Glenn, Joshua
Entry updated 24 November 2025. Tagged: Editor.
(1967- ) US editor, publisher and essayist, founder-editor of the journal Hermenaut (1992-2001), and responsible for the creation (solo or in collaboration) of several websites, including Significant Objects, Hermenaut and HiLoBrow. Through the latter site, he edited an initial iteration of the Radium Age series of reprints of sf titles – at least ten all told, most of them Scientific Romances like Goslings (1913) by J D Beresford, The People of the Runs (1920) by Edward Shanks and The Clockwork Man (1924) by E V Odle – that were initially released in the decades before American Genre SF began to take shape under the editorship of Hugo Gernsback. His use of the term "proto sf" to describe these texts presumes a whiggish linear evolution towards the defining heights of American sf, though his own selections, as he himself argues, have literary merits independent of a priority he deems subaltern (for this encyclopedia's differing use of the term see Proto SF). A second iteration of the Radium Age series, from The MIT Press, presents corrected texts with introductions.
Glenn's three Anthologies in the series, Voices from the Radium Age (anth 2022) and More Voices from the Radium Age (anth 2023), are substantial and to the point, the first volume linking together authors as diverse as W E B Du Bois, Jack London and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain; the third volume, Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age (2025), picks up on the long nineteenth-century focus on Supermen (see also Alexandre Dumas), contributions ranging from the relatively obscure, like Jean de La Hire, on to eminences of the wider world of the Scientific Romance like George Bernard Shaw. [JC]
Joshua Glenn
born Boston, Massachusetts: 6 October 1967
works as editor (selected)
Radium Age
- Voices from the Radium Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2022) [anth: in the publisher's Radium Age series: pb/Seth]
- More Voices from the Radium Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2023) [anth: in the publisher's Radium Age series: pb/Seth]
- Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2025) [anth: in the publisher's Radium Age series: pb/]
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