
Stories from Radium Age sci-fi, which ruled the early 20th century - okket
http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/05/recapture-the-glory-of-radium-age-sci-fi-from-a-century-ago-with-these-books/
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fennecfoxen
Fun article! Interesting titles.

Of the post-Radium-Age list, I'd like to point out C. S. Lewis' _That Hideous
Strength_ for special attention, just because everyone and their dog has some
experience with _Narnia_ and usually has some preconceptions of what Lewis is
all about based on those -- but this story is likely to defy those
expectations. If you'd like to turn your one-dimensional stereotype of the man
into something more nuanced, this book is the ticket. Also, a good portion of
it (indeed, the central plot-bearing part) is of Extremely High Quality (as
endorsed by George Orwell... albeit with certain qualifications for the rest
of the book). This portion reads sort of like a spiritual prequel to _1984_ (a
work that would come 4 years later). It's also surprising to many people to
find Lewis writing, even incidentally, about eroticism, and that's quite
besides the chain-smoking butch-lesbian chief-of-police (rumored to be a sort
of character Lewis slightly fancied, if I recall correctly).

Third in a trilogy of space stories (which few are aware Lewis wrote) this
novel just barely predates nuclear weapons - so Space is still a positive
thing instead of being a place of vacuum and death filled with the missiles of
global thermonuclear annihilation. Also, if you've heard about how fascinated
the author was with Relativity and time moving at different speeds in
different places (e.g. in Narnia) you may have wondered why Lewis never did a
time travel novel. Turns out, he started one, and its rough draft eventually
turned into this. My advice: read the short and sweet _Out of the Silent
Planet_ first for context, skip _Perelandra_ (dangerously overdosed with overt
Christian allegory), and then try this thing.

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zem
can strongly recommend kipling's "with the night mail" and "easy as a.b.c.". i
was amazed at how sophisticated they were - i would definitely have placed
them well within the golden age if didn't know when they were written.

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ghaff
In general, there are a number of Victorian and Edwardian era authors who
remain quite readable and come across as rather modern, or at least some of
their writings do. Kipling--who actually won a nobel prize in literature--is
one of them. For some reason, I find the British authors of that general
period hold up better than the American authors in general.

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zem
yep, i'm a huge fan of kipling's writing in general, but what struck me about
those stories was not that the writing sounded modern, but that they felt like
modern _science fiction_ in the topics they dealt with and the manner in which
they were developed.

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ghaff
I actually haven't read those two particular stories but I have them now.
Thanks.

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panglott
Some classic proto-pulp. I got into "Princess of Mars" as a teenager, and they
were hugely important to my understanding of SF&F, warts and all. So many
weird ideas in that list that have not even become tropes. I'll have to add
"Nyctalope of Mars" and "Prisoner of the Vampires of Mars" to my to-read list.

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janekm
A lot of these should be in the public domain now, seems like a perfect
opportunity for putting together a nice collection of these (perhaps even sold
through Kindle)?

