Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+

This novel by one of the putative Fathers of Science Fiction was first serialized in 1911 in Gernsback's first magazine, Modern Electrics, which was a mostly non-fiction magazine aimed at technogeeks and amateur inventors, something along the lines of the later Popular Mechanics. The novel was apparently substantially revised for its first book publication in 1925, the year before Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, the first magazine dedicated solely to science fiction (or scientifiction) stories. My sense is that it has stayed in print pretty consistently since then. The edition I read came out in 2000 in the Bison Frontiers of Imagination series of early science fiction from the University of Nebraska Press.

I've been aware of the novel since I became a serious reader of science fiction in my teens, but I had never been interested in it in the past because it has a reputation as being creaky and old-fashioned -- a gadget tale without any narrative to speak of. There's some truth to all of this, but the reputation is also somewhat misleading, at least to the extent that it obscures what the novel is up to by contrasting it with post-Campbellian SF rather than placing it in the context of earlier SF.

( Cut to the chase ... )