he titular hero--a reclusive yet famous mental giant and strapping physical specimen, "one of the greatest living scientists and one of the ten men on the whole planet earth [sic] permitted to use the Plus sign after his name"--is encountered vividly in the opening sentences of the first chapter.
Seated in his laboratory in the year 2660, Ralph is announcing--via picturephone connection to a comrade--yet another miraculous discovery.
Suddenly, a glitch in the phone service puts him face to face with an unknown beautiful woman in Switzerland, Alice 212B 423. After some coquettish interplay, Alice suddenly finds herself at the mercy of a dreaded avalanche, which Ralph manages to vaporize long-distance, with Alice's plucky help.
This chance "meeting" leads to an encounter in the flesh, when Alice and her father arrive in New York to thank Ralph personally. The sheltered superman, a ward of the state, formerly disdainful of physical and emotional love, finds himself falling head over heels for Alice. He agrees to be her tour guide while she is in America. During the next several weeks (covered in Chapters II through IX), they visit scientifically run farms, floating vacation resorts, an anti-gravitational circus, stores, solar power installations, restaurants and a host of other institutions and places chosen by Gernsback to illuminate his future. Ralph lectures his new attentive girlfriend inexhaustibly for the whole tour, including a long explanation of the world's financial system.
But their idyll features more than intellectual discourse and shy courting. Ralph and Alice have jealous enemies. Two spurned suitors--the human Fernand 60O 10 and the humanoid Martian Llysanorh' CK 1618--are determined to steal Alice away from Ralph. Only thanks to Ralph's bravery and ingenuity does Alice narrowly escape an attack in Manhattan from an invisible assailant who eludes capture. A peaceful interval follows. But then Alice is kidnapped away into space, and Ralph must rescue her, defying the orders of the government, which fears for the safety of its prize superman. In Chapters X through XVI, Ralph pursues first Fernand's fleeing spaceship, then that of Llysanorh'. Alice's ultimate salvation seems doubtful right up to the end, and indeed Ralph reverses a tragic outcome only with scientific prowess and personal sacrifice back on Earth, insuring a happy ending for the lovers.
Yesterday's tomorrows inspire awe
First serialized in the pages of Hugo Gernsback's own magazine, Modern Electrics from April 1911, to March 1912, then printed in book form in 1925, this classic of futuristic fiction predates the real creation of the SF genre, born shortly thereafter with the first issue of Gernsback's Amazing Stories in April 1926. (In a curious twist of fate, this edition bears an introduction from pioneer Jack Williamson, whose first editor was Gernsback himself.)
At one time it was fashionable to deride Gernsback's novel--often without even having read it--as a primitive exercise in speculation, long since superseded by more sophisticated works. And while it's true that the novel would never pass muster as an original in today's scene, it's wrong to dismiss it as worthless. Here Gernsback laid so many templates for all that science fiction could accomplish, as well as codifying a few of the genre's more notorious sins.
Gernsback's style is transparent and concise. Characterization is minimal but more than sufficient. Explanations are delivered in logical soundbites illustrated by vivid comparisons. His speculations hit the mark more often than not. In the '50s, perhaps, cityscapes full of rollerbladers and acres full of solar collectors might have looked silly.
Today, not so. And Gernsback's early concern for the natural environment balances his faith in the virtues and capabilities of technology.
True, Ralph relies too easily on cobbling new inventions together instantly. True, outdated paradigms--mainly the cosmic ether that was once thought to permeate space--are taken for granted. True, Gernsback equates easy achievements (illuminated ballparks) with difficult ones (antigravity and invisibility). True, he thinks that human nature is infinitely plastic and that people will unfailingly do what is deemed "good" for them by the authorities.
But on every page of this book--the plotting of which is masterful, including the climactic usage of a scientific technique introduced early on, then deliberately tucked into the background--the reader senses an earnestly striving mind at work, a scientific spirit for whom communication and education mattered above all.
