47 Renard misrenders this title as L’Eve moderne. There have been several different English translations with various titles, including The Future Eve and Tomorrow’s Eve.
48 I have moved this list of titles from a footnote; the final title he cites is “Le Corps volé,” which I have assumed to be “The Stolen Bacillus.”
49 Renard inserts a footnote here: “Let us observe, besides, that the scientific marvelous, although not the first born, is merely one form of the logical marvelous, and not a genre distinct from it.”
50 The word I have translated as “false” is vicieux; I would far rather substitute “conjectural,” for the sake of the argument, but that would exceed the limits of permissible synonymy.
51 The reference is to the central character of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), who expressed his surprise on discovering that he had been speaking prose for 40 years “without knowing it.”
52 Although Renard is making a valid point, this blanket dismissal is surely excessive, given what the explorers in Voyage au centre de la Terre contrive to discover in the implausibly fecund bowels of the Earth, or what such space travelers as Michel Ardan and Hector Servadac are able to observe as they make use of their impracticable vehicles.
53 Again, this scathing dismissal is not entirely unwonted, but is surely overly harsh. Renard might not have approved of Robida’s pacifism, but is difficult to support the contention that his calculatedly absurd but all-too-pertinent images of technologically-enhanced warfare in Saturnin Farandoul and La Guerre au vingtième siècle are incoherent or inconsequential.
54 Renard inserts a long footnote here: “Note that the fallacy is not always where one expects to find it. Not always, for example, in the assertion of an apparently prodigious phenomenon, but sometimes in the means employed to obtain the phenomenon in question. That is the case in Wells’s ‘The New Accelerator,’ in which the objective of the discovery is to accelerate the functions of life within an individual, to the point at which surrounding events seem to him to be happening very slowly, that being merely a transposition into the domain of the artificial of what is produced naturally in critical circumstances in the course of some danger or during some accident. Everyone is familiar with the apparent slowness with which a perilous fall, or a collision between two automobiles, occurs for those who are at risk of being its victims. The fallacy of ‘The New Accelerator’ is in the fictitious invention of a pharmaceutical method designed to produce that state of accelerated life artificially, not in its affirmation, as one is tempted to believe.”
55 Sesostris was a legendary king of Egypt whose supposed exploits were loosely based on the actual achievements of Ramses II. This reference may seem slightly out of keeping with the category of fiction I have translated as “Medieval Romance” (which is, confusingly, signified in French by the same word—roman—as modern fiction) but French romances of that kind, which originated in the Middle Ages and thrived for centuries, soon expanded their subject-matter from Arthurian and Charlemagnian legendry to fantastic adventures set in pre-Christian eras, which consequentially enjoyed a greater moral license; such quasi-mythical figures as Sesostris owed their popularity to this move.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION
Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
Didier de Chousy. Ignis
C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid; The Thieves of Silence
Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
Charles de Fieux. Lamékis
Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic
Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
André Laurie. Spiridon
Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
Jules Lermina. Mysteryville; Panic in Paris; The Secret of Zippelius
José Moselli. Illa’s End
John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril; Doctor Lerne; The Doctored Man; A Man Among the Microbes; The Master of Light
Jean Richepin. The Wing
Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries; Chalet in the Sky
J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River; The Givreuse Enigma; The Mysterious Force; The Navigators of Space; Vamireh; The World of the Variants; The Young Vampire
Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
Han Ryner. The Superhumans
Brian Stableford (anthologist) The Germans on Venus; News from the Moon; The Supreme Progress; The World Above the World; Nemoville
Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
Kurt Steiner. Ortog
Eugène Thébault. Radio-Terror
C.-F. Tiphaigne de La Roche. Amilec
Théo Varlet. The Xenobiotic Invasion
Paul Vibert. The Mysterious Fluid
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The Scaffold; The Vampire Soul
English adaptation, introduction and afterword Copyright 2010 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2010 by Gilles Francescano.
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ISBN 978-1-935558-15-6. First Printing. February 2010. Published by Black Coat Press, an imprint of Hollywood Comics.com, LLC, P.O. Box 17270, Encino, CA 91416. All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The stories and characters depicted in this novel are entirely fictional. Printed in the United States of America.
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