Second paragraph of third story (“The Age of Science”, by Frances Power Cobbe):
For obvious reasons the particulars of this most marvellous invention, and the name of its author, must be withheld from the public till the patents (and the enormous profits) be secured to the Company which is invited to undertake to work it (with limited liability). We are only permitted by special favour to hint that the natural Force relied on to set the machinery in action is neither Electric, Magnetic, nor Galvanic; nor yet any combination of these; but that other great correlated imponderable agency, whose existence has been for some time suspected by many intelligent inquirers, called the Psychic Force. That no scepticism may linger in the minds of our readers, we desire to add that we have at this moment in our hands a complete transcript of a newspaper bearing date January 1st, 1977. As the printed matter of this gigantic periodical equals at least in bulk the whole of Gibbon’s History, or Mr. Jowett’s edition of Plato, we cannot attempt to do more than offer our readers a few brief extracts.
Jack Fennell has been fighting the good fight to uncover the historical traditions of Irish science fiction for many years, and this is quite an extraordinary collection of stories from various writers, many of them women and radicals, from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and all of the stories are firmly on the science fiction rather than fantasy side of the divide.
The potted biographies of the authors frequently spurred me to seek more information from Wikipedia, and I realised the depth of my own ignorance of the science fictional side of the cultural revival – which is ironic, because in my PhD thesis I made the closely related argument that the pro-science agenda of revolutionary Irish nationalism had been ignored.
I was particularly intrigued by Clotilde Graves (1863-1932), a distant cousin of Robert Graves, who wrote plays as “Clo Graves” and novels as “Richard Dehan”, cropped her hair short, wore men’s clothes and smoked cigars in public. One of her plays compared marriage to prostitution and her work is generally feminist. I don’t think I had heard of her before.
Not all of these stories are top-notch, but I’m glad that Jack Fennell has revived them. The other authors represented are William Maginn, Fitz-James O’Brien, Frances Power Cobbe, George William Russell / Æ, Amelia Garland Mears, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, Jane Barlow, Robert Eustace and L. T. Meade, L. McManus, Dorothy Macardle, Art Ó Riain, Tarlach Ó hUid and Cathal Ó Sándair. You can get it here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations by Terri Hooley and Richard Sullivan and Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold.
