In Fitz-James O’Brien’s 1858 story The Diamond Lens, a scientist makes an astonishing discovery when he gazes at a drop of water through a special microscope. Instead of the empty “brilliant void” he expected to find on the slide, he sees an incredible world of strange and colourful wonders. As Jack Fennell points out in the introduction to this important and often extremely entertaining book, the same surprise awaits anyone investigating the history of Irish science fiction.
With a few exceptions, the Irish cultural establishment has always been wary of anything resembling genre fiction, which is one of the reasons the country’s collection of stories that could be described as speculative, gothic or “weird” has been comparatively neglected. Thank heavens, then, for Fennell and his