Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 by Hugo Gernsback
Some books are more important than they are actually good. Ralph for short (better than R1+AROY) is an important historical document, despite not exactly being good writing or storytelling. If read the right way, it can be very entertaining. Written in 1910 or 1911 by Hugo Gernsback in his magazine Modern Electronics. This was of course, a new field, electronics. John Ambrose Fleming, the first professor of electrical Engineering at University College in London got that gig less than a decade earlier. Gernsback was a publisher, but he saw himself as an inventor. This radical thought experiment showed him going far beyond what was currently technologically possible.
Perfect for Science fiction, just one problem, the genre didn’t exist yet. Ralph as a story is very, very important, not just because of how crazy ahead of the time it was. First serialized in 1911 in his electronics journal Ol’ Hugo had no idea that in sixteen years he would be inventing not technology, but a storytelling genre.
There is a reason the science fiction award is called the Hugo, and yes, I am aware that SF in a sense already existed, but Gernsback, Amazing Stories, and indeed Ralph play a role in inventing the genre we see expressing itself across media. Now the edition I read is based on the text of an edition from the 50s, and it had been revised a bit in 1928, but still the ideas are quite revolutionary for 1928, but in 1911 it is CRAZY.
From a universal translator, thumb drive newspapers. Anti-gravity flying cars, microfilm, vending machines, satellites, tape recorders, solar energy, and a few others are accurate or close to accurate predictions. This is all fun stuff to read about, and the technologies that were pretty close to the eventual thing that was invented. Even more fun is the stuff that never happened. One of my favorites was a postage stamp-sized newspaper you buy to download the news.
This is an important book, but make no mistake, the story and characters are thin. You are reading it for the thought experiment of the technology at the time. For that, it is a valuable snapshot of wild speculation of many sitting at a typewriter in 1911 and thinking about the future and certainly a better example than Poe’s The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall," which still people traveling in balloons in a thousand years.
As far as a work of Pre-Science Fiction I think this novella is a must-read. The faults are many, but the strengths are enough to validate its importance.
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