Beatrice the Sixteenth

By: Irene Clyde

A pioneering feminist adventure in an alternate world—before the concept of gender.

Introduced by Lucy Sante, author of the acclaimed memoir of transition I Heard Her Call My Name, this pioneering 1909 feminist utopia is productively discombobulating. When Mary Hatherley, an intrepid British explorer, is kicked in the head by the camel she was riding through the Arabian desert, she finds herself transported to what seems to be an alternate version of Earth. Arriving in Armeria, she discovers a society in which the very concept of gender is unknown. Like Mary, the reader will become disoriented, but enjoyably so: By avoiding the use of gendered pronouns, the story’s author—herself a gender-fluid activist—challenges our assumptions about gendered social paradigms.

Series Overview: Under the direction of Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s Radium Age is reissuing notable proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935. In these forgotten classics, science fiction readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopian wastelands, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes. With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and science fiction authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualize the breakthroughs and biases of these proto–science fiction classics, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning genre.