
* John Collier, Tom's A-Cold (1933, pub. in US as Full Circle)
* Helen Simpson, The Woman on the Beast: Viewed from Three Angles (1933)
* Neil Bell, The Lord of Life (1933)
* H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (1933)

PLUS:
* Karel Čapek, War with the Newts (1936)

A decade, after all, is a sociocultural as well as a calendrical phenomenon. Think of the Sixties, which - pop-culturally speaking - began optimistically in '64 with the release of Meet the Beatles, and ended tragically in '73 with the death of Spider-Man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy (the comic book's cover even announced a "TURNING POINT," i.e. the end of the Sixties). Still not convinced? It would be tedious to argue about my crackpot scheme here, but I've written plenty on the topic elsewhere.

If my survey of SF novels published between the beginning of the 20th century and the so-called Golden Age of SF stops short of the Thirties (1934-43), it does so with good reason. It was during the mid-1930s, after all, that "science fiction established itself, separating with a slowly increasing decisiveness from fantasy and space-opera," as Kingsley Amis approvingly put it in his 1958 critique, New Maps of Hell.

SF's Golden Age, in this analysis, didn't wait for Campbell to start buying stories from Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but instead gave birth to itself in the years 1934-37, a transitional period or interregnum that saw the advent of the campy Flash Gordon comic strip, E.E. "Doc" Smith's pseudo-scientific Lensman series, and innumerable post-King Kong Hollywood "sci-fi" blockbusters. These escapist, fantastical, wildly popular phenomena helped disentangle literate, analytical, socially conscious "speculative fiction" (Huxley's Brave New World, which appeared in '32, had helped jump-start the trend) from mere sci-fi, a genre now understood by the public to concern itself exclusively with adventure yarns set in the future and populated with Bug-Eyed Monsters. Not that there's anything wrong with BEMs, you understand.

By the early 1940s (i.e., the midpoint of the Thirties), as SF chroniclers of a certain age never tire of crowing, the grown-up Campbell Revolution had decisively overthrown the eternally sophomoric Gernsbackians. For the next couple of decades, American genre writers born in the Oughts, who were too young to contribute to PGA SF - e.g., Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Andre Norton, Fredric Brown, Clifford D. Simak, Alfred Bester, C.L. Moore; and their immediate juniors, born in the Tens, including Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, Leigh Brackett, James Blish, Frederik Pohl, Frank Herbert, and Theodore Sturgeon - would rarely mingle SF and Fantasy in the promiscuous, innocent fashion of PGA-ers like William Hope Hodgson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, or David Lindsay. Unless, of course, they did so as a deliberate experiment in what came to be called (yuck) "science fantasy."

In his introduction to a 1974 collection titled Before the Golden Age, Asimov would note, condescendingly, that although it may have possessed a certain vigor, in general PGA SF "seems, to anyone who has experienced the Campbell Revolution, to be clumsy, primitive, naive." This is certainly true of much SF from the Pulp Era, and of Hugo Gernsback's own fiction in particular. (Amis on Gernsbackian SF: "Neither culture not dreams warm it; it exists as propaganda for the wares of the inventor.") However, what I find so appealing about PGA SF is the ability of its best authors to bring thinking and dreaming (also known as the "Hmm..." and the "Oh!") together in a fraught, negative-dialectical state of productive tension. If this means that PGA SF is somehow less sophisticated than GA SF, more adolescent or immature, then we need to rethink what it means to be sophisticated and mature.

As for SF novels published in the years 1901-03, there's a sound argument to be made for overlooking them, too. Here it is: The 20th century saw the prose style of H.G. Wells, father of SF in the English-speaking world, turn increasingly didactic and shrill; however, The First Men in the Moon and The Food of the Gods, the last of Wells's "scientific romances" that are actually fun to read, appeared in '01 and '04. As Brian Aldiss laments, in Billion Year Spree, Wells's many 20th-century novels, with the exception of the two named, "do not recapture that darkly beautiful quality of imagination, or that instinctive-seeming unity of construction, which lives in his early novels, and in his science fiction particularly." This suggests that the late 19th century which Wells did so much to invent didn't expire until '04-ish - a proposition that is, I submit, six years less outlandish than Virginia Woolf's claim that the 20th century (I'm paraphrasing) didn't begin until "on or about December 1910." For the purposes of this survey, then, the handful of SF novels published from 1901-03 can be safely disregarded.

Fine! But mightn't ignoring the years 1901-03 and 1934-37 do a disservice to important, even critical SF novels published during those periods that belong - by virtue of their style and worldview, their negative-dialectical whatchamacallit - neither to the Wellsian 19th century nor to the Campbellian Golden Age?

Not so much, actually. In fact, by my count only five such novels exist. So I'm going to cheat, and include in this survey: M.P. Shiel's gorgeously written apocalypse, The Purple Cloud (1901); Joseph O'Neill's Land Under England (1935), a hollow-earth fable of telepathic totalitarianism; Olaf Stapledon's Homo Superior novel, Odd John (1935), without which David Bowie couldn't have dreamed up Ziggy Stardust; Karel Čapek's War with the Newts (1936; 1937 in English), in which Nazi-like intelligent salamanders demand Lebensraum from the human race; and Stapledon's Star Maker (1937), which defies description in a few words.

Science fiction's Pre-Golden Age (1904-33) is a cruelly neglected era. It's almost as though SF historians and scholars don't want us to read the SF of, for example, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, Olaf Stapledon, William Hope Hodgson, Karel Capek (who gave us the word "robot"), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and Philip Wylie. They'd like us to jump straight from the late 19th century (Edward Bellamy, William Morris, HG Wells, Jules Verne) to the Golden Age. Why? Let's find out!

Two final notes:

(1) Each post in this series will be devoted to an enduring SF theme, from Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Scenarios to Artificial Life, Lost Worlds, Utopias and Dystopias, and Homo Superior, among other things.

(2) Want to get your mitts on the novels I'll be reviewing or mentioning? Bison Books and Penguin have reissued dozens of 19th-century and PGA SF novels, while some other titles are fairly easy to find at new and used booksellers. PS: In the 1960s and '70s the now-defunct New English Library reissued some PGA SF titles as part of its SF Master Series, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss. In the mid-1970s, turn-of-the-century SF scholars Douglas Menville and R. Reginald republished 62 SF books from before the Golden Age with the Arno Press. Also in the mid-70s: Lester del Rey republished a half-dozen PGA SF novels under the aegis of The Garland Library of Science Fiction; and Sam Moskowitz republished 23 "classics" of late 19th- and early 20th-century SF with Hyperion Press.

Alas, a few of the books I'll mention are impossible to purchase for a reasonable price, or even locate. Useful websites for collectors are AbeBooks and the bookseller L.W. Currey. If the full text of any of the PGA SF novels reviewed or mentioned in this series is available online, and I neglect to link to it, please post the URL to the comments on that entry.

READ THE WHOLE SERIES:

Introduction to Science Fiction's Pre-Golden Age (1904-33) | The 10 Best Apocalypse Novels | The Most Amazing Book Covers | The Coolest Robots | More TBA

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based freelance journalist and independent scholar, who writes frequently about science fiction. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary.