RADIUM AGE: 1923

By: Joshua Glenn
September 26, 2022

Kandinsky’s *Circles in a Circle* (1923)

A series of notes — Josh calls it a “timeline,” but Kulturfahrplan might be the more apt term — towards a comprehensive account of the science fiction genre’s Radium Age (1900–1935). These notes are very rough-and-ready, and not properly attributed in many cases. More information on Josh’s ongoing efforts here and here.

RADIUM AGE TIMELINE: [1900 | 1901 | 1902 | 1903] | 1904 | 1905 | 1906 | 1907 | 1908 | 1909 | 1910 | 1911 | 1912 | 1913 | 1914 | 1915 | 1916 | 1917 | 1918 | 1919 | 1920 | 1921 | 1922 | 1923 | 1924 | 1925 | 1926 | 1927 | 1928 | 1929 | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | [1934 | 1935]. (The brackets, here, indicate “interregnum” years — i.e., periods of overlap between sf’s Radium Age and its Scientific Romance and so-called Golden Age eras.)

1923

The year 1923, in my periodization scheme, marks the end of the cultural decade known as the “Nineteen-Teens.” Of course there are no hard stops and starts in culture, so it’s more accurate to describe 1923 (and 1924) as cusp years during which the Teens end and the Twenties begin.

Weird Tales debuted in March 1923, providing a venue for fiction, poetry, and non-fiction on topics ranging from ghost stories to alien invasions to the occult. It was the first magazine to be primarily associated with fantasy and science fiction. See 1924.

Also in 1923: Gernsback devotes an entire issue of Electrical Experimenter to “scientific fiction.”

Proto-sf coinages dating to 1923, according to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction: PARALLEL UNIVERSE | SPACE TRAVEL | WEIRD (describing supernatural horror (often in weird fiction, weird tale, etc. — in title of Weird Tales)

CATASTROPHE

Radium Age CATASTROPHE fiction from this year includes…

BITE THE BULLET: See FUTURE WAR.

DECLINE & FALL OF (WHITE/WESTERN) CIVILIZATION

G. Pawlowski’s Voyage au Pays de la Quatrieme Dimension. A famous anti-realistic novel of ideas, first published in 1912. A complex, episodic Future History, on lines that anticipate Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930); the disjunctive narrative touches upon a range of eras, including one known as Leviathan, when humanity has been absorbed into something resembling a Hive Mind, climaxing in the Age of the Golden Eagle, when the fourth Dimension is accessible both aesthetically and as a usable understanding of the physical world. Supermen, sometimes short-lived, are frequently found throughout, as are miracles of science. The first edition tends to the exorbitant, aerates the depicted future; the second edition, which Stableford translates, darkens that vision, almost certainly because World War One intervened. “The new material added to the body of the text in the 1923 edition consisted of additional pieces that had appeared in COMOEDIA between 1912 and 1914 — Pawlowski was conscripted thereafter for the duration of the Great War to serve as an engineer in the ‘auto-service’ and had to give up the editorship of the magazine. The new chapters were inserted at various points in the text, according to their approximate internal chronology — many of them, inevitably, in the relatively dour section dealing with the present day and the supposed development of the collective consciousness he calls ‘the Leviathan'” (Stableford). Stableford calls it remarkable. First published in 1911 in the monthly review Comœdia then in 1912, Pawlowski produced a new edition in 1923 in which he discussed the implications of Einsteinian physics upon his work.
P. Anderson Graham’s The Collapse of Homo Sapiens. Time traveler visits England two hundred years in the future. English civilization has been destroyed by wars with socialists and Blacks. The few survivors live in the woods and cannot believe that scientific and mechanical aids ever existed. Said to be one of the better awful warning stories published in Britain between the World Wars. Sounds racist!

DEEP TIME: See COSMIC AWE.

DIRTY OLD TOWN: See DYSTOPIA / UTOPIA.

DYING EARTH (or DEAD MOON)

TBD

ECO-CATASTROPHE / PANDEMIC

J.J. Connington’s Nordenholt’s Million (1923). As denitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth spread around the world, causing agricultural blight, Jack Flint is invited to become director of operations at a huge survivalist colony located in England’s Clyde Valley. Flint discovers that his employer, the ruthless plutocrat 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. The plant-killing plague ends… but Nordenholt’s collectivized serfs refuse to work, blow up the factories on which their fragile community depends, and join weird religious cults! The author, it seems, was as worried about the Soviet Revolution as he was about right-wing politicians and rapacious businessmen eager to use any disaster as an excuse to dispense with democracy, liberty, and justice. Fun fact: Connington was the pseudonym of Alfred Walter Stewart, the British chemist who coined the term isobar as complementary to isotope. Reissued in 2022 by MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series, with an introduction by Matthew Battles and an afterword by Evan Hepler-Smith.

Charles W. Garrett’s Aurilly. Eccentric science fiction novel in which a planetoid strikes Earth somewhere in the North Pacific causing a giant tidal wave and the emergence of an island some 400 miles long parallel to the Aleutians with rich gold deposits that, following exploitation, ultimately disrupt the world’s economy.

OVERREACH: See SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH.

COSMIC AWE

Radium Age COSMIC AWE fiction from this year includes…

ATOMIC SUBLIME: See DISENCHANTMENT / UNSEEN FORCES.

DEEP TIME:

TBD

DYING EARTH (or MOON): See CATASTROPHE.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

TBD

IS THERE LIFE ON MARS

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “The Moon Maid” (stories May 1923-September 1925 Argosy All-Story Weekly as “The Moon Maid” [5 May-2 June 1923], “The Moon Men” [21 February-14 March 1925] and “The Red Hawk” [5-19 September 1925]. Describes a civilization in the hollow interior of the Moon and a future invasion of the Earth. As a fixup in 1926, and there were 1960s versions too.
Albino Coutinho’s Brazil – A Liga dos planetas [“The League of Planets”]. Features space flight to utopian Venus and Mars.
John Martin Leahy’s “Draconda” (serial). Haggard-esque lost race on Venus, not very well written but fondly remembered. In Weird Tales.

MATHEMATICAL SUBLIME: See FAR-OUT MATHEMATICS / FOURTH DIMENSION.

OVERVIEW EFFECT

TBD

STARS WHEEL IN PURPLE

TBD

DEHUMANIZATION

Radium Age DEHUMANIZATION art from this year includes…

CYBORG MANIFESTO

E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man (1923). Years from now, advanced beings known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads. At the cost of a certain amount of agency, these marvelous devices will permit us to move unhindered through time and space, and to live perfectly regulated lives. However, if one of these devices should ever go awry, a “clockwork man” from the future might turn up in the 1920s, perhaps at a cricket match in a small English village. Considered the original cyborg novel, and perhaps the original singularity novel too. “Odle’s ominous, droll, and unforgettable The Clockwork Man is a missing link between Lewis Carroll and John Sladek or Philip K. Dick,” says Jonathan Lethem. “Considered with them, it suggests an alternate lineage for SF, springing as much from G.K. Chesterton’s sensibility as from H.G. Wells’s.” Fun fact: Rumors that “E.V. Odle” was a pen name for Virginia Woolf are amusing, but unfounded. Edwin Vincent Odle (1890–1942) was a writer who lived in Bloomsbury, London during the 1910s. From 1925–35, he was editor of the British short-story magazine The Argosy. Reissued in 2022 by MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series with an Introduction by Annalee Newitz.

MECHANIZATION

TBD

THINGS ARE IN THE SADDLE: See NEW TECHNOLOGIES.

DISENCHANTMENT / UNSEEN FORCES

Radium Age DISENCHANTMENT / UNSEEN FORCES fiction from this year includes…

ATOMIC SUBLIME

Ray Cummings’s The Girl in the Golden Atom. “The Girl in the Golden Atom,” Cummings’ first published story, appeared in the 15 March 1919 issue of All-Story Weekly. It was an instant success and was followed by a sequel, “People of the Golden Atom,” published 24 January–28 February 1920. The two stories are here collected as the author’s first book. See 1919.
G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Man from the Atom.” Wertenbaker was 16 at the time. He was Gernsback’s first important discovery.
Austin Hall’s “Hop o’ My Thumb.” Another microcosmic romance. Called Hall’s most interesting solo work.

CHROMATIC SUBLIME

TBD

DIAGRAMMATIC SUBLIME

TBD

GEOPHYSICAL SUBLIME

TBD

MICROSCOPIC SUBLIME: See SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS.

QUANTUM SUBLIME: See SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS.

RE-ENCHANTMENT

TBD

SCIENCE FANTASY

A. Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss (serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly). An American mining engineer, Nicholas Graydon, stumbles into the hidden Andean city of Yu-Atlanchi. There, he becomes entangled in an epic conflict between an ancient Lord of Evil and a benevolent, snake-like matriarch. (Nimir — a god-like being who eons earlier was defeated and trapped inside a golden mask — acts primarily through mind control, advanced ancient technology, and as a shapeless shadow who manipulates greedy mortals and commands an army of dinosaur-riding minion.) The original novella, some say, is superior to the 1931 novel version.
A. Merritt’s “The Pool of the Stone God.”

David Lindsay’s Sphinx. Places muted metaphysical images of the same type as those found in the author’s A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) and THE HAUNTED WOMAN (1922)] in a conventional domestic drama. A hapless young man becomes entangled with two women while trying to perfect a machine to record the deep, unremembered dreams that contain the hidden truth of human existence.” As Cabot successfully tests his prototype dream machine, he discovers his recorded dreams predict the looming tragedies playing out in the lives of the people around him. The women in the novel embody different characteristics of the legendary Sphinx—acting as symbols of benevolence, earthly distractions, and fatal traps. The book ultimately explores the hidden, deeper layers of human consciousness and reality. “SPHINX comes closer to traditional science-fiction than anything else Lindsay was to write.” – Wolfe. “Most critics have dismissed SPHINX as a failure, but I find it curiously fascinating.” – Bleiler.
Claude Farrère’s Contes d’outre et d’autres mondes (Tales of Beyond and Other Worlds). Some of the stories in this collection (untranslated?) are proto-sf. The stories are primarily about the occult, metaphysical mysteries, and science fiction themes, featuring elements like alternate dimensions, immortality, and time travel. “L’autre côté de la terre” (The Other Side of the Earth): Explores spatial mysteries and what lies beyond our known geographic realities. “Histoire de la truie humaine” (History of the Human Sow): A darker, more macabre piece with hints of weird horror. Le “double” (The Double): A doppelgänger tale dealing with identity and the supernatural.
Alexander Grin’s Blistaiushchii mir [“The Shining World”]. A philosophical sci-fi novel about a man named Drud who possesses the innate ability to fly without machinery. The author uses this ability as a metaphor for creative and personal freedom, exploring how society rejects, fears, and ultimately destroys those who refuse to conform. The book is considered a masterpiece of early 20th-century Russian speculative fiction and remains one of the defining works of “Grinlandia,” the romantic fantasy universe created by Grin.
A Russian author, Grin began his writing career after his imprisonment and exile after the 1905 Revolution. His romances set in a parallel world fed a strong appetite in Russia, especially after the 1917 Revolution when high fantasy was taboo, and they were printed in millions of copies. Containing many fantastic elements they include the stories in Shapka-nevidimka [“The Hat of Invisibility”] (coll 1908), the novels Alyie parusa [“Scarlet Sails”] (1923), Blistaiushchii mir [“The Shining World”] (1923), Doroga nikuda [“Road Nowhere”] (1930) and others.

SOUL SEARCHING

TBD

STOP MOTION

TBD

TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME: See NEW TECHNOLOGIES.

DYSTOPIA / UTOPIA

Radium Age DYSTOPIA / UTOPIA fiction from this year includes…

BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN

TBD

BRAVE NEW WORLD

TBD

DIRTY OLD TOWN

TBD

FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITIES

H.G Wells’s Men Like Gods. The author’s second major Utopian fantasy and, according to some critics, his best. “Three carloads of Earthlings, accidentally transported into an anarchistic ‘Utopia’ based on science and rationalistic social planning, react with the violence and bigotry which the author regards as characteristic of capitalism.” — Survey of Science Fiction Literature
John Hargrave’s Harbottle. A bitter Wellsian novel of ideas. Slides from excoriations of the Aftermath world of the 1920s into a tentative glimpse of a better future. The first of several best-selling novels that raised enough cash to support the author’s bohemian existence. (It was Hargrave who created the Kibbo Kift.)

GEOMETRICAL UTOPIA: See FAR-OUT MATHEMATICS / FOURTH DIMENSION.

STATE BRUTALITY

TBD

FAR-OUT MATHEMATICS / FOURTH DIMENSION

Radium Age FAR-OUT MATHEMATICS / FOURTH DIMENSION fiction from this year includes…

GEOMETRICAL UTOPIA

TBD

MATHEMATICAL SUBLIME

TBD

NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY

TBD

QUANTUM SUBLIME: See SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH.

STOP MOTION: See DISENCHANTMENT / UNSEEN FORCES.

FUTURE WAR

Radium Age FUTURE WAR fiction from this year includes…

BITE THE BULLET

Arpad Ferenczy’s The Ants of Timothy Thummel. Ferenczy is the Hungarian author of the German-language proto-sf novel Timotheus Thümmel und seine Ameisen (1923; trans anon as The Ants of Timothy Thümmel 1924), a Satire featuring a race of ants in central Africa whose Intelligence exceeds that of humans, and who engage in a kind of world-spanning Great Ant War with surrounding tribes of ants; these events may be presumed to have happened aeons earlier, as the only record of the war is to be found in a hieroglyphic tablet which itself refers to events in the deep past.

DEATH FROM ABOVE

TBD

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

Gaston Leroux‘s The Veiled Prisoner. Translated by Hannaford Bennett (1923). Science fiction novel of adventure and intrigue set in the first world war and featuring a super-submarine commanded by a mysterious person obviously inspired by Captain Nemo. Includes the concept of undersea trench warfare.

Jan Gramatzki’s Elavalill. A novel of super science in which a German astronomer and an old Norwegian scientist who has invented “Elavalill” travel in a space ship to Venus. Meanwhile, a misanthropic inventor with an earthquake machine attacks European cities. After the destruction of Paris, Germany is attacked by the French and Poles — who suspect the Germans are responsible for the artificially created earthquakes. Germany is in chaos. After a few years the astronauts return from Venus and the earthquake machine breaks down. “Jan Gramatzki” was probably physicist Hugh Ivan Gramatzki (1882-1957). Gramatzki also wrote DER KRISTALL (1917), an occult novel about the search for the philosopher’s stone.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Radium Age NEW TECHNOLOGIES fiction from this year includes…

CYBORG MANIFESTO: See DEHUMANIZATON.

PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES

TBD

TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME

TBD

THINGS ARE IN THE SADDLE

TBD

SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH

Radium Age SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH fiction from this year includes…

CHROMATIC SUBLIME: See DISENCHANTMENT / UNSEEN FORCES.

MICROSCOPIC SUBLIME

TBD

OVERREACH

Christopher Blayre (Edward Heron-Allen)’s The Cheetah-Girl (1923 chap). An unsettling, provocative tale exploring taboo themes of mad science, bestiality, and human-feline miscegenation. Kind of an amazing story — seems almost too raunchy and transgressive to publish today. Reminds me a bit of Octavia Butler.

Maurice Renard’s New Bodies for Old. The author’s first and best novel, first published in 1908 as LE DOCTEUR LERNE. See 1908.
Coutts Brisbane’s “Growth” — about giantism.
Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen. Women (only) are rejuvenated by X-rays directed to the gonads. The novel’s sexual implications caused a scandal.

QUANTUM SUBLIME

TBD

UNKNOWABLE ALIENS / SINGULARITY

Radium Age UNKNOWABLE ALIENS / SINGULARITY fiction from this year includes…

ALIEN INVASION

George Allan England’s “The Thing from – ‘Outside'”. A creature that may hail not merely from off-world but from a dimension “outside the universe” stalks an expedition in the Canadian wilderness. A science-fictional updating of Blackwood’s 1910 horror tale “The Wendigo,” the story appeared in the April 1923 issue of Hugo Gernsback’s magazine Science and Invention. Ashley says: England had by now passed his peak in the Munsey magazines but still a better writer than any of Gernsback’s contributors, so this was one of the best stories that Science and Invention published

CYBORG MANIFESTO: See DEHUMANIZATION.

HOMO SUPERIOR

TBD

I IS AN OTHER

TBD

IS THERE LIFE ON MARS: See COSMIC AWE.

POST-HUMANITY:

TBD

SCARY MONSTERS (AND SUPER CREEPS)

Otis Adelbert Kline’s “The Thing of a Thousand Shapes.” Kline’s debut – in Weird Tales.

WATCHERS

TBD

OTHER FICTION

Some proto-sf ideas and obsessions that don’t fit easily into our categories include: time travel / viewing | gender reassignment | dinosaurs still live (unless we can connect this to “deep time”) | hollow earth | thought control via parasite | tinkering with / eradicating memories | silly inventions | the colonization [as opposed to merely visiting] of other planets | future politics. Also in the OTHER FICTION section, for the moment, I am lumping: Radium Age proto-sf that resists categorization, or which I haven’t read, or which I’m not even sure should be considered “science fiction” (I’m looking at you, “lost race” adventures).

Francis Stevens’s “Sunfire” (July-September 1923 Weird Tales). A Merritt-esque story of a lost civilization in Brazil. Ashley suggests this is one of the author’s weaker works, probably rejected by the Munsey magazines.
Gilbert Collins’s The Valley of Eyes Unseen — Lost Race adventure. A Tibetan hidden valley inhabited by scientifically advanced descendants of Alexander the Great’s Greeks, from whom the protagonist eventually escapes by purloining one of their inventions, mechanical wings. Michael Dirda tells me he likes it.
Théo Varlet and André Blandin’s Timeslip Troopers. This title added by Brian Stableford.
Nina Murnie Doney’s My Life on Eight Planets, or A Glimpse of Other Worlds. See this list of Pre-1950 Utopias and Science Fiction by Women.
Laura Shellabarger Hunt’s Ultra: A Story of a Pre-Natal Influence. See this list of Pre-1950 Utopias and Science Fiction by Women.
H. Alfarata Chapman Thompson’s Idealia, a Utopian Dream; or, Resthaven. See this list of Pre-1950 Utopias and Science Fiction by Women.

Erich Marx’s *Röntgenstrahlen, Radium und die Materie* (1923)

ALSO: Andrade’s The Structure of the Atom. Arthur Eddington publishes the textbook The Mathematical Theory of Relativity. Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in Munich fails. Two hundred thousand KKK members attend a conclave in Kokomo, Ind. Messerschmitt establishes his aircraft factory. Coolidge becomes US president. Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929), Cassirer’s most important work; whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory perception, he argues, humans create a universe of symbolic meanings. Sayers’s Whose Body? (the first Wimsey adventure), Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, Christie’s Murder on the Links. Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk. Buber’s I and Thou, Freud’s The Ego and the Id. End of Dada movement.

Einstein’s Sidelights on Relativity, which Rucker describes as “highly readable.” It contains translation of his 1920 address “Ether and the Theory of Relativity” (1920) and “Geometry and Experience” (1921). See 1920 and 1921.

The Hungarian philosopher György Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Makes concepts such as alienation and reification central to Marx’s theory, and argues for the primacy of the concept of totality. The book helped to create Western Marxism and is the work for which Lukács is best known. A crucial text for the French Situationist theorist Guy Debord, and for Theodor W. Adorno’s Critical Theory.

New Lands is the second nonfiction book of the author Charles Fort, published in 1923. It deals primarily with astronomical anomalies.

Fort expands in this book on his theory about the Super-Sargasso Sea – a place where earthly things supposedly materialize in order to rain down on Earth – as well as developing an idea that there are continents above the skies of Earth. As evidence, he cites a number of anomalous phenomena, including strange “mirages” of land masses, groups of people, and animals in the skies. He also continues his attacks on scientific dogma, citing a number of mysterious stars and planets that scientists failed to account for.

Of all of Fort’s books, New Lands is the worst-regarded. His speculations (serious or joking, he does not reveal) concerning continents in the sky and the supposed top-like shape of the Earth have dated considerably.

JBS Haldane’s original lecture on the subject to the Heretics on 4th February 1923 was attended by C. K. Ogden. It was Ogden who urged the publication of Daedalus; it sold 15,000 copies in its first year and was in its seventh impression by 1926. Most likely prefiguring Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Daedalus is a book of prophecies.

Herbert Read’s poems in The Mutations of the Phoenix (1923) help inaugurate a neo-metaphysical school in modernist poetry (running through Empson, Michael Roberts, c. Day Lewis), which incorporate science into poetry.

1923 French ad for a radioactive cure-all

***

RADIUM AGE: 1923

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