Frank Reade, Jr., and His Electric Ice Ship

Frank Reade, Jr., and His Electric Ice Ship is one of Luis Senarens’s many Frank Reade Library dime novels, working in the proto science fiction adventure mode that made him one of the most influential American genre writers of his era. Senarens wrote hundreds of stories about young inventor Frank Reade Jr. and his various sons and assistants, often under the pen name Noname, and the cumulative output established many of the conventions that would later define the science fiction genre proper.

The electric ice ship of the title points to a particular invention that the dime novel tradition delighted in producing for its young inventor protagonists. An ice ship would have been a vessel designed to travel across the polar ice or the frozen waters of the Arctic and Antarctic regions, with the electric power source representing the kind of advanced technology that the period was just beginning to develop in real engineering applications. Senarens used the polar exploration premise across multiple Frank Reade stories, with the genuine geographical mystery of the polar regions in the late nineteenth century providing the kind of unmapped territory that the dime novel adventure tradition required.

The Frank Reade stories typically follow a young American inventor and his crew of friends and engineers as they build a remarkable new machine and use it to explore some remote and dangerous corner of the world. The stories combined adventure plotting with an interest in plausible engineering speculation, which made them important precursors to the science fiction that would emerge as a distinct genre in the early twentieth century. Senarens corresponded for years with Jules Verne, who admired the American writer’s work, and the influence ran in both directions across the Atlantic.

The polar exploration framing in particular connects Senarens’s work to the wider Victorian and Edwardian fascination with the unmapped polar regions. The actual polar expeditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the various attempts to reach the North and South Poles that culminated in the polar achievements of the early twentieth century, gave the dime novel polar adventure subgenre its real world counterpart. Frank Reade’s electric ice ship is the dime novel version of the polar exploration vessels that real expeditions were beginning to use during the period.

The prose is brisk, the action moves, and the period assumptions about race, empire, and the American frontier are very much present in ways modern readers will need to navigate. For scholars of early American popular literature, of the prehistory of science fiction, or of the dime novel as a publishing phenomenon, Senarens’s work is essential. Many of his stories are now in the public domain.