“WHEN THE MIT PRESS publishes science fiction, it does it to make a point”
“the Radium Age series of books launched in 2022 challenges readers to reconsider the science fiction of the early 20th century through a novel periodization; the name is intended to bracket work published between the date Marie Curie discovered radium and the date she died of radiation-induced leukemia or, in deference to the convenience of round numbers, between 1900 and 1935”
“Probably the most notable thing about the Radium Age, conceptually, is that it is named for events external to SF. It is also a long period, a little over three decades. These are both relatively unusual ways of periodizing SF in the 20th century”
“Existing histories tend to talk sometimes about decades, and often about labels arising from tendencies and debates within SF that, happily, serve as synecdoches for specific decades — the Pulps, the Golden Age, the New Wave, Cyberpunk, and so on”
“With minor variations, this is the approach taken by examples ranging from Brian Aldiss’s ur-history Trillion Year Spree (1986) through Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint’s Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (2011), Adam Roberts’s The History of Science Fiction (second edition, 2016), and Mike Ashley’s five-volume history of SF magazines (2000–2022)”
“In this century, the closest precursor to Glenn’s approach might be Roger Luckhurst’s cultural history, Science Fiction (2005), which identifies a breakpoint at the end of World War II, or, more precisely, with the culmination of the Manhattan Project; but even Luckhurst returns to a decade-based approach in the second half of his book”
“Glenn’s project is also well suited to providing an organizing principle for an SF reprint line, to the point where I’m a little surprised that I can’t think of other similarly high-profile examples of reprint-as-critical-advocacy”
“Individual books, yes: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Big Book of Science Fiction (2016) comes to mind as a sympathetic historical-geographical project — but not entire series”
“In the United States, Macmillan’s Tor Essentials do only what they say on the tin. The United Kingdom is much better served, by the long-running Gollancz Masterworks series, as well as by more recent and more eclectic selections from Penguin and the British Library; but they are all general SF lists”
“the HILOBROW page about the series lists a further nine books in preparation, out to 2025. If all come to fruition, 88 percent of the included works at that point will be books by white writers; 70 percent will be by white men; and 52 percent will be by white British men”
“Monographs such as Rachel Haywood Ferreira’s The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (2011), Nathaniel Isaacson’s Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (2017) and Ian Campbell’s Arabic Science Fiction (2018), among others, mention various works that could be considered, to say nothing of a reasonably extensive body of scholarship on European SF of the time”
“The VanderMeer Big Book includes a dozen stories from the Radium Age period, of which half are non-Anglophone — albeit primarily European”
“Over the last couple of decades, critics such as John Rieder, John Clute, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay have advanced models for how we might think about global SF history differently, and some of their thinking dovetails with some of Glenn’s”
“The way I would frame the opportunity would go something like this: in place of the Golden Age and the New Wave, we could identify broader social-historical-technological labels that provide umbrellas to bring different traditions into dialogue, encouraging readers to trace the impact of world-historical conditions and events — such as the First World War — even across the work of authors who, at the time, were unaware of each other’s existence”
“The Radium Age certainly gestures in this direction, not least because it boldly subsumes Hugo Gernsback’s 1926 launch of Amazing Stories within itself, thus (correctly) reframing the most commonly recognized starting point for genre science fiction as specifically the start of genre science fiction in the United States”