Radium Age series

The Lost World and The Poison Belt

Arthur Conan Doyle introduction by Conor Reid afterword by Joshua Glenn

A heart-stopping adventure tale featuring a brilliant scientist—as insufferably pompous as Doyle’s most famous character—and his unlikely trio, as well as its apocalyptic sequel.

In 1912, the creator of Sherlock Holmes introduced his readers to yet another genius adventurer, Professor Challenger, who in his very first outing would journey to South America in search of . . . an isolated plateau crawling with iguanodons and ape-men! A smash hit, Doyle’s proto-science fiction thriller would be adapted twice by Hollywood filmmakers, and it would go on to influence everything from Jurassic Park to the TV show Land of the Lost. Its 1913 sequel, The Poison Belt, finds Challenger and his dino-hunting comrades trapped in an oxygenated chamber as the entire planet passes through a lethal ether cloud.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish physician and author who in 1887 introduced Sherlock Holmes, arguably the best-known fictional detective. He also wrote poetry, historical novels, influential gothic short stories, and more. Doyle’s proto-sf series of Professor Challenger adventures include the novels The Lost World (1912), The Poison Belt (1913), and The Land of Mist (1926), and the short stories “When the World Screamed” (1928) and “The Disintegration Machine” (1929). Conor Reid is a podcaster and writer from Ireland. He has published widely on popular fiction and science, including The Science and Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs (2018). Joshua Glenn is a consulting semiotician and editor of the websites HiLobrow and Semiovox. The first to describe 1900–1935 as science fiction’s “Radium Age,” he is editor of the MIT Press’s series of reissued proto-sf stories from that period.

science fiction February 5 1/4 x 7 3/4, 448 pp.

US $19.95T/$25.95 CAN paper

978-0-262-54525-9 Radium Age series “Highly interesting adventure of a sort to stir the pulse and arouse the wonder of even the jaded novel reader.” —New York Times (1912)

“At once one of the most realistic and one of the most romantic of [Doyle’s] books.” —The Living Age (1912)

“They who neglect to read it will have missed a highly entertaining flight of the Doyle imagination.” —New York Evening Sun (1912)

“Miss Hamilton always writes forcibly, and her present novel deals with the heart-shaking effects of the next war. It might, indeed, be used as a tract to convey an awful warning. . . .” —The Spectator (1922)

“Miss Hamilton has spun so finely with the intimate fibres of human emotion and thought that the whole effect is startlingly real.” —The Bookman (1922)

“Terror falls from the skies, and within a few months England has become a collection of small tribes living separately and brutishly, tilling the soil and building hutments.” —The Fortnightly Review (1924)

“A particularly effective and chilling version of a theme that dominates British speculative fiction between the wars.” —Neil Barron, Anatomy of Wonder, ed.

Theodore Savage

Cicely Hamilton introduction by Susan R. Grayzel

From one of the earliest feminist science fiction writers, a novel that envisions the fall of civilization—and the plight of the modern woman in a post-apocalyptic wilderness.

When war breaks out in Europe, British civilization collapses overnight. The ironically named protagonist must learn to survive by his wits in a new Britain. When we first meet Savage, he is a complacent civil servant, primarily concerned with romancing his girlfriend. During the brief war, in which both sides use population displacement as a terrible strategic weapon, Savage must battle his fellow countrymen. He shacks up with an ignorant young woman in a forest hut—a kind of inverse Garden of Eden, where no one is happy. Eventually, he sets off in search of other survivors . . . only to discover a primitive society where science and technology have come to be regarded with superstitious awe and terror.

A pioneering feminist, Hamilton offers a warning about the degraded state of modern women, who— being “unhandy, unresourceful, superficial”—would suffer a particularly sad fate in a postapocalyptic social order.

Cicely Hamilton (1872–1952) was an Anglo-Irish actress, author, and feminist campaigner best known for her 1909 treatise Marriage as a Trade. Her prewar plays include Diana of Dobson’s (1908) and How the Vote Was Won (1909). After working in the north of France during WWI and witnessing how its violence affected civilians, she was inspired to write Theodore Savage (1922), a proto-sf novel presciently foregrounding modern warfare’s destructive power.

Susan R. Grayzel is Professor of History at Utah State University, where she researches and teaches about modern European history, women’s and gender history, the history of the world wars, and war and culture. Her publications in these areas include Women’s Identities at War (1999) and At Home and Under Fire (2012). Her latest book is The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War (2022).

science fiction February 5 1/4 x 7 3/4, 276 pp.

US $19.95T/$25.95 CAN paper

978-0-262-54522-8 Radium Age series

978-0-262-54429-0 978-0-262-54430-6 978-0-262-54428-3

978-0-262-54343-9 978-0-262-54335-4 978-0-262-54337-8

Radium Age Series

Under the direction of Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s Radium Age reissues notable proto-science fi ction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935, with new contributions by historians, science journalists, and science fi ction authors.

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