Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Voices from the Radium Age | 2022 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 2 | A World of Women | 2022 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 3 | The World Set Free | 2022 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 4 | The Clockwork Man | 2022 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 5 | Of One Blood | 2022 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 6 | Nordenholt’s Million | 2022 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 7 | What Not | 2022 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 8 | Theodore Savage | 2023 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 9 | The Lost World and The Poison Belt | 2023 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 10 | More Voices from the Radium Age | 2023 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 11 | The Napoleon of Notting Hill | 2023 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 12 | The Inhumans and Other Stories | 2024 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
| 13 | Before Superman | 2025 | H.G. Wells | Buy |
The MIT Press Radium Age series, edited by Joshua Glenn, reprints science fiction from the early twentieth century that has been largely forgotten. Glenn uses the term “Radium Age” for the period between roughly 1900 and 1935, arguing that the science fiction written during those years deserves more attention than it typically receives.
The series includes both novels and short story anthologies. H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free (originally 1914) appears here because it fits the series’ timeline and themes. Other titles come from writers who are far less well known today: J.D. Beresford’s A World of Women, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood, and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage. The Voices from the Radium Age anthologies collect shorter works from the period.
Each volume includes a new introduction placing the work in its historical and literary context. The series makes a case that science fiction did not spring fully formed from the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, but had deep roots in earlier literary traditions. Several of these books address themes of race, gender, and empire that were often overlooked in later histories of the genre.