RADIUM AGE 4Q2025
By:
December 20, 2025
Under the direction of HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn, in 2022 the MIT Press launched its RADIUM AGE series of proto-sf reissues from 1900–1935.
In these forgotten classics, sf readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopias and apocalypses, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes. With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and sf authors, the RADIUM AGE book series recontextualizes the breakthroughs and biases of these proto-sf pioneers, and charts the emergence of a burgeoning literary genre.
RADIUM AGE SERIES UPDATES: 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025 | 3Q2025 | 4Q2025. FULL SERIES INFO.
Below, please find updates on the RADIUM AGE project from 4Q2025.
During 4Q2025, we sent our two Spring 2026 titles to press. Those titles are:
- E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low: Occult Detective (March 10), edited and introduced by Alexander B. Joy. “Flaxman Low is the Sherlock Holmes of the ghost world.” — The London Quarterly Review (1900)
- Irene Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth (March 31), introduced by Lucy Sante. “A gynarchic state, Armeria, where women marry each other and buy the babies on whom the future of Armeria depends… Readable and suggestive.” — The Occult Review (1909)
After Spring 2026, we’ll start publishing just one title per season, or two per year total. We have several exciting projects, including anthologies and translations, scheduled through 2028…
Here at HILOBROW, during 4Q2025 Josh continued to share his Radium Age-related research. For example…
HILOBROW published further installments in the series RADIUM AGE POETRY. Here’s a sampling of the 4Q2025 lineup:
Kochia Tseng’s FIRE IN THE SKY | Carrie W. Clifford’s WARNING | Max Jacobs’ HELL IS GRADUATED | Angela Weld Grimké’s TENEBRIS | Hirato Renkichi’s HOT-BLAST | Inagaki Taruho’s THE MAN IN THE MOON | D.H. Lawrence’s HOLD BACK! | Edward Silvera’s INTROSPECTION | Mykola Bazhan’s AERO-MARCH.
To see the full RADIUM AGE POETRY lineup, organized thematically, visit this page.
Here at HILOBROW, as we have been doing for a decade now, during 4Q2025 we serialized some of Josh’s favorite Radium Age proto-sf stories and novels. Here’s the lineup:
- Leslie F. Stone’s “The Fall of Mercury” (1935), cont.
- Alfred Jarry’s The Supermale (1902), excerpt, trans. Josh Glenn
- Fernande Blaze de Bury’s The Storm of London (1904), excerpt
- Marita Bonner’s The Purple Flower (1928)
Here’s a sampling of 4Q2025 series publicity:
- Before Superman spotted at Golden Notebook in Woodstock, NY — October 23rd.
- In October, Nat Harrington reviewed Jill Roese’s translation of Marietta S. Shaginyan’s Yankees in Petrograd for the Ancillary Review of Books. Excerpt:
Yankees in Petrograd shows us both the promises and the failures of the Soviet project: the dream of a liberated future and the enduring force of racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression even under socialism. If the novel fails to live up to its promise, it is, nonetheless, an engaging and, I think, productive failure, part of an attempt to create a new kind of popular culture, suitable to what its creators saw as a new historical era fighting to take shape—a popular culture oriented not only towards mass entertainment but also towards collective liberation.
- In October, writing in Leonardo Reviews, a peer-reviewed publication of the international arts, sciences, and technology society Leonardo, the Belgian poet and cultural studies professor Jan Baetens reviewed Before Superman. Excerpt:
The originality of the [Radium Age] series is the result of a smart editorial policy, open to a wide range of styles, themes and voices, yet also focusing, as in the case of the present volume, on the anthological presentation of key characters, here that of the “superhuman.”
About Before Superman:
A smart selection of various types of authors (well-know, lesser known, sometimes almost forgotten, some also translated from the French or the German) as well as a cunning mix of independent short stories and fragments of larger novels.
And:
Before Superman is a joyful as well as thought-provoking volume of an excellent series, insightfully presented by Joshua Glenn. The book is of great interest for all SF lovers but also to all literary and cultural historians, who can only feel encouraged to rethink some of their labels and periodization tools.
- Anna Aslanyan reviewed Jill Roese’s translation of Marietta S. Shaginyan’s Yankees in Petrograd for the November 14th edition of the Times Literary Supplement. Excerpt:
What to put in a novel to make it a page-turner that would last a century? Here are some possible ingredients: a fast-rising body count; flashy sci-fi devices; “a hidden bomb of infernal contents” planted inside a clock (part of a fascist plot to destroy communism); narrative darting around from America to Russia and back again, propelled by technology; “all manner of cheerful objects… streaming into the world”. Militant masses marching to modernity.
Also:
The fight between cartoonish commies and vaudeville villains makes for good satire. Laughing, you try to imagine the reactions of the novel’s first readers. Theirs must have been the laughter of the victors. The Soviet experiment may eventually have failed, yet it started on a wave of joyous enthusiasm.
- In November, writing for the Financial Times, British sf author James Lovegrove named Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age one of the Five Best SF Books of 2025. Excerpt:
Part of the Radium Age series — reissues and anthologies of early-20th-century science fiction in nattily designed paperback editions — Before Superman assembles stories about superhumans from an era before they achieved comic-book ubiquity. Authors represented include Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Karel Čapek, even George Bernard Shaw. Sheer retro bliss, no spandex.
- In December, Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Schrödinger’s Wife author Pippa Goldschmidt. Excerpt: “As in so much speculative fiction set in imagined futures, these superhumans shed a light on the age in which they were conceived. Rather than strengths, they reveal its anxieties and preoccupations.”
On to 1Q2026…
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.