The World Above The World Read online

  The World Above the World

  and Other French Scientific Romances

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  S. Henry Berthoud: A Heavenward Voyage 24

  S. Henry Berthoud: The Second Sun 37

  René de Pont-Jest: Mimer’s Head 69

  Alphonse Daudet: Wood’sTown 113

  Camille Flammarion: Love Among the Stars 118

  Charles Recolin: The X-Ray 127

  Michel Corday: The Mysterious Dajan-Phinn 135

  Jules Perrin & H. Lanos: The World Above the World 175

  André Mas: Drymea, World of Virgins 267

  Introduction

  This is the fourth anthology of stories relevant to the early development of French speculative fiction that I have assembled for Black Coat Press, following News from the Moon (ISBN 9781932983890, 2007), The Germans on Venus (ISBN 9781935543566, 2009) and The Supreme Progress (ISBN 9781935558828, 2011).

  I was prompted to compile another volume so quickly on the heels of the last because the opportunities for gaining access to relevant material have greatly improved over the last few years, thanks to the prolific addition of electronic versions of books and periodicals to the Bibliothèque Nationale’s website gallica, which has made many texts readily available that are virtually impossible to locate in physical form. Although the last two texts come from reprint editions issued by the small press Apex International, which has also rescued numerous interesting texts from undeserved oblivion, the rest all come from gallica, and would have been very difficult to locate otherwise.

  As with the earlier volumes, the present selection attempts to present a cross-section of relevant works, this time extending from the 1860s to the 1920s, but any limited sample of texts is bound to include a few duplicated themes and stances, and this one is no exception, in that several of the stories reproduced herein take a critical view of scientific and technological progress, often leveling similar skeptical charges against the notion the moral and scientific progress go hand in hand. Although the acute disenchantment of the final item is readily explicable in the fact that it was written in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, it is surprising how many premonitory echoes of its tacit lugubriousness can be found in the earlier stories, going all the way back to the earliest one of all. The latter is, admittedly, somewhat atypical of its period, but not so very atypical that no common threads extend therefrom through the darker aspects of the other stories bridging the parenthetical items, although their content is quite various.

  The first story in the anthology, “Voyage au Ciel,” here translated as “A Heavenward Voyage,” was initially published in 1840 in La Presse and reprinted in 1841 in the Revue des Feuilletons. It was futuristic at the time, in that it features the invention of a dirigible balloon long before any such feat was actually achieved, and was probably inspired by the recent setting of a new altitude record for human ascent, which the device in the story is intended to smash. Its interest from the modern viewpoint, however, is not reliant on its modest and long-superseded innovations, but derives from the imaginative context in which it presents them, in which science and religion are juxtaposed in such a way as to draw comparisons and contrasts.

  The protagonist of the story is introduced as a nephew of the religious poet Friederich Klopstock, the self-appointed “Christian Homer” who spent much of his adult life producing the Messianic epic Messias. His fictitious nephew also conceived messianic ambitions of a sort, which reach their critical moment when he makes a balloon ascent to what seem to him to be the limits of the physical world, beyond which lies a tacit barrier imposed of God to separate the Earth from “the Heavens”—not quite the innermost crystal sphere of Ptolemaic cosmology, or the realm of the quintessential aether, but something imaginatively and symbolically akin to it. For the hero, as a scientist, that barrier exists only to be crossed, and his inventive genius will give him the means to cross it: a determination that his neighbors—represented in the story by the local pastor—consider to be evidence of madness.

  The symbolic scheme extends a little further than that, as the reader will discover, but its intricacies are perhaps less fascinating than its ambiguity. The history of 19th century French literature is, of course, littered with works of the “madman’s manuscript” variety in which ambiguity is the privilege of unreliable narrators, but “Voyage au Ciel” is not a first-person narrative and its ambiguity is more objective. The question it raises is not so much whether Ludwig Klopstock is mad—of course he is—but the whether his madness might not, in some respect, be finer than sanity, and that question is not seriously affected, let alone undermined, buy the evasiveness of the ending. It is a question that recurs constantly, if sometimes mutedly, in most of the other stories making up the collection. That science is blasphemous is taken for granted; that scientific genius is intrinsically insane—in modern parlance, a variety of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder—is also taken for granted. The key question remains, however, as to whether that blasphemous insanity, no matter how destructive it might be, has not something within it that is worth more than mundane aspirations and moribund delusions. Only a minority of the stories reproduced here, as in the entire spectrum of speculative fiction, come down firmly on one side or the other, but the real point of asking the question is not to supply a ready-made answer, but merely to wonder, anxiously.

  The same nexus of ideas provides the narrative background to the second story by Berthoud reproduced here, “Le Second Soleil,” translated as “The Second Sun,” which juxtaposes a conventional sentimental romance with a chronicle of scientific madness, again leading to a conclusion whose ambiguity is deliberately complicated. I have not been able to trace the periodical publication of the story, but it was reprinted in book form in 1862 and the internal evidence—which is, admittedly, not entirely consistent—suggests that it was probably not written very long before that date. The consistency of attitude revealed by the two stories does, however, result from their selection as stories on the margins of speculative fiction; the author was remarkably versatile and prolific.

  The author of “Voyage au Ciel” and “Le Second Soleil,” S. Henry Berthoud, is not widely cited nowadays as a significant pioneer of speculative fiction, mainly because those of his works that contain a speculative component are, almost without exception, very tentative. By the time anyone was able to conceive the idea of a history of speculative fiction, most of Berthoud’s hypothetical inventions, like the dirigible balloon in the present story, had been actualized after a fashion, and his more ambitious guesses as to the fundamental nature of reality seemed naïve as well as obsolete. He does, however, remain a writer of some significance in the development of French scientific romance, especially in terms of its relationship to the popularization of science

  Berthoud was born in Cambrai in 1804 and educated in medicine; some eulogistic accounts of his life and career identify him as a “medical pioneer” although there does not seem to be much evidence that his keen interest in science led to any significant discoveries in his own field. The only relevant publication listed in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale is an account of a cure supposedly effected by music, unless one counts his various endeavors in “marriage guidance.” His medical career always had to compete with his literary interests; he published his first volume of poetry in 1822 and his first collection of short stories, Contes misanthropiques [Misanthropic Tales] in 1831. His first novel appeared in 1832. Much of his early work was set in Flanders, and his most significant work of the first phase of his career was a three-volum
e collection of Chroniques et traditions surnaturelles de la Flandre (1831-34). His interest in folklore and the supernatural is reflected in several of his early novels as well as many of his short stories.

  Although did not give up on his literary endeavors there is something of a hiatus in the record of Berthoud’s publications in volume form from the mid-1840s to 1860, doubtless assisted by the disruption of the marketplace caused by the revolution of 1848 and Louis Napoléon’s subsequent coup d’état. He was presumably concentrating on his medical career for the interim. Whether or not he retired permanently from that career in 1860 I have not been able to ascertain, but the trickle of his publications turned abruptly into a flood in 1861, when he must have devoted himself full-time to writing for a decade. His interest in the supernatural was still strong—three of the numerous books he published in 1861 were Le Dragon rouge, ou l’art de commander au demon et aux esprits infernaux [The Red Dragon; or, The Art of Summoning the Devil and Infernal Spirits], Le Grand Albert et ses secrets magiques et merveilleux [Albertus Magnus and his Magical and Marvelous Secrets] and Le Baiser du diable [The Devil’s Kiss]—but it was his interest in science that really came to the fore in the second phase of his career.

  In 1861, Berthoud began an annual series of Les Petites chroniques de la science [Little Chronicles of Science] which extended until 1872, and also published the first two of four volumes of Fantaisies scientifiques de Sam [Sam’s Scientific Fantasies], the latter volumes of which followed in 1862. Each volume of the set runs to more than 400 pages; the whole assembly totals more than half a million words; the project must have been moderately successful, because the four volumes were reprinted in 1866-67. The two stories translated here were both included in the set, although they are not typical of what Berthoud meant by “scientific fantasies.” Most of his science-based stories are not speculative fiction at all, but merely accounts of contemporary life whose characters have occasion to discuss recent scientific discoveries or to encounter some of the bizarre phenomena recently revealed by the rapidly-expanding database of scientific discovery.

  The “Sam” named in the title of the four-volume collection is Berthoud himself, whose first name was Samuel, although it is worth noting that he had published Les Histoires de mon oncle Samuel [Uncle Samuel’s Stories] in 1845. He followed up the four-volume set with Contes du Dr. Sam [Dr. Sam’s Tales] (1862), whose inclusions are modeled on folktales, although not entirely innocent of scientific input, and he also reproduced selections from their contents, along with some new material, in Le Monde des insectes [The World of Insects] (1864), Les Féeries de la science [The Enchantments of Science] (1866) and L’Esprit des oiseaux [The Spirit of the Birds] (1867). Each of the four volumes of Fantaisies scientifiques had been carefully categorized; the first volume containing sections headed “Entomologie” (7 stories), “Botanique” (15) and “Inventeurs et Savants” (4), the second “Reptiles” (4), “Mammifères et Oiseaux” (10), “Physique et Chimie” (5) and “Industrie” (3), the third “Négoce et métiers” (4), “Médecine” (6), “Minéralogie” (4) and “Ethnologie” (4) and the fourth “Archéologie” (4), “Voyageurs” (2), “Martyrs” (9) and “Histoire” (3).

  Berthoud might well have planned to expand the contents of several more of the categories identified in the Fantaisies scientifiques into entire volumes, but this prolific period of endeavor only lasted a little over ten years; after Soirées du Dr. Sam [Dr. Sam’s Soirées] (1871) and the final volumes of the Petites chroniques, he published very little that was new, although Histoires et romans de Vegétaux [Stories and Romances of Vegetals] appeared in 1882. The probability is that his health had deteriorated, although he did not die until 1891.

  Berthoud’s prolific period coincided with a more general boom in the popularization of science, which had a considerable impact on the early development of French scientific romance. This was the decade in which Camille Flammarion first began to publish prolifically, experimenting with quasi-fictional frameworks in a spirit not dissimilar to Berthoud’s, and the similarly prolific scientific journalist Henri de Parville undertook an experiment of his own in Un Habitant de la planète Mars (1865; tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars, ISBN 9781934543470). Jules Verne’s first novel, Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; tr. as Five Weeks in a Balloon) began life as a series of articles on the techniques of ballooning, before he was persuaded to turn it into an adventure story, and his second, Voyage au Centre de la Terre (1864; tr. as Journey to the Center of the Earth) drew so heavily on Louis Figuier’s recent popularization of geology and paleontology, La Terre avant le Déluge (1863; tr. as The World Before the Deluge), that when Figuier issued a new edition of his book in 1867, Verne felt compelled to modify his text in order to keep abreast. The version of Voyage au Centre de la Terre that everyone reads today is the revised edition published in 1867, which differs significantly from the original; the original was never translated, so no English version exists.

  Berthoud was acquainted with Figuier, who provided a preface to the final volume of the Petites chroniques, and was similarly enthused by the paleontological discoveries of the decade, including the unearthing by Jacques Boucher de Perthes of a human jawbone that supposedly, but controversially, provided the final proof that the antiquity of the human species extended far beyond Biblical chronology (it was ultimately revealed to have been a hoax, but not until genuine finds had been made). Berthoud produced two books dramatizing these discoveries, L’Os d’un géant, histoire familière du globe terrestre avant l’homme [A Giant’s Bones: An Intimate History of the World Before Humankind] (1862) and L’Homme depuis cinq mille ans [Five Thousand Years of Humankind] (1865), the latter of which extends into the future, in the most adventurous of the author’s speculative endeavors. Had Figuier reprinted any of Berthoud’s work under the heading of romans scientifiques, which he attached to all the feuilletons reprinted in his popularization of science magazine, Le Science illustrée, founded in the late 1880s, Berthoud might have received a little more credit for his early endeavors in the field, but they probably seemed a trifle outdated by then. I hope to repair the omission by compiling a more extensive collection of his work, representing the whole spectrum of his relevant endeavors, next year.

  The third story in the present volume, “La Tête de Mimer” by René de Pont-Jest, here translated as “Mimer’s Head,” first appeared in the September 1863 issue of the Revue Contemporaine. It also has some connection with the boom in the popularization of science and its extension into scientific romance, in that its author began legal action against Jules Verne, alleging that Voyage au Centre de la Terre had plagiarized it. The legal action was eventually dropped, presumably because Pont-Jest was advised that he had no chance of winning the case, but it does seem probable, on comparing the opening sequences of the two stories, that Verne had read the Pont-Jest story and decided to borrow its central narrative device: a cryptogram written in runes that directs the solver to go to a particular Scandinavian mountain on a particular day and follow the direction given by a shadow at a specific time of day.

  Beyond that initiating device, Pont-Jest’s and Verne’s stories are completely different—diametrically opposed, in ideological terms—but what adds an extra dimension of irony to the aborted lawsuit is that the continuations of both stories lend themselves just as readily to accusations of copycat behavior than the part they have in common. Louis Figuier did not seem to mind in the least, however, that Verne had paraphrased whole chunks of La Terre avant le Déluge while taking his characters through the Earth’s geological strata to a fictional reproduction of the antediluvian world, and Pont-Jest was safe from any accusation that he had illicitly plundered the Faustbuch (1587), not so much because the latter’s author, Johann Spies, was long dead, as because so many others had preceded him, from Christopher Marlowe to J. W. Goethe, that the game had become an honorable tradition. Pont-Jest would doubtless have claimed that his narrative transfiguration was more
extreme than most—not least because of the remarkable way in which the Devil sets temptation before the central character—but the fact remains that his story is, in its essence and its ideology, a more straightforward ideological repetition of the original than its more famous predecessors.

  Pont-Jest’s full name was Louis-René Delmas de Pont-Jest (1830-1904) and in private life he preferred to be known as Léon Delmas. His first career was as a naval officer, and his early writings were mostly books on naval affairs and explorations, but once he had retired from the sea to become a full-time writer he dabbled in several kinds of popular fiction, including detective fiction. Scientific romance was, however, one genre of which he steered well clear, for reasons that “La Tête de Mimer” presumably spells out. Here, as in the original Faustbuch and all of its previous transfigurations, the lure that the Devil lays down for the protagonist is that of curiosity, the promise of being able to know all the secrets of the natural world, but Pont-Jest inevitably has a sharper consciousness of the progress that science is making in pursuit of that quest, and a proportionately sharper sense of the danger it supposedly poses. Unlike S. Henry Berthoud, he knew almost nothing about the content of modern science, and was therefore content to be very vague about what there might be to be learned by means of study and experimentation, but that only made him more strident in shaping the moral and symbolism of his story.

  What is interesting about “La Tête de Mimer” in the context of the present collection is how closely it echoes Berthoud’s stories in its analysis of the social and psychological demands of scientific endeavor, and the crucial opposition that supposedly exists between the abstract intellectualism of the dedicated scientist and the requirements of intimate family life. There is a sense in which Pont-Jest’s case has already been conceded in advance by such supposed champions of science as Berthoud, who accepts the judgment that scientists are, ipso facto, not merely tacitly Faustian in their hopes and dreams but quite insane in their obsessive antisocial proclivities. Berthoud—who, it will be remembered, titled the first collection of his own works Contes misanthropiques—is perfectly prepared to start from a defensive situation with a siege mentality, being content to wonder whether there might just be a glory in scientific madness unknown to sentimental Christian doctrine.