Customer Reviews

Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the seminal work in sci-fi by the man who's editing direction shaped the modern genre, Hugo Gernsback, the guy they named the Hugo Awards after.

A future where everyone wears electric roller skates, has a number instead of a last name and cities have moving side walks... One of theose travelogues of the future extrapolated by a writer from the very beginings of the pulp era. The gadgetry seems almost Victorian, the philosophy seems dated, yet somehow you'll never forget this book.

I read this book in the early 60's and it was already very quaint and dated even back then. But somehow I've never forgotten it and parts of this book come to mind even now almost 40 years later. If you've ever seen the 1930 film "Just Imagine," then this is the literary equivalant.

I came across this title in the usual way: surfing for something almost, but not quite related. I knew of Gernsback's publications. And I'm quite familiar with the SF award that bears his first name. But it never dawned on me that the man actually wrote SF himself. I had to read this obvious classic.

Only knowing a glimmer of the book's contents, I jumped in. Fully expecting stuff so "left field" from today's technology, I was quite surprised with Gernsback's predictions. A few of them are fairly accurate, and at least one is square on target. And winding through it all is a darling, innocent love story to boot. It reads as good as any Jules Verne, or H.G. Welles story!

Don't let either the title or it's author scare you off from reading this. You'll be glad you did!

If you were to take away the historical context of this book, and treat it as a pure piece of science fiction, it would be a poor purchase, two stars at best. Plot seems contrived at times, and overly romantic. (Perhaps because the book wasn't actually a book but orginally published as many installments of magazine story.) There are phrases that read awkward, whether due to the age or lack of focus on literature I don't know. Having said that, I still give it four-stars, and there is a reason why science fiction achievement award is named after Hugo Gernsback.
This book is widely considered the first science fiction and Hugo credited with creation of the term 'science fiction.'

It is a must read for serious fans of science fiction. But for casual readers, you'd be glad modern SF is leaps and bounds more interesting. (Then again, who knows what people will say a hundred years from now about Star Wars?)

"Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967)is celebrated as the father of modern science fiction. His novel, Ralph 124C41+: A Romance of the Year 2660, is considered to be the first pure work of science fiction. Some successful preditions from this novel include television, remote control power transmission, televisted phone calls, trancontinental air service, solar energy in practical use, sound movies, synthetic milk and foods, artificial cloth, voiceprinting, tape recorders, and space flight. Its setting is a post 2000 utopian world, where technology reigns supreme and everything is productive, efficient and relies heavily on science. The title itself is a play on words meaning "one to forsee for one." The main character, Ralph 124C41+, was one of the greatest living scientists, and one of only ten men on the whole planet earth permitted to use the plus sign after his name."

-Episode 7 Epilogue; 'Ergo Proxy'

This nvel was a first and although dated and to be honest not a smooth read, it is good for scifi history.

Hugo Gernsback (SF's "Hugo" awards are named for him) wrote this in 1911, so a big part of its value comes from campy quaintness. Set in the year 2660, everything is grander and more glorious than what we poor slobs of centuries 20-21 could possibly imagine - something that Ralph points out with remarkable frequency. The story itself has lagged the times, a formulaic romance of accidents, kidnappings, and heroic saves.

Many parts of this hundred-year-old story are decidedly dated, not least the references to the "ether" that carries light waves. Some just look silly to a modern eye, including the broadcast power distribution (sort of like a live-in microwave oven), electric roller skates, or restaurant that serves only liquid food, pumped through pipes to patrons turned off by the idea of chewing. And the daily disinfections, killing off all bacteria in the body, look positively pernicious, now that we know more about the importance of our symbiotic microbes.

A few points are strikingly prescient, though. Cable video might have been the obvious next thing, once telephonic voice transmission was common. Gernsback went even farther and predicted "video walls" tiled from many smaller video panels, and even channel surfing, albeit with patch-cord panels rather than typed URLs.

Read this if you want a quaintly futuristic, doubly-anacronistic romp, a shallow space opera, or an interesting artifact from the start of the last century. If you're looking for light, contemporary fiction, look onward. This is probably best for the hard-core SF fan or for the historian of technology trying to understand the social context of the time. The right reader will find a lot to enjoy, but it's not for everyone.

-- wiredweird