Radium Age 100 (20)
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July 18, 2015
One in a series of 100 posts about the best science fiction novels published from 1904–33. HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn has named that era science fiction’s Radium Age; more info here. The complete Radium Age 100 list can be found here.
Monteiro Lobato’s The Negro President (1926).
In the year 2228, the USA’s President Kerlog (a white male) faces an unprecedented situation: In his race for reelection, he faces Evelyn Astor (a white feminist) and James Roy Wilde (a black man). Like the actual first black president of the US, Wilde is a cultivated and brilliant man, and a community organizer of sorts. Unlike Barack Obama, Wilde isn’t mixed-race — because race-mixing has been outlawed in America; the novel’s author, I’m sorry to report, appears to be in favor of this eugenicist policy. Although Kerlog offers an alliance with Roy — black votes in exchange for easing the Race Code setting limits on the growth of the black population — Roy wins the election. Kerlog then enlists Astor in an effort to protect the interests of the white race… and Roy is found dead on the day that he was supposed to assume office.
Fun fact: Lobato was one of Brazil’s most influential writers, mostly because of his children’s books set on the fictional Yellow Woodpecker Farm.
MORE RADIUM AGE SCI FI ON HILOBROW: HiLoBooks homepage! | What is Radium Age science fiction? |Radium Age 100: 100 Best Science Fiction Novels from 1904–33 | Radium Age Supermen | Radium Age Robots | Radium Age Apocalypses | Radium Age Telepaths | Radium Age Eco-Catastrophes | Radium Age Cover Art (1) | SF’s Best Year Ever: 1912 | Radium Age Science Fiction Poetry | Enter Highbrowism | Bathybius! Primordial ooze in Radium Age sf | War and Peace Games (H.G. Wells’s training manuals for supermen) | Radium Age: Context series | J.D. Beresford | Algernon Blackwood | Edgar Rice Burroughs | Karel Čapek | Buster Crabbe | August Derleth | Arthur Conan Doyle | Hugo Gernsback | Charlotte Perkins Gilman | Cicely Hamilton | Hermann Hesse | William Hope Hodgson | Aldous Huxley | Inez Haynes Irwin | Alfred Jarry | Jack Kirby (Radium Age sf’s influence on) | Murray Leinster | Gustave Le Rouge | Gaston Leroux | David Lindsay | Jack London | H.P. Lovecraft | A. Merritt | Maureen O’Sullivan | Sax Rohmer | Paul Scheerbart | Upton Sinclair | Clark Ashton Smith | E.E. “Doc” Smith | Olaf Stapledon | John Taine | H.G. Wells | Jack Williamson | Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz | S. Fowler Wright | Philip Gordon Wylie | Yevgeny Zamyatin