A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction, ed. Jack Fennell

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language: English/Irish (English tr. Jack Fennell)
country: Ireland
year: 1837-1960 (published 2018)
form: short fiction
genre(s): science fiction, fantasy
dates read: 5.8.23-16.8.23

A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction (edited by Jack Fennell, who also translated the three originally Irish-language short stories that appear in it) is an interesting collection of weird (pseudo-)science fiction. I was surprised to find that half the collection is from before 1900 (ranging from 1837 to 1899), and, given this, unfortunately I think the collection suffers for its being framed as a collection of science fiction: most of the early stories it collects are, at best, dubiously scientific (notably Æ’s Theosophical short story “The Story of a Star”).

as such, if you approach the collection with “science fiction” in mind (as I did, based on the subtitle), I think you’re likely to be a little disappointed, because only in the second half, and really only with the last two stories — Tarlach Ó hUid’s “The Chronotron” (originally “An Cianadóir”) and Cathal Ó Sándair’s “The Exile” (originally “An Deoraí”) — does it become consistently recognizably sci-fi, which makes sense, since the genre as we now know it didn’t really coalesce until the ’20s.

that said, there are some great stories here, and some less than great ones that were nonetheless interesting as period pieces:

• Franes Power Cobbe’s “The Age of Science” (1877) is framed as an excerpt from a future newspaper from a dystopian anti-feminist 1977, where women are forbidden to learn to read and apes are educated as domestic labor (foreshadowing Clare Winger Harris).
• Jane Barlow’s “An Advance Sheet” (1898) is a weird and dark story about clairvoyance and attempted murder.
• Clotilde Graves’s “Lady Clanbevan’s Baby” (1915) is a wacky kind of horror comedy written before the effects of radium were really understood.
• Dorothy Macardie’s “A Story Without an End” (1922), written while she was a political prisoner during the Irish Civil War for her anti-Treaty activities, is a grim but compelling weird/dark fantasy story about a dream-vision.
• Tarlach Ó hUid’s “The Chronotron” (1946) is a time travel/paradox story that isn’t exactly breaking new ground, but it’s well-executed and the political angle and bitterness give it a new twist.
• Cathal Ó Sándair’s “The Exile” (1960) is an unexpectedly sharp look at emigration, as a man who spent most of his life on the moon returns to Ireland in his old age.

the upside of the fact that many of the early stories are only tangentially “science fiction” is that the three Irish-language stories come off much better than the earliest stories, which are mostly by conservative and/or Ascendancy writers; that was a nice bonus.

moods: reflective, wacky

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