What Frederick Soddy, the English radiochemist whose lectures would inspire H. G. Wells to predict the atomic bomb, described as the “ultra-potentialities” of radioactive elements seemed limitless. Throughout the nineteen-aughts and -tens, scientists and snake-oil salesmen alike would ascribe to radium—and radiation in general—vitalizing, even life-giving powers. By the 1920s, then, the Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin and the English biologist J. B. S. Haldane could independently propose that radiation, acting upon our planet’s inorganic compounds billions of years ago, had produced a primordial “soup” from which emerged life.
Science fiction, too, emerged during the genre’s 1900–1935 Radium Age from out of a hot dilute soup of sorts, this one composed of outré genres of literature—from occult mysteries and paranormal thrillers to Yukon adventures and Symbolist poetry—acted upon by the energy of new scientific and technological theories and breakthroughs.
Pedersen hoped to become perhaps the first person to visit all 195 countries without flying. He figured he would return home to Copenhagen in four years as a record holder.
But Pedersen recently walked off a boat in Denmark, having completed his objective six years later than anticipated and feeling fortunate to be alive. Pedersen said he ventured about 260,000 miles via cars, trains, buses, taxis, boats, shipping containers and his own feet.
The book shows how witch-hunting was a source of income for many local people — innkeepers, carpenters, gaolers, and others — and of how whole communities became involved in one way or another.
Its strengths include Meyer’s fine prose, and its vivid evocation of life in a 17th-century English village, how such a place looked and smelled, its social relations, and the language spoken by its inhabitants.