Radium Age 100 (26)

By: Joshua Glenn
August 30, 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.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s When the World Screamed (1928).

Narrated by a drilling engineer, the fifth and final Professor Challenger adventure takes us not outward (e.g., to a South American plateau crawling with dinosaurs), nor inward (e.g., to an airtight chamber, while the Earth passes through a poison belt), but instead downward. Challenger, here described as “a primitive cave-man in a lounge suit,” while also “the greatest brain in Europe,” proposes to drill his way from a tract of land in Sussex (England) eight miles beneath the planet’s epidermis. Why? In order to prove his hypothesis that the world is itself a living organism; and that the Earth’s animal and vegetable life, including the human race, are like insignificant barnacles attached to the hull of a great ship. In the end, Challenger becomes “the first man of all men whom Mother Earth had been compelled to recognize.”

Fun fact: First published in Liberty magazine. Some historians of science point out that Doyle challenges both the disregard for ecological thinking in his own time, and the role scientists play in the changing relationship of humankind to nature.

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Radium Age 100 (26)

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