Glenn’s second collection of short stories from the early decades of the twentieth century represent what he considers “proto-science fiction.” He considers this period the “Radium Age” because Curie’s discovery that radiation indicates that atoms, up until this time the smallest and most basic form of matter, could decay and be made up of even smaller bits of matter and energy sparked writers of fiction to imagine that more mysterious and exciting, perhaps even terrifying things existed than humans perceived.

The nine stories are presented in their order of publication from 1901 through 1926. The first, “The last days of Earth” is science fiction in its purest form, in the far future, the last few humans attempt an escape from an Earth frozen by a shrinking sun in a spacecraft. The second is a war story in which H. G. Wells envisions mobile ironclad machines manned by soldiers protected by their armor from enemy forces sweeping thorough the lines and over the trenches of their foes more than a decade before the British deployed their tanks in the battle of the Somme. Interestingly, in Wells’s story these land ironclads as he called them moved not on treads, but on mechanical feet. I could only think of something the size of a tank dancing across the field like one of Boston Dynamic’s robots.

Other tales are more traditional horror stories that involve falling into other dimensions or being stalked by invisible beasts or falling into their hidden lair or being trapped by a mad scientist. A few are more thoughtful: Bryusov’s story of a future civilization falling into anarchy due to a mysterious disease, or Tarkington’s fictitious folktale of ancient disputes. The most interesting is feminist Sinclair’s philosophical fantasy. It’s a theological tale of an afterlife that reveals to the central character all he wants to know about metaphysics. ( )