Nordenholt's Million - (Mit Press / Radium Age) by J J Connington (Paperback)

About the Book

"Bacteria inimical to plant growth spread around the world, causing a blight, Jack Flint is invited to become director of operations at Nordernholt's survivalist colony in England's Clyde Valley"--

Book Synopsis

As a bacteria threatens to wipe out humankind, a plutocrat sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a survivalist colony.

In this novel originally published in 1923, as denitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth spreads around the world, toppling civilizations and threatening to wipe out humankind, the British plutocrat Nordenholt sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a ruthlessly efficient, entirely undemocratic, survivalist colony established in Scotland's Clyde Valley. Discovering just how far their employer is willing to go in his effort to spare one million lives, Jack Flint, the colony's director of operations, and Elsa Huntingtower, Nordenholt's personal assistant, are forced to grapple with the question of whether a noble end justifies dastardly means.

Review Quotes

"I've been particularly looking forward to this installment of the [Radium Age] series."
-- Andrew Liptak, Transfer Orbit

In Praise of the Radium Age Series:

"Joshua Glenn's admirable Radium Age series [is] devoted to early- 20th-century science fiction and fantasy."
--The Washington Post

"Long live the Radium Age."
--The Los Angeles Times

"It's an attractive crusade. [...] Glenn's project is well suited to providing an organizing principle for an SF reprint line, to the point where I'm a little surprised that I can't think of other similarly high-profile examples of reprint-as-critical-advocacy. "
--The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Neglected classics of early 20th-century sci-fi in spiffily designed paperback editions."
--The Financial Times

"New editions of a host of under-discussed classics of the genre."
--Tor.com

"Shows that 'proto-sf' was being published much more widely, alongside other kinds of fiction, in a world before it emerged as a genre and became ghettoised."
--BSFA Review

"A huge effort to help define a new era of science fiction."
--Transfer Orbit

"An excellent start at showcasing the strange wonders offered by the Radium Age."
--Maximum Shelfs

About the Author

Under the pseudonym J. J. Connington, Alfred Walter Stewart (1880-1947) wrote seventeen well-received detective novels; Nordenholt's Million is his only science fiction novel. Stewart was a distinguished British chemist and author of the popular textbooks Recent Advances in Organic Chemistry (1908) and Recent Advances in Physical and Inorganic Chemistry (1909). Via a 1918 theory of the physical chemistry of radioactivity, he contributed the term isobar--as complementary to the term isotope--to science.

Matthew Battles is the author of Library: An Unquiet History, Palimpsest, and Tree, as well as the story collection The Sovereignties of Invention. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science, technology, and the natural world have appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, and Orion. For Harvard's metaLAB, he develops research into the dark abundance of collections, cultural and technology, and conditions of experience in the context of deep time.

Evan Hepler-Smith teaches the history of science and technology and environmental history at Duke University. He has a special interest in the history of chemicals and chemistry, information technology, and environmental regulation. His book in progress is entitled Compound Words: Chemical Information and the Molecular World. His writing has been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time.com, and Public Books.