News from the Moon Read online

  News from the Moon

  And Other French Scientific Romances

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Table of Contents

  Introduction 4

  Louis-Sébastien Mercier: News from the Moon 19

  Adrien Robert: The Embalmed Hand 26

  Stéphane Mallarmé: The Future Phenomenon 45

  Jean Richepin: The Metaphysical Machine 47

  Albert Robida: The Monkey King 57

  Eugène Mouton: The Historioscope 194

  Georges Eekhoud: Tony Wandel’s Heart 223

  Guy de Maupassant: Martian Mankind 277

  Fernand Noat: The Red Triangle 286

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION 332

  Introduction

  There is no equivalent in French of the British term “scientific romance,” which evolved in the 1890s as a general term for speculative fiction wholly or partly based in scientific ideas. The corresponding American term, “science fiction,” did not come into common usage until the late 1920s, although it was subsequently exported to Britain, France and the rest of the world, becoming the dominant term for all fiction of that kind. This process of coca-colonization had the unfortunate side-effect of establishing the particular nexus of ideas typical of the American subgenre as the tacit core of all speculative fiction, masking the distinctive features and the internal coherency of different native traditions of speculative fiction.

  The lack of any distinctive French label has further obscured the fact that, of all the native traditions, the French has the longest history and made the most rapid early progress. This early start was not entirely surprising, given the crucial contribution made by French philosophers to the celebration of the Enlightenment brought about by science–which included the development of the modern idea of progress–and it is a pity that the tradition faltered thereafter, mainly due to the effects of a series of historical interruptions, including various revolutions and wars.

  The genrification of French speculative fiction might have been easier to describe if Charles Garnier had only been able to think of a snappier title for a 36-volume series of reprinted texts that he began issuing in 1787, or had the project not been interrupted in 1789 by that year’s Revolution.

  The collection brought together various Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions, et romans cabalistiques [Imaginary Voyages, Dreams, Visions and Cabalistic Novels] with the manifest intention of defining a new genre of imaginative fiction, which introduced a distinctively modern spirit into classical narrative modes such as the fantastic voyage, the Utopian romance, the allegorical vision and the occult romance, renewing all of them with healthy doses of Enlightenment philosophy and wit.

  No single text can be extracted from Garnier’s collection as a central exemplar around which all the others may be said to orbit, but one of its key inclusions was Voltaire’s Micromégas (1750), the boldest of his definitive contes philosophiques, in which Earth is briefly visited by a giant inhabitant of a planet orbiting the star Sirius, who is equipped with a far more elaborate sensorium–and thus with far greater powers of intelligence–than human beings. While en route through the Solar System, the visitor picks up a traveling companion from the planet Saturn, whose size, sensory equipment and intelligence are intermediate between the human and the Sirian. From their hypothetical viewpoint, the pretensions of humankind–especially the kind of faith that insists on pretending to perfect knowledge on the basis of a single ancient text–inevitably seem ridiculous, but the story’s moral is less brutal than it seems, for its chief implication is that, although human philosophical and moral progress may have a long way to go, it is a process that might be capable of enabling us to make the journey.

  Micromégas was not without precedent in its method or materials; it continued a tradition of scathingly sarcastic satirical writing headed in France by the 16th-century writings of François Rabelais, which employed the hypothetical viewpoints of the giant Gargantua, his son Pantagruel and the latter’s priapic companion Panurge. The most significant intermediate item in the tradition, Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique contenant les états et empires de la lune (1657) and Fragment d’histoire comique contenant les états et empires du soleil (1662)–combined in translation as Other Worlds: The Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon and Sun–had been bowdlerized, and some of its text destroyed, because of its religious skepticism, and Micromégas itself had initially to be published outside France, bearing a deceptive imprint.

  Other writers within the tradition had avoided similar risks by being more earnest and more careful. Gabriel de Foigny’s La terre australe connue [The Southern Continent Revealed] (1676), had considered the question of whether social equality would only be possible in a society of hermaphrodites with careful diplomacy. Simon Tyssot de Patot’s two fantastic voyages, Voyages et aventures de Jacques Massé [Voyages and Adventures of Jacques Massé] (1710) and La vie, les aventures et le voyage de Groenland du Révérend Père Cordelier Pierre de Mésange [The Life, Adventures and Voyage to Greenland of the Rev. Fr. Pierre de Mésange] (1720), and the Chevalier de Mouhy’s Lamékis (1737-38), which also featured venturesome speculations in exotic biology and sociology, had been equally careful in muting their satirical components. Even so, speculation based in science was never entirely safe in a Catholic country like France, whose churchmen had been dealing very roughly with perceived heretics for hundreds of years.

  Voltaire’s contes philosophiques are more inventive in terms of their narrative technique than their predecessors, often conserving an appearance of frivolity by borrowing narrative devices from Antoine Galland’s translations of Arabic folklore, which had been synthesized into the massive collection known as Les mille-et-une nuits (1704-16; tr. as The Arabian Nights or The Thousand-and-One Nights). The imaginative adventurism and verve of Galland’s work had already complemented and fused its influence with a burgeoning literary interest in contes des fées prompted by Madame d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault and others. Borrowings from Galland also infuse another key exemplar in the Garnier collection, the Chevalier de Béthune’s Relation du monde de Mercure [An Account of the World of Mercury] (1750), in which a “philosophical telescope” permits close observation and evaluation of the lives of the winged inhabitants of the planet Mercury.

  Where the Chevalier de Béthune led, others soon followed, including Charles-François Tiphaine de la Roche in the macrocosmic romances Amilec (1753) and Giphantie (1760; tr. as Gyphantia), and Marie-Anne de Roumier (later Madame Robert), whose Voyages de Milord Céton dans les sept planètes [Voyages of Lord Seaton to the Seven Planets] (1765-66) describes a tour of the solar system as it was then characterized. Roumier’s “seven planets” are the traditional Aristotelian complement (the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) although the novel’s allegorical apparatus is based in a heliocentric cosmology and ideas regarding the plurality of worlds that had been popularized in France–in the context of a long-standing theological dispute–by Pierre Borel’s Discours nouveau prouvant la pluralité des mondes [A New Discourse Proving the Plurality of Worlds] (1657) and Bernard de Fontenelle’s enormously popular Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686; tr. as Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds). Roumier was doubly represented in Garnier’s collection, her second contribution being a long conte philosophique transfiguring mythical imagery, Les ondines [The Undines] (1768).

  The bestselling work of the latter half of the 18th century in France was Louis Sébastien Mercier’s L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante [The Year 2440] (1771; rev. 1774; further rev. 1786 and 1799; tr. as Memoirs of the Year 2500), which was published
anonymously, without the official certification theoretically required to license its publication. This was the first Utopian novel to be set in an actual place in the future, rather than in some remote contemporary geographical location, and it moved Utopian fiction into a “uchronian” mode, defining the ideal state as something attainable within the framework of the existing world order, by means of political action: an object of social progress rather than a comparative exemplar.

  Although L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante did not foresee a revolution–its Utopian Paris has been created by gradual modifications guided and supervised by an enlightened king–Mercier claimed, once he had owned up to its authorship in 1791, that the book had helped to precipitate the Revolution of 1789. That may have been an exaggeration, but L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante did lay the groundwork for a new subgenre of French futuristic fiction. It is extensively discussed as a pivotal text in a long theoretical discussion of the potential scope of futuristic fiction juxtaposed with a further exemplar in Félix Bodin’s Le roman de l’avenir [The Novel of the Future] (1834). These two examples, in their turn, generated a dialectical counterpart in the form of the skeptical satirical dystopia, Emile Souvestre’s Le monde tel qu’il sera (1846; tr. as The World As It Shall Be), which challenged the supposition that technical progress and social progress would go hand in hand, suggesting instead that technical progress might increase social inequality and injustice.

  Although use of the Memoirs was proscribed, Garnier did reprint one of Mercier’s earlier books–the first of his two collections of fictionalized essays, Songes et Visions Philosophiques [Philosophical Dreams and Visions] (1768)–in his collection. One of these tales, a brief sketch of “Nouvelles de la lune” [News from the Moon], proved highly influential. Although it is, in essence, a straightforward theological fantasy regarding the possible nature of the afterlife, it takes care to redesign the afterlife in such a way as to take account of the cosmos revealed by modern science; in effect, it uses the universe of science as an existential framework for paradisal experience, while relegating the inferno to some further and separate dimension. It also takes care to refine its imaginary method of communication with the dead into something resembling a laboratory experiment, employing a beam of coherent light that anticipates the invention of the laser.

  The story’s republication by Garnier attracted the attention of two writers who were to become important manufacturers of extended contes philosophiques that celebrated the philosophy of progress and the discoveries of modern science: Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne and Camille Flammarion.

  In addition to his famous account of La découverte Australe par un homme-volant, ou le Dédale Français [The Discovery of Australia by a Flying Man; or, The French Dedalus] (1878) Restif produced an account of a cosmic voyage that is clearly indebted to Roumier, as well as Mercier, in a section of Les posthumes [Posthumous Correspondence] (written 1788-89; published 1802). Flammarion–who launched his literary career with an account of La pluralité des mondes habités [The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds] (1862), and made his own attempt to define a new literary genre in his scrupulous comparative account of Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels [Real and Imaginary Worlds] (1864; exp. 1892)–used it as a model for the longest and most significant of his early fictionalized essays, Lumen (1866-69; reprinted in Récits de l’infini, 1872; tr. as Stories of Infinity). “News from the Moon” thus represents a useful starting-point for this exemplary anthology of “French scientific romances.”

  The interruption of Garnier’s reprint series was one aspect of a significant developmental hiatus in the nascent genre of French speculative fiction. Although it never died away entirely, such fiction did not flourish under the Convention, during the Empire, or in the first phase of the Restoration.

  Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le dernier homme (1805; tr. as The Last Man) formed a bridge of sorts between Mercier and Bodin, but it was a less daring work in ideological terms, which attempted to subsume the idea and imagery of technological progress within religious prophecies of the apocalypse.

  Satirical speculative fiction was incorporated into the fiction of the French Romantic Movement by its early leader, Charles Nodier, in a handful of fragmentary Utopian romances, including “Hurlubleu” (1833), but Nodier’s enduring preference for the imagery he collated in his influential directory of Infernaliana (1822) was reflected in the works of most of his followers. Ventures such as Théophile Gautier’s Les deux étoiles (1848; tr. as The Quartette), which described an unsuccessful attempt to rescue Napoleon from Saint Helena in a submarine, and Victor Hugo’s extension of La légende des siècles [The Legend of the Centuries] into the future in “Plein ciel” [Open Sky] (1859), were rare.

  Bodin and Souvestre published their works between the July Revolution of 1830 and the next attempted Revolution of 1848–a period which also saw the publication of Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes’ lunar romance “Mazular” (1832) and the birth of alternative history fiction in Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812-1832 [Napoleon and the Conquest of the World] (1836; better known as Napoléon apocryphe [An Apocryphal Napoleon]). It was not until Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of 1851 established the Second Empire, though, that speculative fiction resumed the appearance of being about to attain generic status.

  Charles Defontenay’s magisterial Star, ou Psi de Cassiopée (1854; tr. as Star: Psi Cassiopeae), which details the history, politics and culture on a complex star-system, remained an isolated tour de force, but the career of Jules Verne, launched in the following decade, provided a vital seed-crystal around which a genre could and did organize itself, with significant assistance from works by Camille Flammarion.

  Verne’s career as a novelist might have developed differently had he been able to publish an exercise in futuristic fiction written in the early 1860s, but he was persuaded by his publisher, P.-J. Hetzel, to set it aside and it was lost for more than a century before resurfacing as Paris au XXe siècle (1994; tr. as Paris in the 20th Century). Hetzel persuaded Verne to expand on the kind of adventure fiction he developed in Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; tr. as Five Weeks in a Balloon), subjecting his speculative imagination to a rigorous discipline that contrasted strongly with the tactics of Voltairean satirists. Verne followed it with a series of classic voyages extraordinaires, including Voyage au center de la terre (1863; tr. as Journey to the Center of the Earth), De la terre à la lune (1865; tr. as From the Earth to the Moon) and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870: tr. as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). Although Verne’s first venture into interplanetary fiction was calculatedly restrained in its scope, De la terre à la lune did lend momentum to the gradual refinement of the satirical tradition in the direction of greater realism, assisted by such works as Achille Eyraud’s Voyage à Venus [Voyage to Venus], also issued in 1865.

  Verne’s contemporaries did not include any other author of similar influence, and other writers of popular fiction interested in speculative material tended to follow the abundant precedents which mingled such imagery with entirely fanciful materials, thus seeming far less significant to modern chroniclers of the evolution of a more restrictive kind of science fiction.

  They included Léon Gozlan, whose Les émotions de Polydore Marasquin (1856; tr. as The Emotions of Polydore Marasquin, A Man Among the Monkeys and Monkey Island) brought the satirical tradition of Cyrano de Bergerac into the realm of feuilleton fiction, and the equally-prolific Charles Basset, who used the pseudonyms Charles Newill and Adrien Robert to distinguish himself from his similarly-named father, a noted playwright. The Adrien Robert collection Contes fantasques et fantastiques (1867) contains an early future war story, “La guerre en 1894,” and a tongue-in-cheek account of the legendary inventor of gunpowder, “Berthold Schwartz,” as well as the medical fantasy “La main embaumée,” translated here as “The Embalmed Hand.”

  “The Embalmed Hand” is primarily a weird tale, linke
d in its method and motifs to the contemporary short fiction of Erckmann-Chatrian, and it features a motif that was later to become a staple of horror fiction, employed twice in that fashion by Guy de Maupassant before featuring in numerous 20th-century literary and cinematic shockers. In this version, however, the severed hand does not wreak its revenge by strangling its victim but by writing–specifically, by amending a prescription, making use of its former proprietor’s knowledge of chemistry. In this respect, it is a more distinctively modern story than its many successors.

  Although the Second Empire came to an ignominious end in the siege of Paris that followed military defeat by the Prussians at Sedan in 1870, Verne’s career continued without any significant interruption, including such speculative works as Autour de la lune (1870; tr. as Around the Moon) and the title novella of the collection Une fantaisie du Docteur Ox (1872; tr. as Dr. Ox’s Experiment). He attracted many imitators once political stability had been restored again in the 1870s, not merely in France but also in Italy, Germany and Britain. His influence even spread to the USA, although most American Vernian fiction was published in the conspicuously lowbrow medium of cheap “dime novels”–a degradation encouraged by the butchery of Verne’s works in execrable translations.

  French Romanticism continued to flourish in the Second Empire, but as it extended through the 1860s and 1870s, it was gradually invaded by a consciousness of its own decadence, and the fondness for ornate stylistic exercises that many of its key authors exhibited became the hallmark of what Théophile Gautier described as “Decadent” style, appointing Charles Baudelaire as its key exemplar. Alongside Verne’s career, therefore, a markedly different kind of fantastic fiction flourished, flatly opposed in its fundamental narrative strategy to the discipline of Vernian fiction.