Radium-Age Science Fiction: GNOSTIC HORROR

Showing posts with label GNOSTIC HORROR. Show all posts

Monday, January 5, 2009

Gnostic Horror

Pre-Lovecraftian tales in which the protagonist discovers that the world as we know it is not as it seems, that we're surrounded by ancient, alien, advanced intelligences who watch us, control us, destroy us... that sort of thing.

HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND
NIGHTLAND

1904-13

1914-23

* A. Merritt, "The People of the Pit" (All-Story, January 5, 1918). See Merritt entry.

* A. Merritt, "The Moon Pool" (All-Story, June 22, 1918). See Merritt entry.

1924-33

What is Radium-Age SF?

I've named the years 1904-33 the "Radium Age" of science fiction because the phenomenon of radioactivity — the discovery that matter is neither solid nor still and is, at least in part, a state of energy, constantly in movement — is a timely and fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, "vertigo years" during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. For a thrilling, terrifying, and all-too-brief moment, another world was possible.

Why those dates, in particular? Not merely because the Curies won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of radium in '03, while Marie Curie died (from radiation-induced leukaemia) in '34. By my reckoning, the 19th-century era of Wellsian "scientific romances" ended around '03, while the so-called Golden Age of SF began around '34. The intervening three decades gave us American and European SF visionaries like Olaf Stapledon, William Hope Hodgson, Sax Rohmer, Karel Čapek, Hugo Gernsback, E.E. Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, E.M. Forster, Arthur Conan Doyle, David Lindsay, David H. Keller, John Taine, Jack Williamson, S. Fowler Wright, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Le Rouge, A. Merritt, Murray Leinster, Jean de La Hire, Maurice Renard, Garrett P. Serviss, and Philip Wylie. Not to mention Edgar Rice Burroughs and Aldous Huxley!

Too little attention has been paid to this era's pioneering, intellectually daring, and truly enlightened science fiction. This blog — where I'm storing my ongoing research, as I simultaneously publish a series of posts about "Pre-Golden Age" SF over at the excellent SF blog io9 — aims to correct that oversight. Read a longer introduction to Radium-Age SF here.

Radium-Age Science Fiction

Monday, January 5, 2009

Gnostic Horror

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What is Radium-Age SF?

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