THE HAMPDENSHIRE WONDER
By:
March 4, 2025
Under the direction of HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn, the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series is reissuing notable proto-sf stories from the underappreciated era between 1900–1935.
In these forgotten classics, sf readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopias and apocalypses, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes.
With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and sf authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualize the breakthroughs and biases of these proto-sf pioneers, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning literary genre.
Today marks the publication of the following Radium Age series title…
J.D. BERESFORD
Introduction by TED CHIANG
(March 4, 2025)
In this pioneering science-fictional treatment of superhuman intelligence, a mutant wonder child’s insights prove devastating.
Science fiction luminary Ted Chiang introduces The Hampdenshire Wonder, one of the genre’s first treatments of superhuman intelligence. Victor Stott is a large-headed “supernormal” mutated in the womb by his parents’ desire to have a child born without habits. Known as “the Wonder,” Victor surveys humankind’s science, philosophy, history, literature, religion — the best that has been thought and said — and dismisses it brutally: “So elementary… inchoate… a disjunctive patchwork.” Rejecting “the interposing and utterly false concepts of space and time,” the Wonder claims that life itself is merely “a disease of the ether.” Unable to deal with the child’s disenchanting insights, his adult interlocutors seek to silence him… perhaps permanently.
“In The Hampdenshire Wonder Beresford explores anxieties about human evolution and the limits of knowledge. Is Victor Stott our evolutionary successor or simply a vulnerable boy in a provincial town? A threat or a victim?” — John Kessel
“Extravagance… but of so remarkable a character that it keeps you almost spell-bound. What follows is philosophy, psychology, poetry, allegory, what you will.” — The Bookman (1911)
“A novel which, in point of originality, both of conception and execution, is the most remarkable that has been published for some time. A wonderful effort of vision and imagination. It is a book that counts.” — Morning Post (1911)
“Mr. Beresford reveals himself as a man who has something to say very distinct and different from the ordinary rut of novelists, something that amounts almost to a message.” — English Review
“A clever and curious book.” — The Book Monthly (1911)
“A thoughtful and original novel.” — The Athenaeum (1911)
“The striking originality of the book is what first catches the reader’s attention; afterwards it is held by the quiet, truth-compelling manner of the telling.” — Pall Mall Gazette (1911)
“Mr. Beresford has done a very difficult thing extremely well. He has written a story which anyone can read with pleasure, and in which the philosophic reader will find a rich vein of meaning and suggestion.” — Westminster Gazette (1911)
Advance publicity includes the following:
“What makes the Radium Age series so valuable is how it illuminates the origins of science fiction tropes we take for granted. The Hampdenshire Wonder tackles transhumanism decades before it became a preoccupation of science fiction and posthumanist philosophy.” — Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing
“One of the earliest exemplars in SF of the genius unbound, the more-than-human intellect whose insights are sublime and terrible. The Wonder, as the child is primarily known, devours entire libraries of philosophy and science, eventually expounding a theory-of-everything that (of course) cannot be recreated on the page, but implies what [Ted] Chiang calls (brilliantly) in his introduction a kind of “cognitive heat death,” a point beyond which learning, and perhaps therefore living, becomes irrelevant. The heightened passages grappling with this possibility convey, without any particular pyrotechnics, the proper scientific romance chill of perspective, which is to say that The Hampdenshire Wonder has more than just historical value, and earns this latest reprint.” — Niall Harrison, March 2025 issue of Locus.
J.D. BERESFORD (1873–1947) was an English dramatist, journalist, and author. A great admirer of H.G. Wells, he published the first critical study of Wells’s scientific romances in 1915. In addition to The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), an early and influential proto-sf novel about super-intelligence, his genre novels include A World of Women (1913), Revolution (1921), and The Riddle of the Tower (1944, with Esmé Wynne-Tyson).
TED CHIANG‘s fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and six Locus Awards, and has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories. His first collection Stories of Your Life and Others has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival. His second collection Exhalation was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019.
Originally published in 1911. Cover illustrated and designed by Seth. See this book at The MIT Press.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF FROM THE MIT PRESS: VOICES FROM THE RADIUM AGE, ed. Joshua Glenn | J.D. Beresford’s A WORLD OF WOMEN | E.V. Odle’s THE CLOCKWORK MAN | H.G Wells’s THE WORLD SET FREE | Pauline Hopkins’s OF ONE BLOOD | J.J. Connington’s NORDENHOLT’S MILLION | Rose Macaulay’s WHAT NOT | Cicely Hamilton’s THEODORE SAVAGE | Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE LOST WORLD & THE POISON BELT | G.K. Chesterton’s THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL | MORE VOICES FROM THE RADIUM AGE, ed. Joshua Glenn | William Hope Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND | Hemendrakumar Roy’s THE INHUMANS | Charlotte Haldane’s MAN’S WORLD | Francis Stevens’s THE HEADS OF CERBERUS & OTHER STORIES | Edward Shanks’s THE PEOPLE OF THE RUINS | J.D. Beresford’s THE HAMPDENSHIRE WONDER | John Taine’s THE GREATEST ADVENTURE | Marietta Shaginyan’s YANKEES IN PETROGRAD | BEFORE SUPERMAN: SUPERHUMANS OF THE RADIUM AGE, ed. Joshua Glenn | & more to come.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.