News from the Moon Read online

  Stéphane Mallarmé’s prose poem “Le phénomène futur” (written c. 1866), translated here as “The Future Phenomenon,” illustrates this contrast very well. It offers a prospect of the future whose underlying assumptions are sharply contrasted to that of the philosophers of progress, conceiving it as a process of inevitable degeneration and degradation.

  Decadent fiction did, however, retain the fugitive speculative elements that had been featured in Romantic fiction, as displayed in such floridly sarcastic contes philosophiques as Jules Richepin’s “La machine a métaphysique,” from his collection Morts bizarres [Bizarre Deaths] (1877), which is here translated as “The Metaphysical Machine.” Like “News from the Moon,” “The Metaphysical Machine” uses an apologetic narrative strategy that was very common in 19th-century fantastic fiction, beginning with a ritual rejection of potential accusations of insanity. In this case, the objective narrative voice that emerges in the story’s coda explicitly endorses the concession that is narrator is mad, and licenses the conclusion that his metaphysical speculations ought not to be taken seriously, but the real heart of the story is not the speculations themselves but the methodical way in which the narrator sets up an experiment to prove his hypothesis and gain privileged access to the truth. As an allegory of science and its progress, the story rests on the same bleak assumption as Mallarmé’s prose poem–but the situation described is such that the “objective” narrative voice cannot really know what the experimenter actually discovered, and must be regarded as intrinsically unreliable, in exactly the same fashion as the writer of the manuscript.

  Many of Verne’s imitators clung steadfastly to Hetzel’s strategy of producing earnest accounts of exploratory ventures. Several of them, including André Laurie, Georges le Faure, Louis Boussenard and Paul d’Ivoi, produced similarly loosely-knit series of novels. The temptation to reintroduce an element of satire was, however, irresistible to the humorist and illustrator Albert Robida, who began his literary career with a long feuilleton serial chronicling the Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul dans les 5 ou 6 parties du monde et dans tous les pays connus et même inconnus de M. Jules Verne [The Very Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnin Farandoul in the World’s five or six Continents, and in all the Countries known–and even unknown–to Monsieur Jules Verne] (1879). The first part of the sequence, set En Océanie [In Oceania] is “Le roi de singes,” here translated as “The Monkey King”–a story that owes as much to lavishly-illustrated versions of Gozlan’s Emotions de Polydore Marasquin as it does to Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers and L’île mystérieuse (1874).

  Robida went on to become a writer of considerably greater imaginative range than Verne, accommodating himself to the tradition of futuristic fiction in such key works as Le vingtième siècle (1882; tr. as The Twentieth Century) and the pictorial La guerre au vingtième siècle (1883; exp. 1887; tr. as War in the Twentieth Century), although his light touch and reputation as a caricaturist undermined appreciation of his speculative brilliance.

  “The Monkey King” is an unashamed comedy, including several episodes that construe Vingt mille lieues sous les mers as a modern version of Galland’s account of the adventures of Sindbad, but beneath the comedy, there is a blunt contradiction of the central allegorical affirmation of Les émotions de Polydore Marasquin. As an account of the politics of imperialism and European attitudes to other races, its slapstick humor serves to soften some serious criticism, just as the author was later to do in his determinedly pacifist account of La guerre au vingtième siècle.

  Although Napoléon is never mentioned in the text of “The Monkey King,” Saturnin Farandoul’s conquest of Australia echoes and parodies aspects of the Emperor’s conquests–something that had still to be done with considerable diplomacy, even when Napoléon III had been deposed as the ruler of France for some years. Nowadays, of course, the reader is far more likely to find elaborate parallels between the early phases of Farandoul’s life and the career of one of the great heroes of 20th-century popular fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, although it is unlikely that Burroughs was aware of the precedent.

  By the 1880s, speculative fiction had begun to make rapid progress elsewhere in Europe, and influences began to flow into France as well as out, but the diversification of French speculative fiction in that period remained strongly rooted in the native tradition, and its contributors continued to produce a great deal of original and innovative work. The earnest exemplars provided by Flammarion–whose career also continued to flourish after 1870, when he became the most significant popularizer of science in France–also inspired witty responses. The components of Lumen provoked three satirical ventures by the humorist Eugène Mouton, included in the collection Fantaisies (1883). One of them, “L’historioscope,” is translated here as “The Historioscope.” The other two were “L’origine de la vie” [The Origin of Life] and “La fin du monde” [The End of the World].

  Like “The Monkey King,” “The Historioscope” is pure comedy–and goes even further than “News from the Moon” and “The Metaphysical Machine” in its calculated use of a mad narrator–but, as in Robida’s novella, the account it offers of the lessons that might be learned by the use of a device that could see through time makes some serious points in a suitably sly fashion. The story’s philosophical themes were picked up by numerous 20th-century science fiction stories, including T. L. Sherred’s classic black comedy “E for Effort,” and were still being revisited at the end of the century in Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter’s Light of Other Days.

  The expanding genre of French scientific romance began to attract the attention of established writers, many of whom dabbled therein. These included the Belgian writer George Eekhoud, whose collection Kermesses (1884) included the remarkable moral fantasy “Le coeur de Tony Wandel,” here translated as “Tony Wandel’s Heart,” in which the progress of medical science is viewed with a scathingly skeptical eye. The socialistically-inclined Eekhoud took leave to wonder whether such potential technologies as heart transplantation might enable to the rich to become vampirically parasitic upon the poor in ways that Karl Marx had not imagined. This story, too, is a comedy, but the tenor of its humor is far darker than that of Robida or Mouton, reverting to the scathing abrasiveness of Voltairean satire

  Guy de Maupassant, the foremost French short story writer of his admittedly-brief era, became famous as a naturalist by virtue of pioneering the development of anecdotal slice-of-life stories and calculatedly low-key contes cruels, which helped define the narrative method of the modern short story, but the range of his work extended much further. His most famous alliance with speculative motifs was “Le Horla” (1887), an ambiguous story whose distressed narrator becomes convinced that he is being tormented by an invisible creature, which must have come from Brazil on a passing ship, and that its species may be in the process of displacing humankind in the contest for dominion over the Earth. In the same year, he produced “L’Homme de Mars,” translated here as “Martian Mankind,” which complemented Flammarion’s speculations–most elaborately fictionalized in Uranie (1889)–regarding the forms that Martian life might have taken in adapting to the physical conditions of the planet’s surface.

  Although it still retains a plangent echo of the apologetic formula used by Mercier, Richepin and Mouton–which the author had brought to a kind of perfection in “Le Horla”–“Martian Mankind” is a fundamentally earnest story, which is prepared to take its central hypothesis seriously, and the scientific data it quotes were all deemed accurate at the time. Its suggestion that Mars might be a warm world despite its distance from the Sun, by virtue of the influence of the greenhouse effect, proved dead wrong, but its underlying logic deserves some credit. Its account of a brief glimpse of alien life–strikingly similar to modern reports of UFO sightings–strikes a subtle note of exotic poignancy that was to become one of the keynotes of 20th-century science fiction.

  The final piece included in translati
on here, Fernand Noat’s “Le triangle rouge” (1902), appeared in the most successful of several magazines of Vernian fiction, the Journal des Voyages (1875-1949)–a periodical that had earlier offered useful publishing opportunities to many of the writers who became specialists in that genre, including Boussenard, d’Ivoi, René Thévenin and Jules Lermina.

  “The Red Triangle” only retains the faintest hint of the standard apologetic narrative strategy in its narrator’s final comment, and its author extrapolates the imaginative ambition that Verne briefly demonstrated in Voyage au center de la terre, before he muffled it in order to conform to Hetzel’s standards of inventive diplomacy, in order to transpose a Gothic horror story into a modern mode. The story is an unashamed shocker of a sort that was to be elaborately developed in the 20th century, and it provides an early illustration of the inevitable effects of “melodramatic inflation” on a genre dependent on the capacity of its ideas to provoke excitement.

  I hope that this anthology will be the first of a series of samplers, whose subsequent volumes will further illustrate the themes and methods typical of French scientific romance, as well as celebrating its distinct attitudes and chronicling its early evolution.

  Many of the most significant late 19th- and early 20th-century writers in the genre died in the late 1930s and early 1940s, so the work of such crucial contributors as Maurice Renard, J. H. Rosny aîné, Théo Varlet, Gustave le Rouge, André Couvreur and Edmond Haraucourt will fall into the public domain in the next decade, thus becoming available for translation. Hopefully, therefore, I shall be able to render numerous exemplary novels into English as well as more short stories.

  Brian Stableford

  Louis-Sébastien Mercier: News from the Moon

  (1768)

  The account I am writing is perfectly true, although the reader might deem me a madman. Believe me if you will; I shall offer no proofs to the incredulous. Let us begin.

  I had a friend: a good man whom everyone called inestimable, but with whom very few people were closely acquainted. Friendship is a tree that cannot put down roots in bad ground; it requires everyday virtues to put forth good fruit, and moral defects usually cause it to wither. Two men who do not respect one another rarely come to like one another; in order to be friends they must be able to confide in one another, and they must earn the right to speak frankly to one another by repeatedly proving themselves worthy of trust. Let us return to my friend.

  We had become acquainted in middle age; we helped one another through awkward crises more than once. Our characters were not perfectly in tune, but amity and tolerance bridged the gap. Resolved to run a similar course for the rest of our days, we took up residence in the same house. I passed my happiest years in his pleasant company. His death left me alone, prey to regrets which still endure, but I have continued to live under the same roof.

  Ordinarily, one does not like one’s thoughts to dwell on those whose loss afflicts us, but for me that was my sole consolation. Always alone, revisiting in my thoughts through the places I had discovered with my friend, I recalled our most interesting conversations incessantly. The memories returned so vividly to mind that I was sometimes able to enjoy his imaginary company.

  All those who have the habit of reflection know from experience how conducive a fine evening’s moonlight is to meditation. Late one night, when the heavenly body in question was full, I was lingering in the garden, thinking continually of the one I had lost, when my sight was suddenly struck by a bright and vivid point of light. It seemed to stay in front of me no matter which way I turned. Eventually I stopped, looked directly at it and examined it more closely. I perceived that the shining point was the tip of a luminous arrow, inscribed on the ground–and that the arrow was an immensely extended ray proceeding directly from the Moon.

  Astonished by this phenomenon, I became more attentive. When I approached it, the point of light withdrew, as if to guide me. When I followed it, it stopped on a newly-whitewashed wall, where I saw it trace visible letters, and I read:

  It is me! Have no fear! It is your friend. I am living on the star that lights your way. I can see you. I have long sought a means of writing to you, and I have found one. Prepare a set of planks of wood, so that I can more easily trace thereon all that I have to tell you. Come back to the same place tomorrow; it is too late tonight–the star is turning, my line is no longer direct, and it is...

  The fiery point abruptly disappeared.

  This marvelous apparition threw me into utter confusion. I remained immobile for a long time, my eyes staring by turns at the Moon and the wall. My mind was so agitated that I passed the rest of the night without being able to sleep a wink. The following day I made ready a large number of planks, which I arranged myself in the place where I impatiently awaited the return of night.

  Never had the Sun seemed to set so slowly. The Moon displayed its shining disc at last, but so many clouds gathered around it that it was masked by an impenetrable veil. Fatigued by waiting in vain, and not having slept at all the previous night, I could not help falling asleep, much to my regret.

  When I woke up, I saw a clear and serene sky, in which the Moon was already close to the horizon. My eyes immediately went to my planks, and I found the following inscribed upon them:

  You are asleep, my friend. That is an imposition to which the beings of your world are subject; when you awake, you will see this evidence that I am thinking about you. I want to reveal secrets to you that no other living man has ever penetrated before. Do you remember the moment when I died in your arms? Well, it has not been nearly as painful for me as you have presumed.

  No, death is not what one imagines; the living have an idea of it that is false and frightful. Its convulsions, so frightening for the spectator, are a gentle passage into sleep for the dying man. The somber ceremonies with which a corpse is surrounded perpetuate dread and terror, but death is not what is represented by the fearful imagination.

  When I felt the beating of my heart stop, I found myself endowed with the faculty of entering into more durable bodies, whose density could not prevent my elevation. All matter appeared to me as porous as a sieve, and my will took control of my ascension. I could transport myself to any place I wished, traversing immense distances without difficulty or dread.

  The more I projected myself, the more I felt the flame of life empower and activate me. My understanding, memory and imagination brightened with a new clarity. When I had lifted myself up, I could descend just as rapidly towards any object that I wanted to reach; the wings of a bird are an inadequate analogy for the free movement of which every part of my being was now eminently capable.

  What delighted me more than anything else was that a host of ideas that I had never previously entertained became familiar to me. A ready intelligence immediately allowed me to conceive all the marvels of creation–but the one which imported the sweetest rapture into my being was that of rediscovering all those I had loved. Our souls were instantaneously drawn together, and a delicious sentiment bound us together inextricably.

  Our bliss comprises an inexhaustible and incessantly-satisfied curiosity. Every day, we apprehend more, and never tire of apprehension. Science, uncertain on Earth, is supported here by the clearest evidence. There is no object that our eyes cannot easily penetrate; we see so profoundly at a distance that I can even read, at this moment, the words that I am writing. I can bend rays of light to my will, making pencils of them that I sharpen according to my taste, and in this manner I can engrave my thoughts in the deepest regions of the sky and touch the boundaries of the universe.

  By this means, the Creator has given the eye the privilege of reaching the most distant globe, has deigned to afford to thought the power of manifesting itself in every system populated by sentient reasoning beings. I converse with those whose writings I have admired; distance is no obstacle to the rapid flight of ideas, and print is only the gross simulation of that privileged art by which the inhabitants of the celestial spheres communi
cate their thought.

  I have descended to the Moon in order to select its gentlest ray, for the benefit of your feeble eyelids; your eyes would be dazzled and blinded by a brighter one. I will return tomorrow, if there are no clouds to get in our way, and if I still have permission to reveal to you the strange truths of the sublunary world.

  Seeing these last words. I took a piece of chalk in my trembling hand, and I wrote on the plank:

  My friend, is it possible that you are on the Moon, and that your sight can penetrate as far as this? Can you read these words?

  Yes, perfectly. There is no need to write such large letters. Write quickly and easily, in your own hand.

  Oh, how many questions I have to put to you! So, it really is in the radiant spheres I observe in the sky that all the races of humankind who have lived on Earth will be reunited. Tell me, will the wicked and the good be mingled together without distinction? That is the first and most important thing I want to know.

  The most secret actions of a past life will be revealed to every gaze; the entire history of our lives is painted on our faces in a manner that is universally intelligible. The wicked are forced to discover their own wickedness; it is by seeing one another, and what they are, that they are themselves horrified. This perpetual display inspires in them a profound repentance, which is their torture, and they try to erase those iniquitous characters that torment them. By performing good deeds they can remove the black imprint that disfigures them; it is necessary that they are without the stain of dishonor in order to communicate with beings who are strangers to all deformity.

  If those who are blackened by numerous vices ask questions of those resplendent with light, they obtain no reply; they are punished by disdain, and they feel the distance that separates them from children of divinity. Consternated by their debasement, they seek to escape it, for the record of their sins passes from mouth to mouth and they hear again all the maledictions heaped upon them on the Earth, where their memory excites horror. Whenever they hope to enjoy a few moments of tranquility, the feeble voice that accuses them becomes thunderous, reclaiming their attention, and that accusation is spread throughout the worlds of the cosmos. Crushed beneath the weight of their shame, conscience becomes a dagger that pricks them incessantly: they flee, but they are naked to every gaze; they hide themselves behind uninhabited worlds, in solitude, but the angels of light cry out to them as they pass by: “I see you, and your every iniquity.”