Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  But hard SF also comprises a worldview, a vision of the human condition and human evolution that does not violate material process but coincides with it, as far as we understand its workings. Essential to this vision, as it develops over the twentieth century, is the question of a posthuman or, more accurately, transhuman possibility: how and in what ways can we go beyond our spatiotemporal limits? Long before J. D. Bernal, Olaf Stapledon, and other evolutionary visionaries, Rosny posed the transhuman question in his writing. He did so in a strikingly speculative way in La Mort de la Terre, a work that predates Bernal by twenty years.

  Bernal’s treatise The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929) could serve as a metanarrative for the development of hard SF. It takes scientific humankind to the threshold of a dimorphic split. Seeking to envision what a posthuman condition might be, Bernal restates the major questions that have accompanied the development of Western science since the seventeenth century: What is special about humankind—now seen as material entity? If that specifically human quality is thought, intelligence, is it possible for this quality to evolve beyond its human source without losing its specificity? The recent physicist-writer Robert L. Forward sounds like an evolutionist when he states that “there is a human world, and the real world out there; from the viewpoint of the scientist there are plenty more species to take your place. . . . Humans are not important, intelligence is.”17 In saying this, however, Forward does little more than restate the mind-matter duality that continues to shape hard SF speculation on transhumanity to this day. For the Cartesians, thought is the defining human quality; the rest of the universe is nonthinking. Therefore, either thought dies with humanity or whatever faculty evolves as posthuman must a priori resemble human thought. For Baconian skeptics, the human limit remains as well. For their part, Baconians challenge the centrality of reason, as a faculty severely limited by the imperfection of human sense organs. As they do so, they arrive, like the Cartesians, at a like rupture between mind and world. Their impasse, too, is similar: either we deny that we can ever know our posthuman self; or we find ourselves doomed to depict that self as the mirror of what we are—imperfect thought.

  Forward’s statement that “intelligence,” as something larger than human reason, is the motor of interspecies evolution may seem to be an important step in defining transhuman possibility. Seventy years earlier, however, Rosny’s speculative masterpiece La Mort de la Terre offers a probing examination of a similar pluralist vision. In previous works, Rosny focused on the struggle of intelligent species. Now the focus is squarely on humankind, on its demise (how the human is no longer a factor in the changing ecology of Earth), and on the possibility that, in the broader ecology of evolving life forms, humanity may contribute to and ultimately communicate with the species that replaces it. By the logic of his narrative, Rosny leads readers to speculate on the possibility that some kind of message, informing future life forms of what we were, could be sent across the gulf that separates expiring and emerging life. He asks readers to imagine how this transfer might occur, and to ponder whether this message might have contributed to the creation of an intelligence a million years in the future. Furthermore, he asks if such a message might provoke this future intelligence’s interest in hearing our story, a story that is part of their evolution as well? Rosny’s narrative may be the first to suggest a genuine transhuman experience. As such, it is an essential element in the history of hard SF.

  La Mort de la Terre is, in its own right, a masterpiece, whose speculative reach is unparalleled. For in terms of future life and intelligence, Rosny looks not only beyond humankind but far beyond carbon-based life itself. On a scale from fast life forms to infinitely slow ones, he is willing to see beyond his ferromagnetics and to include in his vast evolutionary picture the inert mineral reign as well. His vision, in the largest evolutionary sense, is that of Norman O. Brown: life against death. Therefore, his challenge to the mind-matter duality is sweeping. In giving this challenge fictional form, he sets the benchmark for further hard SF speculations on humankind’s place in the universe.

  The fact that Rosny’s work is so significant yet remains unknown to most SF writers and readers today, even in the Francophone world, suggests the synchronicity of SF’s development across national cultural lines. In the three representative works presented here, Rosny develops a vision and methods of constructing fiction that parallels the development of scientific or hard SF in the Anglo-American sphere. Rosny’s fiction calls for scientific responses to questions suggested by the imagining of figures such as aliens, intelligent nonhuman beings, and mutants. In doing so ultimately, it raises Bernal’s question of transhuman possibility. It is Rosny, more than either Verne or Wells, who follows the road map that Bernal laid down in 1929 and that has proven to be the masterplot at least for SF at the harder extreme of its spectrum.

  Let us discuss Rosny’s SF legacy point by point. First of all, he appears to be the first writer systematically to use neologisms, even invented words, in the construction of other and future worlds. As early as the late 1880s, Edmond de Goncourt described Rosny’s speculative novels as “fantastico-scientifico-phono-littéraires” (fantastico-scientifico-phono-literary),18 attesting to the power of word sounds alone to create worlds. For example, when one searches Google for historical antecedents to the tribal names in Les Xipéhuz—Zahelals, Dzoums, Xisoastres, Pjarvanns—one finds Rosny as the sole source. These are in effect phonetic constructions that suggest pre-Assyrian times, words whose sole function is to create resonant bridges between our world and imagined little-known or unknown worlds. The designation “Xipéhuz,” beginning with x and ending with z, phonetically suggests that the species it conjures is near the omega of its evolutionary cycle. In Un autre monde, the name Moedigen, which pops unbidden into the mind of the protagonist, suggests there might be, in its Germanic echoes, some obscure link between the kobolds of Nordic fairy tale and the other-dimensional species that is observed here for the first time. These overtones are mere suggestions, but they work to close the gap between known and unknown.

  In La Mort de la Terre, Rosny not only conjures new devices and machines by means of neologisms, but actually builds a coherent future world around these terms, exactly as Robert A. Heinlein will later do with his rolling roads and waldoes. The process is the opposite of that of Verne. Verne describes Nemo’s fabulous underwater vessel in great technical detail. In the end, however, he gives it a name that falls short of designating a future class or type of machine. On the contrary, Robert Fulton’s earlier submarine (1800) was named Nautilus (in fact a banal derivation from the Greek nautilos, sailor). In contrast Rosny, like Heinlein, throws out designations—Grand Planétaire, radiatrix, resonateurs, motrices—that indicate something we can imagine, but something with no ties to anything concrete we know. These are devices that already exist in this future world, and the reader is left the task of explaining their function by witnessing them in action. Rosny also presents future phenomena without analyzing or explaining them. An example is his offhand mention of “un repas de gluten concentré et d’hydrocarbures essentiels” (a meal of concentrated gluten and essential hydrocarbons)—all its components are known, but their combination and use remain for the reader to fathom. Likewise, Rosny mixes invented terms like ferromagnétaux with already existing specialized terms such as hygroscope, a neologism coined in 1790 to refer to a real machine that measures humidity in the air. Finally, it appears that Rosny, like Heinlein with his waldoes, may have coined words that subsequently, in the real world, have given rise to actual things or classes of things. For example, Rosny’s use of the word aviateur (which we translate as “aviator”)—from the neologism avion (a thing with wings), coined by Clément Ader in 1875—may be the first such use in the French language of a name that has become commonplace today.

  Second, Rosny develops, in Les Xipéhuz and other similar works, a syncretic and synchronic style that a
llows him to extrapolate narratives into improbably far-distant worlds yet retain an oblique link with the reader’s known world. Later SF writers will use a similar style. With Les Xipéhuz, Rosny is said to have invented prehistoric fiction. If so, he would appear to have invented a paradox; for prehistory is, by definition, prewriting. Without writing, there is no bridge, no communication, from there to here. So how can anyone pretend to tell the prehistoric story? Unlike writers who unabashedly invent a lost past as fairy tale, Rosny builds the bridge physically into his story by having Bakhoun invent writing, and by creating a fictitious modern linguist, M. Dessault, who transcribes his tablets. The discovery of prehistory through the scientifically authorized narrative of the very man who invents the means of conveying it is a neat science-fictional trick, born of the need to make literal what otherwise remains conventional.

  There remains, however, another question the literal or scientific mind must ask. Rosny’s Bakhoun speaks of things he knows; his words vouch for their existence. But the words themselves are merely objects, things an archeologist or linguist has found. From them alone, how can we ever know their context? Moreover, they are a modern discovery. Can we know in what manner Bakhoun actually spoke them? Rosny’s “scientific” “attempt” to mediate these words raises these questions, asking the reader, in literal manner, to question what otherwise might pass for convention. Historical novelists like Walter Scott were aware of this problem of “speaking the past”—having a narrator supposedly of the time in question speak in the voice of that time, which the novelist could not know firsthand. Scott tries to “fake it” by giving his novels’ narrators (and characters) an “archaic,” medievalizing mode of speech, which even in its time was recognized as a nineteenth-century imitation, but accepted as a necessary convention. The opening pages of Ivanhoe offer a good example. Later, more scientifically inclined writers like Flaubert scoffed at such artifice. At the same time, Flaubert (along with some of his contemporaries) was genuinely troubled by the fact that we cannot physically know the past. Making the past “speak” then becomes a problem that does not exist for more conventional writers.19

  Rosny clearly knows he cannot make prehistory “speak”; yet he must find a way to tell the story that does not insult his scientifically inclined reader. Rosny’s situation in Les Xipéhuz is that of numerous later SF writers who purport to narrate far-distant worlds. These are worlds the reader visits for the first time, in the company of a narrator who is presumed to have been there before, but of course because of the realities of space-time cannot have been. But if that reader does not demand the impossible literal tour, on what level does he or she accept taking the journey? Rosny confronts this problem by moving his narrative to a synthetic level, generating out of recognizable styles of historical discourse that have been restructured, a narrative that reaches beyond the limits of known history by imitating the process itself of evolutionary time, at least as science understands it. Rosny does not use anachronisms so much as cultivate them in syncretic fashion. The result is a minisimulacrum, in terms of narrative style, of humankind’s evolutionary history—past, present, and future.

  The first narrator in Les Xipéhuz does not pretend to historical omniscience. Its opening remarks seem to echo the precise, methodical descriptions of nineteenth-century science, detailing the new beings in a manner we identify as “objective.” The tone suddenly modulates, however, as the focus shifts from the soon-to-be-called Xipéhuz to the superstitious nomads. Describing the frenzied actions of the astrologer Yushik, the narrator begins to speak a language of emotional excess that invites the reader to experience this world through irrational eyes. Again, when Bakhoun takes up the narrative, his voice brings another shift of tone and manner of speech. He is presented as transitional man, representing humanity’s movement from nomadic to sedentary, agricultural existence. And true to his role, Bakhoun is the first human to invent a means of writing. Indeed, the rest of the narration is his account of events as preserved in what is called the Book of Bakhoun. But when Bakhoun speaks and reasons, his voice is that of Comte’s Scientific Man. Rosny’s contemporary reader would see Bakhoun’s method of apprehending phenomena as reflecting this Scientific Man, seen as the culmination of humankind’s development. Rosny allows style and language to convey these two different worldviews, or methods of perceiving material reality, contrasting the nomads’ superstition with Bakhoun’s capacity for cold analysis. In terms of how prehistoric humankind might have really spoken or reasoned, both voices are nineteenth-century transpositions, anachronisms. The purpose of their contrast, however, is to overlay what is not known in the past with a plausible historical schema. There is, however, another modulation of tone and vision, this time within Bakhoun’s own discourse. This occurs in his final invocation, as his voice suddenly speaks to the future of a human species that has barely emerged from obscure silence, suggesting a possibility that was new to the average nineteenth-century reader, that of evolutionary transformation. The Comtean voice reflects the apogee of human development. But the new, final voice offers a broader vision, one that transcends species boundaries, that speaks of a general “splendor of Life”: “Car, maintenant que les Xipéhuz ont succombé, mon âme les regrette, et je demande à l’Unique quelle Fatalité a voulu que la splendeur de la Vie soit souillée par les Ténèbres du Meurtre!” (For now that the Xipéhuz have perished, my soul misses them, and I ask of the Unique One what Fatality has wished it that the splendor of Life be soiled by the Blackness of Murder?) For Bakhoun, any hint of “survival of the fittest” is at once swept away by a broader sense of evolutionary dynamics.

  Though the storyteller is obviously anchored in one historical time and place, Rosny uses a controlled spectrum of language—from superstitious effusion to Bakhoun’s sober analysis of fact to his evolutionary mysticism—to carry the reader from the present back to the past, and then to suggest an unknown future. When Rosny’s narrator tells us “ce fut l’an mil des peuples enfants, le glas de la fin du monde, ou, peut-être, la résignation de l’homme rouge des savanes indiennes” (this was the year 1000 for these infant peoples, the bell that tolled the end of the world, or perhaps, the resignation of the red man of the Indian jungle), we know the voice of the “civilized” nineteenth-century Westerner is speaking. But when we read “un matin d’automne, le Mâle perça les nues, inonda le Tabernacle, atteignit l’autel où fumait un coeur saignant de taureau” (one autumn morning, the Male God burst through the clouds, flooded the tabernacle, reached the altar where the bloody heart of a bull lay steaming), we experience an otherwise unknowable past through words and rhythms, only to be wrenched back to our familiar culture by Bakhoun’s language of fact and reason. Bakhoun’s final words, however, combining emotion and reason, take us forward, to a possible future of multiple evolutionary possibilities.

  In a sense, Rosny’s narrative offers the stylistic blueprint for later hard SF extrapolations, for example Benford’s Great Sky River and Tides of Light, or more recent intergalactic playing fields, for example those of Stephen Baxter, where vast distances of never-experienced space-time make “playing with the net up” little more than an exercise in scientific theorizing. Even more than with Rosny, the worlds portrayed in these deep space-time novels lie absurdly far off the reader’s historical-linguistic map. To narrate these worlds, the writer must construct a new dynamic from synthetic combinations of known tones and styles that do not simply evoke an unknown world, but render it coherent. For example, Benford cultivates, in a manner quite similar to that of Rosny, an anachronistic alternation between Conan-like primitive speech (a nod to sword and sorcery) and precise and informed scientific discourse. These are the twentieth-century equivalents of Rosny’s nomads and positivist Bakhoun. As in Rosny, these opposing forms of discourse come together in outbursts of scientifico-evolutionary mysticism. In analogous manner, Benford’s synthesis suggests the possibility that today’s humanity could someday find itself in an intergalactic otherness so strange th
at, in terms solely of reason or of emotion, it must remain inconceivable, let alone uninhabitable. A new SF narrative device, by which we tell by analogy a world otherwise untellable, appears to be born with Rosny. Benford and his contemporaries have simply spread Rosny’s technique across seas of suns.

  Les Xipéhuz poses another problem that sheds light on the future development of SF. The issue here is the Xipéhuz themselves—where did they come from, and what does their physical presence in early human times signify? Most readers call them “aliens,” despite the fact that neither Rosny’s narrator nor Bakhoun uses such a designation, nor anywhere suggests that they come from any other location but right here on Earth.20 Rosny, it seems, does not present them as “alien” because he does not want to swerve away from the scientific task of trying to describe and understand phenomena we encounter, no matter how bizarre they may seem. The use of this designation “alien” in fact, in subsequent SF, marks a dividing line between hard and soft SF. However “other” the Xipéhuz appear, Bakhoun takes them as facts. They are physically present, so it is assumed that they too have evolved as humans did, sharing the same environment. Prehistory is an unmapped territory, so it is quite plausible that they have evolved in some area of Earth that humankind has not yet visited, as when Greek explorers discovered all kinds of “Indian wonders” outside their familiar world, wonders they asked their audiences to believe existed, because those audiences had not yet seen them. It is out of fear of such unknowns that we give phenomena like this an extraterrestrial origin, or see them as invaders, beings brought to Earth by some deus ex machina, the chariots-of-the-gods scenario. Moreover, behind our choice of the word “alien” lies a deeper fear: that of the fragility of humankind’s domination of its earthly environment. At first, the Xipéhuz appear to be so unlike humans that it is hard to imagine any common origin for both species. Yet, as Bakhoun’s persistent observation soon discovers, they do appear to share certain customs and mores with their human adversaries. Because of this possible common ground, they now begin to seem more menacing, because they somehow belong to our world yet prove eminently hostile to our being part of it. What is more, Rosny does not give his readers an extraterrestrial “out.” They are invited to speculate on how these beings may have existed in our darkest past, to ask scientific questions instead of succumbing to primal fears. For example, what traces might the Xipéhuz have left in humankind’s collective unconscious? Might perhaps humankind’s common preoccupation with geometry, for instance—a shared language and symbolism of triangles and cones across diverse cultures—be due to some psychic scar left as a result of this far-distant combat with beings like the Xipéhuz? Prehistory has now become virgin territory for scientific, hence science-fictional, speculations.