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

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  17. Robert L. Forward, letter to George Slusser, May 13, 1983.

  18. In a journal entry dated February 19, 1888, Edmond de Goncourt comments on the dizzying array of technological inventions in Rosny’s scientific novels: “Rosny m’effraie un peu par ses imaginations de livres où il veut faire voir les aveugles au moyen du sens frontal, entendre les sourds par l’éléctricité . . . annonçant une série de livres fantastico-scientifico-phono-littéraires. Au fond, c’est une cervelle très curieuse.” (Rosny frightens me a bit with his imaginings of books where he wants to make the blind see by means of senses in their foreheads, the deaf hear by means of electricity . . . all of which announce a series of fanastico-scientifico-phono-literary books. In fact, he has a very curious brain.) Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), 3:247. The term “phono-literary” is prophetic of SF to come (a literature Goncourt dreaded). It announces the proliferation of “scientific” neologisms from Gernsback to the present.

  19. In nineteenth-century fiction, the problem of knowing and presenting what went on in a distant historical world was perhaps first raised by Flaubert in his novel Salammbô (1862). The question Flaubert asked was, essentially, how could he make the people of his fictional Carthage speak and think as historical Carthaginians did, when nothing remains of that world but fragments, objects, words, all without contexts? He abandoned archeological data as useless. The archeologists’ coherent stories were little more than fictional constructs built on the most scattered evidence. Only by dreaming on objects and words left behind, things without referents, could one conjure Carthage, but this time as a construct that was essentially linguistic in nature. Even more so, Rosny follows Flaubert in summoning the world of the Xipéhuz from names and words, most of which are invented but sound like words left behind at the dawn of human civilization.

  20. Pascal Ducommun, “Alien Aliens,” in Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction, edited by George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 36–42.

  21. Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, vol. 2, ed. Louis Forestier (Paris: Editions de la Pléiade, 1979), 918: “S’il existait sur la terre d’autres êtres que nous, comment ne les connaîtrions-nous point depuis longtemps; comment ne les auriez-vous pas vus, vous?” (If beings other than us were to exist on earth, how come, for a long time now, would you not have known of their existence, why wouldn’t you have seen them?”) The narrator has this skeptical “scientific” approach to the fantastic figures carved on the church: they are figments of the primitive imagination, their existence cannot be verified by ocular evidence. The monk takes the argument one step farther: “Est-ce que nous voyons la cent millième partie de ce qui existe?” (Do we see even the hundred thousandth part of what exists? [918]) So these beings, like the wind we cannot see either, may indeed exist. And their existence is even more plausible in our scientific age.

  22. See George Slusser, “The Frankenstein Barrier,” in Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, edited by George Slusser and Tom Shippey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 46–74.

  23. See “Symposium on Posthuman Science Fiction,” in Foundation 75 (spring 2000), 98–121. The mind-matter duality is still very much alive in this discussion, with a writer like Greg Egan being discussed in terms of a “radical materialism” that abdicates mind to res extensa. Other discussions look for the ghost in the machine of posthuman “information” constructs.

  24. It could be argued that the existentialist act, in Pascal’s sense, is an anthropocentric act, the only and final act human beings have in the face of the material infinite. In Pascal’s gambit, mankind in the act of being crushed affirms its uniqueness in perpetual opposition to this néant (nothingness, the void): we know, but it, the material extended world, does not know. It is in this sense that Sartre can proclaim “l’existentialisme est un humanisme.” The existential act, which Sartre also sees as an act of self-creation (se faire), can therefore be seen as something quite different from Targ’s ecological altruism. For Sartre, this act, the freely giving of one’s self, but as a form of self-creation, is not altruistic in Rosny’s sense. It remains but another gambit that (as with Pascal) snatches something uniquely human from the indifferent process of evolution. As Sartre says, we are condemned to be free. In realizing this, once again we affirm our uniqueness as the rational consciousness of our situation, in the face of certain annihilation.

  25. For a similar use of this term, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press) 1993.

  26. Mary Shelley’s Last Man is anachronistic (speaking like an educated man of 1822) and thereby abstracted from any sense of evolutionary transformation. Recent avatars such as Nietzsche’s letzter Mensch (Also Sprach Zarathustra) or Blanchot’s dernier homme retain their abstract centrality in the face of historical process by associating finality with negativity, presenting mankind at its nadir, not its zenith. As is said of Blanchot’s figure: “Le dernier homme est sans mémoire. Il se nourrit d’amnésie pour recouvrer une mémoire qu’il n’a jamais eue” (The last man is without memory. He feeds himself on amnesia in order to recover a memory he has never had.) Maurice Blanchot, Le dernier homme (Paris: Gallimard L’imaginaire, 1957), 26.

  27. Darwin did not use the term “altruism” but discussed the evolutionary paradox of what he called “benevolence,” especially in The Descent of Man (1871). Eric Strong sees scientists still actively debating “the causes and effects of altruistic behavior” a century after Darwin. Eric Strong, “The Evolution of Altruism,” New York Times, Science sec., December 11, 1997.

  28. Gregory Benford, Timescape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980). Citations are to this edition.

  29. Gregory Benford, “Mozart on Morphine,” in Matter’s End ((New York: Bantam Spectra, 1995, 9–24.

  The Xipéhuz

  1. Rosny’s title is full of implications for his later pluralistic vision. Mankind’s God, declaring Itself the alpha and omega, offers an all-encompassing structure in terms of temporal order, with human destiny at its core. Rosny’s other “race” is, with its x and z, still conceivable in terms of our alphabet. But as such, it turns the neat genesis scheme on its head. For it contends with mankind for mastery of the early Earth. Rosny carefully embeds in the name the Xipéhuz are given a set of contradictions. First, the spelling seems to imply they are an “omega” rather than an “alpha,” a species that has already run its course. It also implies that, however radically different from humans they seem, they are somehow made of the same alphabetical building blocks. Or perhaps, they are a genuinely nonanthropomorphic rival to the story of human evolution on Earth, and the name given to them reveals the vanity of human attempts to seek to incorporate the truly alien within our systems of order.

  2. Léon Hennique was a naturalist writer who was born in 1850 in Guadeloupe and died in 1935 in Paris. A close associate of Edmond de Goncourt, Hennique was executor of Goncourt’s will. In compliance with the terms of that testament, he worked to establish the Académie Goncourt, and was its first president, in 1907–1912. In dedicating his first novel to Hennique, Rosny was certainly prescient, as if looking ahead to his own later relations with Goncourt and his own nomination as president of the Académie Goncourt in 1926.

  3. Joseph-Henri Boëx, on his return to France from England in 1884, adopted the pseudonym “J.-H. Rosny,” apparently to reaffirm francophone roots. In the year 1887, Joseph began a collaboration with his younger brother Justin that was to last officially until 1909. During that period, the name “J.-H. Rosny” covered the two writers, who began to be known, informally, as “Rosny aîné” (Rosny the Elder) and “Rosny jeune” (“Rosny the Younger”). Les Xipéhuz, in fact, was the first work published under the collaborative name. Un autre monde (1897) still bore the name “J.-H. Rosny.” By the time of its publication, however, it had become cle
ar that, of the two, the real talent was Joseph. His unique vision is especially notable in the scientific and prehistoric novels. Indeed, by 1906, with La Mort de la Terre, Joseph was already signing his novels “Rosny aîné.” In 1936, a legal list was published whereby Joseph reclaimed possession of the “J.-H. Rosny” works that were his in conception and style. Both Les Xipéhuz and Un autre monde are on this list. For this translation and edition, we have chosen to designate the author “J.-H. Rosny aîné.”

  4. We notice the strangely precise yet vague nature of Rosny’s “chronology” here. However long this “great gathering of peoples” took, we can give precise dates to the cities mentioned. Nineveh, located on the Tigris River in ancient Mesopotamia, was founded around 5000 BCE. In 705 BCE it becomes prominent as the capital of Assyria. It was destroyed in 612 BCE. The city of Babylon, on the Euphrates River about 160 kilometers southeast of modern Baghdad, was founded by the Akkadians around 2800 BCE. Ecbatane, capital of the Medes, located in what is today northwest Iran, flourished 612–550 BCE. Chapter 1 of the apocryphal Book of Judith (written around the Maccabean period, 167–64 BCE), mentions these legendary cities: “In the twelfth year of the reign of Nabuchodonosor [who took Jerusalem in 587 BCE], who reigned in Nineve, the great city; in the days of Arphaxad, which reigned over the Medes in Ecbatane [approximate date 650 BCE] and built in Ecbatane walls round about of stones hewn three cubits broad and six cubits long, and made the height of the wall seventy cubits, and the breadth thereof fifty cubits.” These were high walls for the time; one cubit is 45.72 centimeters.

  5. Rosny has invented the names of these prehistoric tribes, as is fitting for something unwritten and unknown. There is, however, a Kzour area in modern Tunisia. The important thing was to invent ancient-sounding names. We are reminded of Flaubert’s fascination, in Salammbô, with names that have come to us from the night of time, and to which we can no longer attach concrete meaning.

  6. The French word is “strates,” a technical term from geography that refers to sheets of rock or sediment layered on one another. Rosny’s narrator describes mineral beings whose form seems to be sheets of sedimentary mass, which the narrator simply calls “strates.” The narrator speaking here is the “first” seemingly “omniscient” narrator of this novella, who uses descriptive and technical terms like this that only a scientist of Rosny’s time would know. Bakhoun, later, will not have this narrator’s collective and cumulative scientific knowledge, and consequently should not be using a term like this in any technical sense. His early genius, however, could allow him to describe the phenomenon he sees as having the form of strata, layers.

  7. Much has been made of Rosny’s ability to model “real” aliens. We contend, however, that “alien” is the wrong word. These beings do not necessary come from “somewhere else,” invaders from outer space or brought to prehistoric Earth by chariots of the gods. Humans share with them the same basic symmetry, the same geometric shapes (witness Renaissance drawings of human geometry). In the initial sighting, they are seen through the eyes of superstitious tribesmen. This vision, however, is “corrected” by Rosny’s third-person narrator, who methodically describes their forms and actions, indeed personifies them as “The Forms.”

  8. Compared in fact to the barbaric slaughter of noncombatants in human wars down to modern times, Rosny’s Forms show real “nobility” in sparing these. They are merciless warriors, with whom there is neither dialogue nor compromise. But they strictly follow their own ethical code. The eighteenth century used “savage” morals to make comparisons quite unflattering to “civilized” France or England; Rosny uses this prehistoric “alien” morality to like ends.

  9. Sentences like this may seem awkward, but we have rendered Rosny’s austere, almost hieratic style as faithfully as possible, except in cases where it ceases to be English. That style is typified by lists, or more commonly, parallel constructions of object nouns or adjectives of emotion. These are commonly set against each other, without transitional articles.

  10. As of this point, in the French text, the names of these beings, first simply described as cones, cylinders, strata, etc., are capitalized. Apparently, for the narrator, they have become bona fide classes of being.

  11. Rosny uses short clauses like this to track an action. We realize our literal translation here may seem awkward in English. But instead of altering the rhythm by making a sentence like “They decided, beyond the limit of Safety, to trace a wall of stakes,” we have kept the flow of the sentence as Rosny wrote it.

  12. We notice here that, despite their superstitious fanaticism, these nomads do possess “human” ingenuity, as they test the limits of the Xipéhuz’s power, and stake out boundaries. Bakhoun does not represent a total break with these ancestors but a logical evolutionary advancement.

  13. The reference here is to what medieval historians call “les terreurs de l’an mil,” the apocalyptic expectations associated with the approach of the year 1000. There is little surviving evidence of any such widespread terror, and the importance of this date in medieval history is much debated today. If, as some claim, the year 1000 is a creation of Romantic historians, then Rosny may be contrasting irrational terror with rational, “scientific” enlightenment. Through such “topical” allusions as this, as with that to the “red man in the forest,” Rosny’s “objective” narrator betrays his nineteenth-century location.

  14. The French has “des silhouettes d’inspirés, des hommes de silence.” Because the word “silhouette” has a poetical vagueness about it, we have chosen “shades,” which appears to be an analogous word in English. Rosny’s images of this “cult of darkness” and concurrent medievalizing terrors are as vivid as the cinematic rendering of Ingmar Bergman in The Seventh Seal. The film likewise contrasts superstitious horrors of the theological imagination with the realities of practical, physical life in nature, milk and strawberries.

  15. “Quarters of great stones” translates the French “des quartiers de rocs.” Rosny refers here to the “cyclopean” architecture of the walls of ancient Mycenae as described by Pausanias in his Description of Greece, written in the second century CE. Pausanias recounts that the great stones that comprise the Lion Gate at Mycenae were said to be the work of the Cyclopes, the huge, one-eyed creatures of Greek legend, the only creatures deemed strong enough to move such stones. The “tent that does not move” (in French “la tente fixe”) is what we today call a metonymy, where the shift from nomadic to sedentary culture is figured as the visible shift from mobile tent to fixed dwelling.

  16. Bakhoun not only represents the shift, in human evolution, from nomadic to sedentary, agricultural existence. His views also place him squarely as a forerunner of Renaissance science, a prehistoric Galileo, and (more extraordinary yet), in his use of the quantitative method, a Descartes lost in the night of time. In addition, his natural theology and cult of reason position him even closer to our age of European intellectual history: as a postrevolutionary figure, indeed as a positivist. Bakhoun is in fact a resumé of the development of Western rational man.

  17. Bakhoun’s written record is in fact a perfect example of the modern scientific method: observation, hypothesis, testing, and verification.

  18. A search of world libraries revealed no such author or title. M. Dessault and his work are fictitious (in fact a search on the web came back to Rosny’s novel itself as exclusive reference, as does the search for any number of names and places in his texts). The fiction of a fictitious scientist deciphering and mediating an ancient text to a contemporary audience is a common device in a nineteenth century fascinated with archeology and prehistory. Rosny’s narrative has some interesting shifts in focus. In the first several chapters, pre-Bakhoun, the narrative voice affects an “ancient” tone and distance. Then we have the sudden shift to a narrator of Rosny’s time, speaking in the first person, or in a form of “scientific ‘we,’ ” the consensus voice of a body of specialists, speaking to the lay reader. This leads the way to the �
�Book of Bakhoun,” the ancient text that the fictitious M. Dessault has translated.

  19. Our translation generally follows Rosny’s text to the letter. However, in the case of certain cryptic phrases—an example is “l’indépendence partielle,” which we translate here as “the partial capacity for independence of mind”—we have taken a small interpretive liberty in order to make the text clearer to the reader. Generally, however, we seek neither to “second-guess” the author nor to interpret his words. Many times, we record them literally. His phrases are often as enigmatic in French as in English, and we imagine his design was to cultivate a certain imprecision or vagueness that obliges readers to work their way into the future world he presents—a thoroughly science-fictional process.

  20. Bakhoun’s preservation of this strange metallic “debris” is an act that will allow modern chemists to study this matter. Rosny’s narrator presents him as a Lavoisier avant la lettre, for whom this debris is not rejected as an alien, unearthly substance but is accepted as one that does not fit in the known table of elements. As it is never a question of something not of earthly origin, it is implied that future science may find the means of breaking down and recombining this matter.

  21. We are reminded here of the first impressions of Wells’s Time Traveler among the Eloi, who also have no visible signs of industry. The nature, however, of these observed facts, and their role in determining the course of the narrative, is very different in Wells. An apparently innocent fact, the absence of industry first leads, in the imagination-driven investigations of the Traveler, to a utopian misinterpretation of the situation. This error becomes all the more horrific as further evidence points to the deeper mystery of the Morlocks and the nature and purpose of their “industry.” Bakhoun, in contrast, presents the fact but does not conclude. His stress on the words “tangible or visible industry” suggests that some other kind might exist: telepathic or telekinetic industry for example. But Bakhoun remains the positivist—he restricts himself in Comtean manner to strict facts, and beyond that he says: “I don’t know.”