239 pages
Published 2023
Read from August 27 to August 29
Rating: 3 out of 5
In the bookstore, I was more interested in this volume’s table of contents, but I couldn’t just skip the first book. (One reason that trip was so expensive!) Hopefully this installment lives up to the (mostly) excellent selections of the original Voices. Editor Glenn’s introduction states this volume is a look at the varied genres that fed into the soup of what would become SF. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s somewhat more hit-or-miss than the first.
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“The Last Days of Earth: Being the Story of the Launching of the ‘Red Sphere’” by George C. Wallis (1901). It is thirteen million years from now. The sun’s heat wanes and the Earth enters its final frozen age. And yet we cannot escape Edwardian gender norms. Ah well. It’s fascinating how social change has always been harder for white male authors to imagine than technological or even astronomical change. Also interesting: the way the last humans’ “spacecraft that’s a sphere of unknown red metal” prefigures Jack London’s “The Red One” in 1918 (reviewed here). The story itself is a collection of memorable images conveyed in juiceless prose and “As you know…” exposition. It’s fine? C-
“The Land Ironclads” by H. G. Wells (1903). Wartime sci-fi written before the Great War. Parts of it were prescient (technocracy making slaughter impersonal) and parts of it were almost incomprehensible relics of a pre-war worldview (the dichotomy between the rugged, manly, “uncivilized” regular army and the over-civilized army of button-pushing clerks fielded by the opponent). There’s also a touch of eugenics in the final “degradation” of the victorious army of clerks. An interesting historical artifact that somehow gave us a prototype of drone pilots in 1903. C+
“The Republic of the Southern Cross” by Valery Bryusov (1907; translated 1918). Barely a story, this social satire adopts the form of a historical description of an efficient utopian city at the South Pole, the authoritarian control hidden just under its surface, and the outbreak of “contradiction” that brings its downfall. Interesting as a snapshot of 1907’s concerns about modern life. C?
“The Third Drug” by E. Nesbit (1908). A story in the mad scientist tradition. A Paris doctor patches up a man who comes to his door, but gives him a sequence of three drugs intended to turn him into a superman. Well-written as far as these things go; mildly diverting. C
“A Victim of Higher Space” by Algernon Blackwood (1914). I was gonna make a comment about this era’s quaint overlap between mysticism and higher mathematics, but then I realized the conflation never went away; modern woo dresses itself in theoretical physics to this day. In this story, psychic investigator Dr. Silence takes the case of a man who has fallen victim to multidimensional misfortune. Interesting in a way that Flatland never managed to be. C+
“The People of the Pit” by A. Merritt (1918). I always feel a mix of emotions seeing A. Merritt’s name on a TOC. Excitement, because he wrote some of the strangest, most lurid weird adventure fiction I’ve ever encountered, obviously a direct inspiration for many core D&D vibes. Disgust, because he almost invariably would force in some of the most heinous racism I’ve ever read. This tale takes us deep into Alaska to the mysterious Hand Mountain, where gold flows like putty and luminescent “devils” reign. Miraculously, “Pit” packs in the weird but goes light on the bigotry. It was an unexpected pleasure. More Merritt should’ve been like this. B
“The Thing from—‘Outside’” by George Allen England (1923). I knew that the movie The Thing was based on Campbell’s story “Who Goes There?” However, I hadn’t known (until this collection) that “Who Goes There?” was inspired by this even earlier story, which sees a band of five bickering explorers troubled in the Canadian wilderness by a preternatural “Thing” from “outside the universe.” The character work is stiff, but not every story from this era even bothers with details like “character,” so it’s better than it could be. The plot is a slow, inevitable creep into disorienting horror. A solid B-
“The Finding of the Absolute” by May Sinclair (1923). Well-written afterlife fantasy heavily daubed with philosophy and mathematical mysticism. You can imagine it as a missing link situated halfway between Mark Twain’s “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” and The Good Place. It didn’t have the grounding in sympathetic character that the better afterlife fantasies from present day authors give you, but all in all it was surprisingly solid. B-
“The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis” by Booth Tarkington (1927). Satirical take on women’s suffrage in which the rule of women leads to the destruction of Atlantis. I’ll go with Joanna Russ’ assessment, as quoted in Glenn’s introduction, and say that this stinks of smug misogyny. D
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And that’s it! All in all, a much more mediocre volume than the first, but it still had some delightful stories to enjoy.
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