Radium Age 100 (17)

By: Joshua Glenn
July 9, 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.

Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis (1926).

Set in a dystopian city-state, this Expressionist novel asks us to imagine a perverse synthesis of Henry Adams’s dynamo-vs.-virgin dichotomy. Metropolis’s Pharaonic master, Joh Fredersen, deplores those weaknesses that make his dehumanized laborers (who wear standard uniforms, and answer to numbers instead of names) inferior to machines. When he orders the mad inventor-magician, Rotwang, to build him “machine men,” Rotwang instead constructs an alluring female-shaped machine whom he names Parody, or Futura: “The being was, indubitably, a woman… But, although it was a woman, it was not human. The body seemed as though made of crystal, through which the bones shone silver.”

After rendering Futura’s face in the exact likeness of Maria, a flesh-and-blood woman who is both the conscience of the rebellious workers and the object of Fredersen’s son’s affection, the villainous technocrats program their synthetic Virgin/Dynamo to act as an agent provocateuse. The workers revolt, and Futura/Maria is destroyed. In the end, the Virgin (sentimental religiosity) triumphs over the Dynamo (technology-driven development). Hooray?

Fun fact: Von Harbou and her husband, film director Fritz Lang, developed the scenario for Metropolis, then she wrote the novelization while he directed the 1927 movie.

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Radium Age 100 (17)

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