Before Superman
Superhumans of the Radium Age
The weird and wonderful stories of the ancestors of today’s comic-book and cinematic superheroes.
Superhumans—humans who have evolved into creatures stronger, smarter, and more gifted than we have any reason to be—first showed up in science-fictional narratives during the genre’s emergent Radium Age. Originally published between 1902 and 1928, the stories and excerpts anthologized in this volume by Joshua Glenn feature the likes of Marie Corelli’s Young Diana, who, having been rendered super-alluring via a rejuvenation experiment, seeks revenge on a sexist society; Francis Stevens's Thomas Dunbar, one of the first lab-created superhumans; Zoo and Yva, superwomen who contemplate the extermination of us mere mortals, thanks to George Bernard Shaw and H. Rider Haggard; and Alfred Jarry’s André Marcueil, a scientist…