BEFORE SUPERMAN Q&A
By:
September 8, 2025
This Spring I did a Q&A with Paul Semel about Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age (August 19), an anthology I edited for the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series. Here is that interview…
SEMEL: What is Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age?
GLENN: I’m founding editor of the MIT Press’s Radium Age series, which reissues proto-sf novels and stories from the 1900–1935 era. I’ve edited two previous anthologies for the series — Voices from the Radium Age (2022) and More Voices from the Radium Age (2023). When these proved surprisingly popular with readers, I proposed to edit a few themed anthologies. Back in 2009, when I was first writing about proto-sf for the science fiction website io9, edited by Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz, the themes I explored included: robots, apocalypses, telepaths, eco-catastrophes… and superhumans. Noah Springer, the acquiring editor at the MIT Press with whom I collaborate, liked the latter theme a lot. So I started working on this anthology of Radium Age proto-sf stories — and excerpts from novels — featuring some of the sf genre’s earliest superhuman characters.
SEMEL: Once the theme of this collection was decided, how did you decide which stories to include?
GLENN: Over the years, I have read scores of proto-sf novels and stories, as the voluminous notes at my website HILOBROW will demonstrate. So I had a strong sense of which proto-sf superhuman stories and novels were the best-written, most entertaining, and/or the most important early examples of — for example — the superhuman created by a laboratory accident, or the superhuman who wants to enslave or destroy us mere mortals, and so forth. (Not that I’m done doing research; I’m forever discovering stories new to me.) Another consideration was including several proto-sf authors who were of great importance at the time, but whom I haven’t managed to include in the series yet: M.P. Shiel, say, or Jean de La Hire, Thea von Harbou, Hugo Gernsback, Karel Čapek, or Marie Corelli. We couldn’t include every story I might have liked to, of course: J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder, for example, we’ve just reissued in its entirety with a terrific new introduction by Ted Chiang, so that one didn’t make the cut, though it’s an amazing story of super-intelligence. I did try to at least mention several of these un-included superhuman stories in my introduction to the anthology.
SEMEL: Were there any other parameters they had to fit?
GLENN: I’ve included stories that appeared in American pulp magazines (by Francis Stevens, say, and Edgar Rice Burroughs), as well as more avant-garde narratives, for example Alfred Jarry’s Supermale… and everything in-between. I translated a couple of the entries: the excerpt from Jarry’s Supermale, and an excerpt from Jean de La Hire’s The Mystery of the XV, which was serialized in France’s newspaper Le Matin. I’ve even quoted a superhuman poem or two. The stories or novels had to have been published from 1900–1935, they had to be examples of proto-sf, and they had to be well-written and entertaining. Other than that, no parameters.
SEMEL: Obviously, being about superheroes, some of these stories are undoubtably science fiction, and adventures, but what other genres are represented in this anthology?
GLENN: One of my goals with the Radium Age series is to demonstrate how science fiction — before the genre was ever called that — emerged out of a wide variety of other genres, everything from horror and occult tales to Arctic adventures and Symbolist poetry. Jarry’s Supermale is a work that can be described as absurdist or proto-surrealist, for example. Marie Corelli is known as the author of romantic melodramas, largely concerned with reconciling Christianity and mysticism; her novel The Young Diana, which is excerpted in the anthology, is all of these things. I’ve also excerpted H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, which like everything Haggard wrote could be considered Imperial Gothic (though it too is very much fascinated with esoteric, mystical notions). You’ll even find an excerpt of a play by the Nobel Prize-winning Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw in the mix.
SEMEL: Are any of the characters in the anthology like one of the superheroes we see in the movies, on bookstore shelves, and in my t-shirt drawer? Do you think any of the stories in Before Superman could work as a comic book?
GLENN: None of these characters wear masks, tights, or capes; and none of them can fly through the air. However, these are very much the ancestors of today’s comic-book and cinematic superheroes. Much like The Flash, the Hulk, and Spider-Man, among other Silver Age comic book heroes, Thomas Dunbar, who was dreamed up by a teenaged Gertrude Barrows (better known later by her pen name, Francis Stevens), gains his extraordinary physical ability — super-strength — thanks to a laboratory accident. Edgar rice Burroughs’s Tarzan, whose body is shrunk down to 18 inches tall in the novel Tarzan and the Ant-Men, somehow retains his full-sized strength… much like the comic-book superhero The Atom. These superhuman stories and others would make terrific comic books or movies. Perhaps only now is the world ready for Jarry’s André Marcueil, a Bruce Wayne-like gentleman scientist who trains his body to be superior to ordinary mortals… and who develops a super-sexual capacity!
SEMEL: If someone enjoys Before Superman, which earlier Radium Age books would you suggest they read?
GLENN: As mentioned, we’ve reissued J.D. Beresford’s novel of super-intelligence, The Hampdenshire Wonder, with a new introduction by the science fiction luminary Ted Chiang — a great place to begin. Also, Lisa Yaszek edited a collection of stories by Francis Stevens that I strongly recommend. Let me also plug an anthology translated by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, called The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction — because the titular inhumans are in fact superhumans… although their hidden society has degraded over time. We’re also working on anthologies of stories translated from other languages, so more superhumans to come!
MORE RADIUM AGE SCI FI ON HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SERIES from THE MIT PRESS: In-depth info on each book in the series; a sneak peek at what’s coming in the months ahead; the secret identity of the series’ advisory panel; and more. | RADIUM AGE: TIMELINE: Notes on proto-sf publications and related events from 1900–1935. | RADIUM AGE POETRY: Proto-sf and science-related poetry from 1900–1935. | RADIUM AGE 100: A list (now somewhat outdated) of Josh’s 100 favorite proto-sf novels from the genre’s emergent Radium Age | SISTERS OF THE RADIUM AGE: A resource compiled by Lisa Yaszek.