The MIT Press Radium Age Series: A Science Fiction Primer for Students

By Spenser Stevens | July 13 2023 | Literature

In these forgotten classics in MIT Press’ Radium Age series, students will discover the origins of enduring tropes like tyrannical supermen, dystopian wastelands, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes. According to the Los Angeles Review of Books, the series “challenges readers to reconsider the science fiction of the early 20th century… By returning to an international tradition of scientific speculation via fiction from after the Poe-Verne-Wells era and before science fiction’s Golden Age, the Radium Age series [demonstrates] the breadth, richness, and diversity of the literary works that were responding to a vertiginous historical period.”

Under the direction of Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s Radium Age is reissuing notable science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935. With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and science fiction authors, the Radium Age book series recontextualizes the breakthroughs and biases of these proto–science fiction classics, and charts the emergence of a burgeoning genre.

A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction
9780262547611
The first English translation of a cult science fiction favorite by Hemendra Kumar Roy, one of the giants of early Bangla literature, and other sf stories from the colonial period in India.
$19.95 US
Mar 12, 2024
Paperback
188 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262547635
In a eugenics-driven future society, will one young woman’s defiance make a difference?
$19.95 US
Mar 12, 2024
Paperback
296 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262546423
A romance of the far future, in which humankind has relocated underground, where it is beset by monsters from another dimension—but love leads on.
$19.95 US
Aug 15, 2023
Paperback
376 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262546416
A satire set in a future England, in which a neomedievalist contest among London neighborhoods takes a disastrous turn.
$19.95 US
Aug 01, 2023
Paperback
248 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262546430
An essential collection of proto–science fiction stories that reveals the diverse literary milieu out of which the sci fi genre emerged.
$19.95 US
Aug 01, 2023
Paperback
248 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262545259
A heart-stopping adventure tale featuring a brilliant scientist—one as insufferably pompous as Doyle’s most famous character—and his unlikely trio, and its apocalyptic sequel.
$19.95 US
Feb 21, 2023
Paperback
424 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262545228
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.
$19.95 US
Feb 07, 2023
Paperback
276 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262544306
An early novel by Rose Macaulay about a government program of compulsory selective breeding in a dystopian future England.
$19.95 US
Oct 04, 2022
Paperback
248 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262544283
As a bacteria threatens to wipe out humankind, a plutocrat sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a survivalist colony.
$19.95 US
Aug 02, 2022
Paperback
394 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262544290
A mixed-race Harvard medical student stumbles upon a hidden Ethiopian city, the inhabitants of which possess both advanced technologies and mystical powers.
$19.95 US
Aug 02, 2022
Paperback
260 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262543361
In a novel written on the eve of World War I, H. G. Wells imagines a war “to end all wars” that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in an enlightened utopia.
$19.95 US
May 03, 2022
Paperback
282 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262543439
In the first-ever novel about a cyborg, a machine-enhanced man from a multiverse of the far future visits 1920s England.
$19.95 US
May 03, 2022
Paperback
202 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262543354
When a plague wipes out most of the world’s male population and civilization crumbles, women struggle to build an agrarian community in the English countryside.
$19.95 US
Mar 15, 2022
Paperback
340 Pages
The MIT Press

9780262543378
A collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth century by authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle to W. E. B. Du Bois.
$19.95 US
Mar 08, 2022
Paperback
224 Pages
The MIT Press