The Conqueror of Death Read online

  The Conqueror of Death

  and Other Stories from La Science Illustrée

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  IN THE SAME SERIES

  News from the Moon

  The Germans on Venus

  The Supreme Progress

  The World Above the World

  Nemoville

  Investigations of the Future

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  Alphonse Brown: Tribulations of an Angler 14

  Camille Debans: The Story of an Earthquake 73

  Emile Gautier: Le Désiré 96

  Camille Debans: Fire Island 116

  Georges Price: Springfield’s Doubloons 145

  Camille Debans: A Steam Duel 189

  Camille Debans: The Conqueror of Death 216

  Paul Combes: The Gold Mines of Bas-Meudon 235

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 322

  Introduction

  Literary genres are not created ex nihilo; they are woven together from pre-existent threads that consequently seem to have been leading toward them, fated to entwine. Thus, when Hugo Gernsback invented “scientifiction,” trailing it in Science and Invention before founding Amazing Stories in 1926, he formed a deliberate compound, selecting what he considered to be exemplary works from the oeuvres of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe, and adding in what he thought to be relevant components from the contemporary American pulp magazines, including works by Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, Ray Cummings, Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint, which had themselves taken some inspiration from earlier writers, including H. G. Wells and H. Rider Haggard. A generation before then, however, in the 1890s, the editor of the French popular science magazine La Science Illustrée, Louis Figuier—who had been privileged a generation before that, to have exercised a highly significant influence on Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864; rev. 1867; tr. as Journey to the Centre of the Earth)—made a concerted effort to define and delimit a genre of roman scientifique [scientific fiction], using that rubric to head a series of feuilletons that ran in the magazine from 1888 to 1905.

  To some extent, Figuier’s project ran along the same lines as Gernsback’s. Jules Verne was, inevitably, one of the central exemplars he employed in formulating his notion of what “scientific fiction” ought to be like, and in selecting exemplars from Verne’s extensive canon, he would undoubtedly have had the same works in mind as Gernsback—except, of course, that copyright problems and the fact that his readers would already have been familiar with the works in question prevented him from reprinting them, whereas Gernsback did not let such niceties stand in his way. Although Wells had not yet begun producing his “scientific romances” when Figuier began his project, as soon as the relevant works began to appear in French translation, Figuier began featuring them in his feuilleton series, and did so on a prolific scale for some years, continuing for some while even after the prestigious literary magazine Le Mercure de France, also began printing Wells translations—including some of the same ones—in some quantity.

  The one source to which Figuier had no inspirational access was, of course, the American pulp fiction that did not begin to appear in any profusion until sometime after his own experiment had concluded, and a handful of French precursors of that distinctive kind of interplanetary action-adventure fiction that were produced after the turn of the century also arrived too late for inclusion, so it remains a matter for conjecture as to whether Figuier would have been enthusiastic to accommodate them. As things turned out, that component of American “scientifiction,” which was soon relabeled “science fiction,” became such an important aspect of the genre as to be considered by many fans of the genre to be central and essential, although it remained peripheral to the British tradition of scientific romance that developed in the wake of Wells and the French tradition that survived Figuier’s abandonment of his feuilleton series. In fact, the label Figuier used effectively died with his feuilleton slot, Alfred Vallette never having consented to adopt it for its own generic experiments in the Mercure, which were also soon interrupted, presumably because both editors realized that the genre did not have enough reader support to make it commercially worthwhile to continue its development.

  That absence of exemplars of interplanetary adventure fiction was not, however, uncompensated. Figuier had other exemplars to draw upon, which gave rise to a significant thread of his roman scientifique, but which remained virtually unechoed in Gernsbackian science fiction. Alongside the work of Jules Verne, in the 1860s, several other writers participating in a significant crusade to popularize science had dabbled in various fictional formats, experimenting with different methods of trying to exploit narrative methods to dramatize scientific materials and subtle ways of intruding scientific information and perspectives into conventional narratives. The leaders in that enterprise were Camille Flammarion and S. Henry Berthoud, both of whom produced a good deal of what they thought of as “scientific fiction,” but most of which bears little resemblance to what eventually acquired the label of “science fiction.” Both writers produced occasional items of what might be called, in a broad sense, “speculative fiction,” but both were very wary of basing their speculations on the imaginative extrapolation of present-day technologies to produce images of hypothetical future technologies.

  That reluctance seems surprising to us, because we are so accustomed to the strategy, but in the 1860s, it was seen as hazardous and controversial in its propriety; Jules Verne would probably have done a great deal more of that kind of speculation had he been given free rein, but his publisher, Jules Hetzel—who, unusually, had him under contract—did his level best to rein in that aspect of Verne’s work, encouraging him to concentrate primary of supposedly-naturalistic tales of exploration and adventure. Flammarion’s imagination was far more-reaching than Verne’s, but when his reaching mechanisms ventured beyond mere dreaming, they drew almost exclusively on the astronomer’s enthusiasm for “spiritism” (the French equivalent of the Anglo-American spiritualism) rather than his understanding of technology. The devoutly Catholic Berthoud was skeptical about spiritualism and reluctant even to use dreaming as a visionary ploy, and the vast majority of his manifold attempts to alloy science with narrative involve naturalistic narratives in which the characters encounter unusual phenomena or encounter the various tribulations that he considered to be routinely associated with scientific endeavor.

  These two kinds of precedents were not very copiously extrapolated by other writers, and cannot really be said to have prompted subgenres in the manner in which “Vernian fiction” became a distinguishable and fairly prolific subgenre, but they were not without influence. Figuier seems to have been skeptical about spiritism and only allowed it to serve a peripheral role in one or two of the stories he included in his feuilleton series, but he was certainly sympathetic to the strategy of writing conventional narratives whose story-value was similar to that of popular fiction in general, but whose characters become involved with unusual phenomena or have occasion to employ the scientific method to perfectly possible situations in ingenious and intriguing ways. Henry Berthoud was still alive in 1888 but was very old and no longer active as a writer, or Figuier well might have approached him to contribute to his series, and some of the authors he did invite or take up were of a similar stripe.

  The situation of Figuier’s fledgling genre was further complicated by the fact that the term roman scientifique, which had been used by critics and commentators in connection with Jules Verne’s works, had also been previously used to describe fiction of a very different sort: the strictly-defined “Naturalism” for which Émile Zola offered a formal manifesto, which claimed to draw upon scientific perspectives in its analyses of human behavior and motivation. For the most part, Zola confined his “scientific” analyses to such phenomena as alcoholism and religious fanaticism, although one instance of the supposed taint of the Rougon-Macquart blood was the obsessive data-gathering of Le Docteur Pascal (1884), whose experimental endeavors also give rise to a bizarre elixir of life. That novel brought Zolaesque “roman scientifique” much closer in its concerns to the many hypothetical studies of obsessive scientific endeavor developed in fictional form by Henry Berthoud, who had little else in common with Zola.

  Figuier did not include Zolaesque fiction in his feuilleton series, sticking almost entirely to the norms of popular fiction and avoiding literary pretentions, but he was sympathetic nevertheless to works that were “naturalistic” in a more elementary fashion, and published a number of works that would not be considered, in retrospect, to be “proto-sciencefictional,” although they were not out of keeping with many of the popularizing endeavors that Henry Berthoud described as “fantaisies scientifiques” [scientific fancies], of which he published a four-volume set in 1861-2 (some samples of which are included in the Black Coat Press Berthoud collection Martyrs of Science and Other Victims of Devilry and Destiny).1 Inevitably, whether they were influenced by Berthoud or Zola—or, conceivably, both—several of Figuier’s writers also developed a marked interest in the psychology of science and its occasional bizarre attributes.

  In selecting stories from the Science Illustrée feuilleton series for inclusion in my previous anthologies, I generally picked out those whose themes and narrative strategies bear the most resemblance to what is now considered as typical of science fiction. Inevitably, therefore
, the present collection, which completes the set of short fiction from the series currently available on gallica and other on-line sources (the later items in the series remain unavailable, presumably because the relevant issues are missing from the Bibliothèque Nationale’s run of the periodical) is biased in the other direction. Although it includes one item that is thoroughly “sciencefictional” and others that are marginal in that respect, it also includes some that belong to a curious gray area of an “alternative scientific fiction” that was eventually dropped from the typification formed by the American genre. Figuier must either have selected them from submitted material or specifically commissioned them, so they were obviously in conformity with his notion of what roman scientifique might or ought to be, and might therefore be considered especially interesting in terms of their equivocal status in modern eyes.

  One writer who became a regular contributor to Figuier’s series, who is of particular interest in this context, is Camille Debans (1834-1910), who contributed seven stories to the series in all, four of which are reproduced here: “Histoire d’un tremblement de terre” (26 November 1892-24 December 1892; tr. as “The Story of an Earthquake”), “L’Île en feu” (15 April 1893-20 May 1893; tr. as “Fire Island”), “Un duel à vapeur” (13 April 1895-25 May 1895; tr. as “A Steam Duel”) and “Le Vainqueur de la mort: chronique des siècles à venir” (25 November 1895-30 November 1895; tr. as “The Conqueror of Death”). The other three are unavailable at present. The first three of the four stories listed are interesting not merely in differing from the sciencefictional method robustly featured in the fourth, but in being interestingly different from one another.

  “Histoire d’un tremblement de terre,” like many popularizing endeavors by Flammarion and Berthoud, masquerades as an item of non-fiction presented in narrative form in the interests of dramatization, although it is a work of fiction whose careful use of real places and false dates are tactical exercises intended to create a sense of verisimilitude. “L’Île en feu” similarly undertakes to provide a graphic description of a dramatic natural phenomenon, but is much more drastically fictionalized in its use of ironic melodrama and the striking exoticism of its climax. “Un duel à vapeur” is even more ironic in tone, and owes a considerable debt to the American tradition of “tall stories” developed by such writers as Mark Twain and Bret Harte, but its central motif appears to have been borrowed from an episode in Albert Robida’s classic Vernian parody Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul (1879; tr. as The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul2). The futuristic “La Vainqueur de la mort” is much more obviously sciencefictional to the modern eye, but its tone is not so very different from that of “Un duel a vapeur” and it is solidly based in the particular strand of Henry Berthoud’s work that examines the supposed psychology and social tribulations of scientific genius, and is surely influenced by Berthoud’s work in that vein.

  Debans is not significantly reputed as a proto-science fiction writer for any of the work he published outside La Science Illustrée, although one of his novels is entitled Boissat chimiste [Boissat, Chemist] (1892) and the first three stories translated herein were reprinted, along with other items of a broadly similar kind, in his collection Les drames à toute vapeur [Dramas at Full Steam] (1898). As the first story by Debans that Figuier published appeared in the magazine late in 1892, it might well have been the publication of Boissat chimiste that prompted the editor to approach the author for contributions, which he continued to use at approximately annual intervals.

  Two of the other authors represented herein contributed considerable quantities of other material to the feuilleton series. The first is Alphonse Brown (1841-1902), author of “Les Tribulations d’un pêcheur à la ligne (21 August 1891-21 November 1891; tr. as “The Tribulations of an Angler”), whose novel Une Ville de verre (1890-91; tr. as City of Glass3) and novelette “Les insectes révélateurs” (1889; tr. as “The Tell-Tale Insects”) have been previously translated, the second in the Black Coat Press anthology Nemoville.4 Brown had been well-known for some time before Figuier launched his feuilleton series as a “Vernian” writer, and had became a stalwart of the Vernian periodical Le Journal des Voyages, so he was a natural recruit to Figuier’s cause, but it is significant that the three stories that Figuier published are all considerably less fanciful than Brown’s early Vernian romances; although the novel is a Vernian fantasy of exploration it contains no drastic technological extrapolation, and the two shorter narratives are tales of everyday life in which scientific knowledge comes to play a significant role in the strategies of the characters.

  The second author who published other work in the series was Paul Combes (1856-1909), alias “C. Paulon,” the author of “Les Mines d’or de Bas-Meudon” (12 February 1898-28 May 1898), two of whose short stories are translated in Nemoville. Combes was a well-known author under his own name, where he had some reputation as a lightweight naturalist of a moderately literary stripe, and did, in fact, reprint the novella translated herein as a book under his own name, where it presumably passed for a naturalistic comedy without any difficulty.

  One of the other two authors represented here, Émile Gautier (1853-1937), author of “Le Désiré, première traverse d’un bateau sous-marin” (31 December 1892-18 January 1893; tr. as “Le Désiré”), was the editor of La Science Illustrée’s chief imitator and rival, La Science Française; he ran a similar feuilleton series of his own for some years, although he never contributed to it under his own name, and might not have done so at all. He did, however, collaborate with a celebrated ex-head of the Sûreté, who signed his works “Goron,” on Fleur de Bagne, a long feuilleton novel published in Le Journal in 1901, which is an interesting hybrid of crime fiction and roman scientifique; that too has been published in translation by Black Coat Press as Spawn of the Penitentiary.5 The marginally-sciencefictional story included here is a similar experiment in genetic hybridization, adding an element of scientific romance to a light-hearted mixture of methods and themes conventional in contemporary popular fiction written with female readers in mind—a rare ploy in roman scientifique, although Henry Berthoud had been a contributor to women’s magazines.

  The remaining inclusion in the present collection, “Les huit cents doubloons de Springfield” (1 December 1894- 2 February 1895; tr. as “Springfield’s Doubloons”) was by-lined Georges Price, the signature employed on all his books and magazine stories by Ferdinand-Gustave Petitierre (1853-1922), who had published books of various sorts before publishing this novelette in La Science Illustrée, but afterwards diversified into Vernian fiction with sufficient determination to become something of a specialist, although he also wrote two non-fiction books about railways, reflecting another interest that he evidently shared with numerous contributors to Figuier’s periodical.

  Price’s Vernian romances, which routinely feature significant components of roman scientifique, include Les trois disparus du Sirius [The Three Missing Men of the Sirius] (1896), its sequel Les Chasseurs d’épaves [The Wreck-Hunters] (1898) and La mine d’or infernale [The Infernal Gold-Mine] (1920), the last-named being one of two items illustrated by Albert Robida. As with “La Vainqueur de la mort,” “Les huit cents doubloons de Springfield” has strong and striking affinities with Henry Berthoud’s accounts of scientific obsession and its social and psychological costs and dangers. That remained a central theme of French roman scientifique long after the label had faded into the historical background, to a greater extent than in British scientific romance, and a much greater extent than in American science fiction and its eventual bastard imitations, and is one of its most interesting features.

  With one exception, all the stories included herein were translated from versions available on gallica, although I used the versions contained in the Debans collection Les Drames à plein vapeur published by A. Mame in 1898 and the one-volume reprint of Les Mines d’or de Bas-Meudon published in 1903 by Librairie d’éducation nationale rather than the serial versions in La Science Illustrée, for the sake of convenience. The exception is the translation of “Le Vainqueur de la mort,” which was taken from the undated Apex “Periodica” edition of a reprint of the serial contained in Les Romans Célèbres, again for the sake of convenience.