The Revolt of the Machines Read online

  The Revolt of the Machines

  and Other French Scientific Romances

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  X. Nagrien: A Prodigious Discovery 14

  Edouard Rod: Dr. Z***’s Autopsy 100

  Emile Goudeau: The Revolt of the Machines 124

  Louis Valona: The Rival Colleagues 133

  Jules Perrin: Monsieur Forbe’s Hallucination 198

  Jules Sageret: The Race that Will Be Victorious 284

  Gaston de Pawlowski: The Veridical Ascension Through History of James Stout Brighton 311

  Michel Epuy: Anthea; or, The Strange Planet 316

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 354

  Introduction

  This anthology is the eighth in a series collectively providing a cross-section of the early development of what Louis Figuier, defining the genre in the series of feuilletons published between 1887 and 1900 in La Science Ilustrée, called roman scientifique [scientific fiction]. Because the label that was eventually attached to the similar American genre that took root in the popular pulp magazines of the 1920s, “science fiction,” was generalized during the period of cultural “co-colonization” that followed the end of World War II, such materials are sometimes described as “proto-science fiction,” but they are, of course, nothing of the sort. The authors represented here had no idea that there would ever be something called “science fiction” and no idea of what it would be like, and cannot in any meaningful sense be considered as working toward it, making “progress” in its direction—if that direction can, in fact, be considered as progress rather than degeneration.

  Like its closest English language analogue, “scientific romance,” the phrase roman scientifique first appeared in the latter half of the 18th century, where it was used to refer to ideas in science that were thought to be, or had turned out be, scholarly fantasies. The earliest uses that show up by searching for the term in Google Books are dated between 1750 and 1754, but all the references from that period refer to an observation by Elie-Catherine Fréron, discussing the theory of gravity. Other early uses include a footnote in a scientific encyclopedia of the period under the entry on phlogiston, and several sources citing Jean-Baptiste Delambre’s dismissal of the calculation of the date of the Biblical Deluge by the astronomer William Whiston, identify the roman scientifique [in this context, the scientific novel].

  The term was employed by Honoré de Balzac in 1836 with reference to the New York Sun “Moon Hoax,” which was equally sensational when reprinted in France, and Camille Flammarion employed it in the same context in 1864. It was still being used in the 1860s to refer to scientific texts, but it began to be used increasingly in that decade to refer to works of fiction, including works by Léon Gozlan, Henri Rivière and, not unnaturally, Jules Verne. Indeed, throughout the 1870s, the term was used almost exclusively to refer to Verne’s scientifically and technologically-enhanced adventure stories, considered archetypal of the genre, but in the 1880s competition began when critics referred to the works of Émile Zola as “romans scientifiques”—a term which the author was happy to accept, on the grounds that his “Naturalist” fiction was typified by its employment of a scientific method of character analysis based on the study of the influences of hereditary and environment in shaping individual behavior. The subsequent conflict of reference might have been one of the factors that prevented Figuier’s championing of the term as a generic label from being more widely adopted, thus leaving the way clear for the eventual usurpation of that field by the American term, which actually had a significantly different spectrum of reference and a markedly different series of ideological fascinations and inclinations. The stories included in this anthology mostly reflect concerns of the French genre that Louis Figuier attempted to define, often including heavy emphases on matters with which the later American genre was only marginally concerned, or to which the American genre typically brought a different perspective.

  The first story contained herein, “Prodigieuse découverte,” translated as “A Prodigious Discovery,” was originally published in the monthly Revue Moderne in the December 1865 and January 1866 issues, roughly contemporary with Jules Verne’s early novels—a fact that inspired Verne’s publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who might have briefly entertained the notion of configuring a genre of speculative fiction himself, to reprint it in 1867 as Prodigieuse découverte et ses incalculables consequences sur les destinées du monde entièr. Unfortunately, Hetzel—an incorrigible meddler whose insistence on suppressing the more extravagant flights of Verne’s imagination probably robbed the world of a considerable fraction of that writer’s immense genius—did not like the ending of the Revue Moderne story and insisted that the author alter it. The alteration did not work to its advantage. (The version here translated is the serial version, taken from Google Books’ reproductions of the relevant volumes of the Revue Moderne.)

  The book version of Prodigieuse découverte apparently sold very poorly, which might have helped to discourage Hetzel from further experimentation with speculative fiction, but the fact that it had been issued by that publisher prompted some eager translators of Verne’s work to translate it, and the versions published in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese were misrepresented as Verne’s work. That misattribution remained commonplace in bibliographies for many years, although the novella was actually the work of the lawyer and Republican civil servant François-Armand Audoy (1825-1891), who wrote a number of non-fiction books under his own name and subsequently published a second book under the Nagrien pseudonym, Un Cauchemar. Manoeuvres, intelligences, délits fantastiques (Lahure, 1869). The catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale does not as yet attribute the Nagrien pseudonym to Audoy, but there is no doubt about it, a search of Hetzel’s archives made in 1966 and publicized by Simone Vierne having revealed the truth.

  In fact, there is nothing Vernian about the novella, which is partly a satire aimed at politics and publicity, using the hypothetical invention of a technology of antigravity as a means of highlighting the problems that an inventor might experience in the profitable exploitation of an epoch-making discovery, and partly an exercise in wry logic, pointing out the economic and social upheavals that a truly prodigious discovery might cause, even while furthering progress. That nexus of issues became a popular theme of roman scientifique, particularly thorny because French scientists routinely saw their work overtaken by American inventors like Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison, who reaped the glory and well as all the profits of discoveries that they succeeded in patenting, but had not necessarily made. Whereas Verne was primarily a writer of adventure stories, whose philosophical bent was kept under a tight rein by Hetzel, Audoy was an occasional dabbler in contes philosophiques that owe more to the Voltairean tradition of wit and cynicism. That doubtless led to Prodigieuse découverte selling poorly to readers in search of Vernian thrills, but should not be estimated to its discredit.

  The second story in the collection, “L’Autopsie du docteur Z***,” translated as “Doctor Z***’s Autopsy,” by Édouard Rod (1857-1910), is also a conte philosophique, which Rod employed as the title story of a collection of his short fiction published in 1884. As in the classic Voltairean tales in that vein, it employs a fantastic literary device as a narrative lever to bring a philosophical question or possibility into clearer focus, albeit, in this instance, somewhat perfunctory (the experience related, ostensibly as a result of the “autopsy” in question, is conspicuous in its failure to mention any such autopsy being carried out).

  There is a sense in which “L’Autopsie
du docteur Z***,” belongs to a series of French stories raising the issue of whether consciousness might persist for a while after death, most of which feature scientists conducting experiments on freshly-guillotined heads—one of the most famous, Villiers de Isle Adam’s “Le Secret de l’échafaud”1, had been published in Le Figaro, to which Rod was also a contributor, in 1883, and might well have inspired Rod’s flight of fancy. Rod’s story is remarkable, however, in assuming that the residue of consciousness might last for days or weeks rather than mere seconds, and is not at all concerned with the mere question of whether or not the hypothesis might be true. Instead, it is intensely interested in the existential thought-experiment of how the consciousness of being dead and the experience of slow post-mortem extinction might affect one’s attitude to the life one has lived. As such, it is highly unusual and quite fascinating in its suppositions.

  It is worth noting that Rod’s story qualifies as roman scientifique in both senses of the term, and can be regarded as a contribution to the school of “neo-Naturalism” that followed from Zola’s Naturalism, and were differentiated by its substitution of more up-to-date psychological theories of biological heredity and their analyses of human behavior and consciousness. This translation was made from the version of the story reprinted in Défricheurs d’imaginaire: Une Anthologie historique de science-fiction Suisse romande (2009) edited by Jean-François Thomas.

  The story that has given the collection its title (purely for melodramatic reasons and for ease of illustration), “La Révolte des machines” by Émile Goudeau (1849-1906), translated as “The Revolt of the Machines,” was published in the 4 September 1891 issue of the Livre populaire, five years before an identically-titled story by Han Ryner was published in L’Art Social (September 1896)2. The theme was eventually standardized as a flamboyant staple of science fiction, but Goudeau’s version stands at the head of the entire tradition, and differs from the subsequent American version in its emphasis on the politics of economic exploitation and Luddism.

  Goudeau had worked as a teacher for a while, but then hurled himself wholeheartedly into the Parisian literary community, where he became famous as the founder and central figure of the Hydropathes—the name of which was based on a pun on his name—a literary drinking club founded in 1881 that survived a temporary disbandment, having become too big for convenience to be reincarnated as the heart and soul of the celebrated literary café Le Chat Noir. Although by no means typical of Goudeau’s literary work—it seems to be his only excursion into speculative fiction—“La Révolte des machines” is very much in the spirit of the vigorous extravagance of such core members of the Hydropathes as Charles Cros, Alphonse Allais, Edmond Haraucourt and Jules Richepin, all of whom made significant contributions to the development of French speculative fiction in an profuse, witty and surreal vein that routinely made the more earnest speculations favored and promoted by Louis Figuier seem rather staid and pedestrian. This translation was made from the version reproduced on Jean-Luc Boutel’s excellent website Sur l’autre face du monde, an invaluable mine of information about the early evolution of roman scientifique.

  The only other publication that routinely adopted Figuier’s rubric as a generic description was La Science Ilustrée’s downmarket competitor La Science Française, which was sufficiently faithful in its imitation to run a feuilleton section of its own from its foundation in 1891 until the late 1890s, but tended to favor future war fiction of a kind that Figuier did not much like, until it switched from serialized novels to shorter works under the aegis of its second editor, Émile Gautier. Most of its fiction was written under the various pseudonyms of Georges Espitallier, who also wrote a considerable fraction of its non-fiction, but Louis Valona, the signature attached to “Confrères ennemis,” published in seven parts in 1896, and translated as “The Rival Colleagues,” does not seem to have been one of Espitallier’s disguises. The byline was attached to various works in other periodicals as well as a couple of satirical songs designed for use as dramatic monologues, and was probably a freelance journalist during the 1890s, although his career does not seem to have lasted long, at least under the employment of that signature.

  Valona published non-fiction in La Science Française as well as the present novelette, although his knowledge of science appears to have been a trifle limited. “Confrères ennemis” was not the only venture into comedy featured in the magazine, but it is the most flamboyant and belongs to a considerable tradition of roman scientifique that focuses on the supposed eccentricities and personality disorders of scientific researchers, often uncharitably. Like many stories in that tradition, and in spite of its passing mention of new gadgetry deployed in the “modern villa” designed by one of the characters, this, too, is a roman scientifique in both senses of the term, albeit a far cruder one than Rod’s, reflecting and pandering to popular prejudices rather than challenging them. The translation was made from the relevant volume of La Science Française reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s website, gallica.

  “L’Hallucination de Monsieur Forbe,” translated as “Monsieur Forbe’s Hallucination,” was originally published in the relatively upmarket periodical Je Sais Tout, an imitation of the English Strand Magazine, where it appeared as a four-part feuilleton between November 1907 and February 1908. It was subsequently revised for book publication as La Terreur des images in 1910, but I have not seen that version and have translated the earlier French title literally, in spite of its woeful impropriety, to emphasize that it is the periodical version that I have rendered into English. In fact, the latter title is only a little better, as “images,” although far more apt as a description of the story’s central motif than “hallucination,” still lacks specific pertinence. The difficulty is easy to understand, however, as the word the story employs to describe its theme—“telepathy”—is usually understood differently, and what is actually featured is a kind of clairvoyance hypothetically enhanced by some kind of naturally occurring “wave” analogous to the carrier waves of wireless telegraphy transmission.

  La Terreur des images is catalogued by the Bibliothèque Nationale as the work of Jules-Laurent Perrin, but other works that are apparently by the same author remain confused in the catalogue with those of an earlier Jules Perrin (1839-1911). The author of the present story appears to have been born in 1862, but I cannot find any reference to the date of his death. His other works included Les Bonhommes en papier (1905) and Deux fantômes (1908). This translation was made from the facsimile of the feuilleton issued as a book by Editions Apex, in its “Periodica” collection, in 1996.

  “La Race qui vaincra” by Jules Sageret (1861-1944), translated as “The Race that will be Victorious,” is a conte philosophique in the purest sense of the term, and appeared in book form in a collection of non-fiction essays on utopian speculation entitled Paradis laïques [Lay Paradises] (1908). It might conceivably have appeared previously in a periodical, but I cannot find any evidence of earlier publication. It explores a common theme in speculative utopian fiction, which is that utopian design would be all very well if humans were capable of living a utopian existence, but that they are ill-fitted for so doing by nature.

  The notion of some kind of mutation, natural or induced, that might produce utopians out of common human stock is not unusual, but Sageret, as befits a scholar with a powerful interest in the conundrum, does so with a rare intensity as well as a deft wit. The translation was made from the version of the story reprinted in issue number 13 (October 2005) of Philippe Gontier’s small press magazine Le Boudoir des Gorgones, another extremely useful and helpful source of information about antique French fantastic fiction.

  “La Véridique ascension dans l’histoire de James Stout Brighton,” translated as “The Veridical Ascent Through History of James Stout Brighton,” was published in book form in Polochon, Paysages animés, Paysages chimériques in 1909, although it had presumably appeared previously in Comoedia, the periodical that its author, Gaston de Pawlowski (1873
-1943), founded in 1908. Like most of Pawlowski’s work, it is a blithe comedy in the casually bizarre manner that made him one of the pioneers of surrealism, along with such fellow dabblers in speculative fiction as Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire. Much of Pawlowski’s work in the speculative vein was assembled in the philosophical extravaganza Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension (1912; expanded 1923)3, but the present story is incompatible with the elastic scheme of that project. The translation was made from the version of Polochon, Paysages animés, Paysages chimériques reproduced on the Internet Archive website at archive.org.

  The final story in the collection, “Anthéa, ou l’étrange planète” by “Michel Epuy” (Louis Vaury, 1876-1943), translated as “Anthea; or, The Strange Planet” first appeared in two installments in the Swiss periodical Semaine littéraire in July-August 1918, where it attracted praise from the author on whose speculative fiction it is clearly modeled, and to whom it is dedicated, J.-H. Rosny Aîné. It was subsequently reprinted as a small book by La Plume de Paon in 1923. As with Rosny’s work in a similar vein, it is a striking biological fantasia imagining life on another world, in which the distinctions seemingly so natural on Earth between animal, vegetable and mineral are confused. The literary devices employed to transplant the hero to the alien world and bring him back again are wildly implausible, but handled with a flamboyant panache that does the story’s melodramatic component no harm at all.

  As with the Édouard Rod story, this translation is made from the version of the story reprinted in Defricheurs d’imaginaire: Une Anthologie historique de science-fiction Suisse romande (2009) edited by Jean-François Thomas. That version reprints the “prologue” attached to the story in the Plume de Paon edition, which is actually a blurb advertising the story, but which is interesting in that capacity by virtue of its apologetic manner, which illustrates very clearly that, even without the existence of a generally-accepted generic label, there was already something seemingly-suspect about speculative fiction in 1923, which caused editors to think twice about publishing it and caused many of them to issue apologies in advance for doing so.