Nordenholt's Million

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.Series Foreword vii
Introduction: Benignant Fascism xiii
Matthew Battles
I Genesis 1
II The Coming of "The Blight" 19
III B. Diazotans 31
IV Panic 41
V Nordenholt 49
VI The Psychology of the Breaking-strain 75
VII Nordenholt's Million 103
VIII The Clyde Valley 121
IX Intermezzo 147
X The Death of the Leviathan 165
XI Fata Morgana 175
XII Nuit Blanche 183
XIII Reconstruction 221
XIV Winter in the Outer World 243
XV Document B. 53. X. 15 263
XVI In the Nitrogen Area 281
XVII Per Iter Tenebricosum 301
XVIII The Eleventh Hour 319
XIX The Breaking-strain 339
XX Asgard 349
Afterword: Alfred Walter Stewart 357
Evan Hepler-Smith“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
“The situations are tremendous, and there are horrors of all kinds. It is a thrilling book.”
—Daily Mail (1923)
 
“You may like Nordenholt’s Million or you may detest it, but there is one thing I defy you to do, and that is to forget it.”
—Punch (1923)
 
“A capital yarn, in the Jules Verne-cum-H. G. Wells manner. Does infinite credit to the author’s ingenuity.”
—Truth (1923)
 
“An extremely good example of the scientific romance.”
—To-Day (1923)

“I can’t think of a more timely moment to reissue Nordenholt’s Million, a chilling prediction of eco-catastrophe and the authoritarian regimes that can and do arise during such periods of chaos.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human
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.