The Super-est Supermen of Pre-Golden Age Science Fiction
Joshua Glenn, io9.com: Long before Alan Moore asked “Who will watch the Watchmen?” science fiction writers of the Pre-Golden Age (1904–33) worried whether supermen would rescue us ordinary mortals — or try to dominate us.
Dreamed up by American and European SF writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — at a time when Lamarckian-Bergsonian evolutionary philosophy, which posits a tendency for organisms to become more perfect as they evolve, remained popular — many of the first fictional supermen were portrayed by their creators as examples of a more perfect species towards which humankind has supposedly long aimed. Pre-Golden-Age superman was, that is to say, homo superior, an evolved human whose superiority was mental, physical, or both.
The influence of Pre-Golden Age supermen remains a powerful one. Consider Adrian Veidt, in the forthcoming Watchmen movie adaptation. He’s an Übermensch — a self-overcoming individual, that is to say, who has not only mastered his perfect body but (to quote Peter Cannon… Thunderbolt, the Charlton comic that inspired Moore’s Ozymandias) “harnessed the unused portions of the brain.”
