Before Superman

“The tales collected here by Joshua Glenn offer a rich origin story for the ‘superhuman,’ a sci-fi trope that would go on to launch a million comic books … and which, in our era of the more-than-human AI, is a prescient one.”—Ann Nocenti, Marvel and DC comic book writer“Provides essential background on the rise to dominance of superhumans in our own pop culture.”—The Toronto Star“Before Superman is a joyful as well as thought-provoking volume of an excellent series, insightfully presented by Joshua Glenn. The book is of great interest for all SF lovers but also to all literary and cultural historians, who can only feel encouraged to rethink some of their labels and periodization tools.”—Leonardo“As in so much speculative fiction set in imagined futures, these superhumans shed a light on the age in which they were conceived. Rather than strengths, they reveal its anxieties and preoccupations.”—The Times Literary Supplement

Joshua Glenn is a consulting semiotician and editor of HiLobrow and Semiovox. He coined the term “Radium Age” to describe the period of science fiction from 1900–1935 and edits MIT Press’s series of reissued proto-sf stories from that era. He is coauthor and coeditor of Unbored (2012), The Adventurer’s Glossary (2021), and Lost Objects (2022). In the 1990s, he published the indie intellectual journal Hermenaut.

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