Before Superman is the latest and intriguing volume of the highly active (no pun intended) “Radium Age” series edited by Joshua Glenn at MIT Press since 2022. Coined by the editor as a tribute to the discovery made by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, the term “Radium Age” refers to a longtime overlooked gap in the history of Science Fiction, the years in-between the pioneering works of authors like Jules Verne or H.G. Wells in the second half and the end of the 19th Century and the institutionalization of SF as a new type of genre fiction in the 1930s, immediately after the decade that saw the emergence of specialized magazines such as Amazing Stories, edited by the “Father of Science Fiction”, Hugo Gernsback.

Yet the “gap” of circa 1900-1930 is anything but a void, as shown by the richness and steady publication rhythm of the Radium Age series. The originality of the 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”. As the title of the book immediately makes clear, “superhuman” is not a synonym of “superman”, the word that became the shortcut for all “superheroes”, the often masked and always crime-fighting characters possessing abilities beyond those of ordinary people (as a reminder: the eponymous hero created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster made its first appearance in issue #1 of Action Comics in 1938). The superhumans of the Radium Age are generally not masked and certainly not always crime-fighting. Some of them are closer to the mad scientist stereotype than to Batman, Spider or Wonder Woman. Not all of them have superpowers themselves. For their superactions or behavior many depend instead on their scientific experiments, inventions, and equipment. A strong emphasis is also put on the framing of these facts and objects through the eyes of not always well informed observers – part of the fun comes from the mismatch between both parties, the superhuman and the human sometimes reduced to the state of infrahuman, dizzied or speechless, but also skeptical and unconvinced by what he or she is seeing or being told.

The major difference between the Radium Age superhumans and the characters we have become familiar with in superhero fiction (comics, movies, games) is their properly literary dimension. The texts written during the first decades of the twentieth century are not yet part of larger franchises that exploit the characters and their story world across the multiple media of the visual age. They are truly verbal, textual inventions and the literary works that reveal them do not yet belong to a well-defined and firmly structured genre. One thus finds in this anthology–with texts by Karel Čapek, Marie Corelli, Arthur Conan Doyle, Hugo Gernsback, H. Rider Haggard, Thea von Harbou, Alfred Jarry, Jean de la Hire, George Bernard Shaw, M.P. Shiel and Francis Stevens–several examples that are not easy to pigeonhole in any specific genre category. Yet the question whether these texts are SF or rather horror, fantastic, fantasy, dystopian, detective fiction or even just literature in general (that is a type of more highbrow writing insensitive to genre boundaries), is not a purely theoretical question. It is what makes these pages and their gathering in this collection so fascinating. Yes, all these works definitely share some basic features of what we call SF today, but Radium Age Fiction and Science Fiction tout court remain strange bedfellows. It is the 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 the cunning mix of independent short stories and fragments of larger novels that both shape a new strand in SF writing and radically reshape overgeneralizing of Science Fiction as we know it from Hollywood.

In this anthology, “fiction” clearly dominates “science”, some exceptions notwithstanding. It should not come as a surprise that the tale by Hugo Gernsback is heavenly burdened by scientific “arguments”, while in other texts there is hardly any scientific concern at all. This is for instance the case in the conversations about “Hannibal Lepsius” by M.P. Shiel, my personal favorite here, which can easily be read as a pastiche of Proust’s high society gossip gatherings in the Parisian salons. Psychological considerations as well as philosophical, religious, moral and metaphysical speculations tend to overrule the science parts of most texts, despite the equally overwhelming presence of didactic excursions addressing the supposedly not very knowledgeable intended audience (superhumans seem to like to have infrahuman sidekicks). However, as in most other forms of SF, be they pre- or post-Radium Adge, all texts bear witness of the place and time of their writing. Misogyny and colonialism, but also to fight against them, mirror the social and ideological debates of the years before and after World War One.

Before Superman is a joyful as well as thought-provoking volume of an excellent series, insightfully presented by Joshuah 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.