Notes
1 Le Félin géant (The Giant Cat a.k.a. Quest of the Dawn Man) and Helgvor du fleuve bleu (Helgvor of the Blue River) will be reprinted in their original English translations in a seventh volume.
2 I have left the key words unaltered, because they are deliberately misrendered in such way as to conserve a certain ambiguity. Roge is only one letter away from rouge [red] or rogue [arrogant], while aigue is subtly distinct from both the masculine and feminine forms of aigu/aiguë, whose usual meaning is “pointed” or “sharp,” although the term is also used as a noun to signify a diamond, referring to its “water” rather than its facets, by analogy with aigu-marine [aquamarine]. The readiest inference to be drawn, therefore, might be reckoned as “red gem”—but the other possible implications should not be left out of account.
3 August 10 is the usual peak of the Perseid meteor shower, consisting of particles left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle; the shower has been observed for the last 2000 years, and is sometimes known as “St. Lawrence’s tears” because August 10 was the day of his martyrdom.
4 Jean Perrin (1870-1942) was a noted physicist, whose accomplishments included a demonstration that “cathode rays” were streams of negatively-charged particles and an explanation of solar energy in terms of hydrogen fusion. Emile Borel (1871-1956) was a mathematician who helped to elaborate Einstein’s theory of relativity; Rosny might have met him via his wife, who wrote novels under the name Camille Marbo.
5 Actually, what Baudelaire referred to having sensed, in his diary (on January 23, 1862, while slowly dying), was “le vent de l’aile de l’imbecillité” [the wind of the wing of imbecility], but later quoters of the phrase, including Emile Goudeau and Catulle Mendès, often shortened it in the same fashion as Langre.
6 The Nicol prism, invented by William Nicol (1770-1851)—which consists of two precise fractions of a crystal of Icelandic spar, glued together with Canada balsam—was the first device commonly used to polarize light.
7 The law known in France as Descartes’ law, popularized by the great philosopher’s Discourse on Method (1637) was first discovered in 984 by Ibn Sahl and had been rediscovered at least twice before Descartes’ publication; outside France it is generally known as Snell’s law, after Willebrord Snellius, who had published it in 1621. It states that the ratio of the sines of the angle of refraction and the angle of refraction is equal to the ratio of the velocities of light in the two media through which a refracted ray is passing.
8 The words of this stirring revolutionary song—which proclaim that the day of “the exploiters” is done, that “the executioners will bite the dust,” exhorting “the people with a thousand arms” to rise up because “we’re going to kill poverty,” and declaring that “the red night is rising in the distance”—produce no hits on Google, so it is possible that Rosny composed them himself, although he might well have heard them sung in the days when he used to hang around with nihilists and assorted revolutionary socialists.
9 Au Printemps is a famous department store in the Boulevard Haussmann. When Rosny wrote La Force mystérieuse it was fitted out in an Art Nouveau style, but it really was devastated by fire in the early 1920s and the modern version is quite different.
10 When Rosny wrote La Force mystérieuse the President of the Republic was the aged and inert Armand Fallières, who was widely despised (Maurice Renard’s Le Péril bleu also singles him out for scathing criticism). It is obviously Fallières that Rosny has maliciously in mind here, but while the novel was being serialized Fallières was replaced by the far more dynamic Raymond Poincaré, and readers of the subsequent book version would inevitably have assumed that it was his corpse that was ignominiously laid out on the steps of the Elysée Palace. Given that Rosny owed Poincaré a considerable personal debt—he was the lawyer who won the long legal battle to establish the Académie Goncourt—this must have caused him some slight embarrassment.
11 Meyral is quoting Baudelaire again, this time from “La Mort des Amants;” he is obviously fond of the poem, because he will soon quote the last three lines of the sonnet, which follow on directly from these two.
12 Deneb.
13 Wilhelm Holtz (1836-1913) developed an electrostatic induction generator in 1865, which—as the text makes clear—converted physical energy into static electricity. A similar device had been invented independently by August Toepler, so such devices are usually known nowadays as Toepler-Holtz machines.
14 Agni is the god of fire—incarnate in sacrificial fire—in Vedic religion, India being the “land of the seven [sacred] rivers.”
15 “Hannibal is at the gate!”—a cry of lamentation uttered by the Romans after the loss of a battle near Cannes, according to Cicero.
16 “Father, into thy hands…” Meyral/Rosny takes it for granted that his auditor/reader will recognize Jesus’ final words, as reported in Luke 23:46, and will know that the sentence concludes “…I commend my spirit.”
17 Roughly.
18 I have translated this list of mushroom varieties as precisely as I can, given that the common names given to such fungi in France and Britain are not exactly equivalent and that Meyral occasionally seems to be offering more than one term for the same referent species. Rosny’s list is obviously based on the color plate in contemporary editions of Larousse which accompanies the entry on “Champignons” [Mushrooms] and some of its eccentricities might be the result of casual copying from that list. The strangest of those eccentricities is the manifest presence in the list of more than one variety of Amanita muscaria, the fly-agaric, which is highly toxic, and not a species one would normally expect to be found on a farm, but this does seem to be deliberate, as one variety of the species in question (named by Rosny as the fausse oronge, although the Larousse plate only supplies that label as an alternative name for the Amanite tue-mouches [literally, fly-killing amanita]) is singled out for a specific role later in the text—a singularity that I shall discuss further in the afterword.
19 Rosny inserts a footnote here: “The reader is not unaware that our matter is considered by illustrious modern scientists to be a straightforward complex of energies.” The idea of the interchangeability of mass and energy was not as familiar in 1913 as it is nowadays; although Einstein had published his famous equation quantifying their equivalence in 1905.
20 Rosny inserts another footnote: “Langre is here using the term ‘nebulas’ in its double meaning.” The term was, of course, employed by astronomers to refer to any light-source that remained telescopically vague, although it had been known for more than a century when La Force mystérieuse was written that some were actually distant star clusters—other “island universes” or galaxies—while others were luminous clouds of gas within the Milky Way. In stating that Langre is conserving both meanings, Rosny is emphasizing the physicist’s contention—which he is about to elaborate—that the nebula within the Milky Way might be inherently mysterious, involving one or more kinds of “alien energy.”
21 Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882) was one of the pioneers of the race theory that became fundamental to paleo-anthropology in the latter half of the 19th century; he was also a statesman and a prolific writer of fiction. The reference here is to his theory of the superiority of the “master race,” whose ideal type Rosny had adopted for the heroes of almost all his prehistoric fantasies and adventure stories. Whereas Gobineau identified that stereotype as “Aryan,” however, Rosny had attributed it to original inhabitants of Europe who were displaced by successive waves of invaders from the east, including the “Ariès” (see “Eyrimah” in vol. 4). In the story that followed Rosny takes care on several occasions to express dissent from the profound horror of miscegenation that infected Gobineau’s thesis.
22 Genesis 6:6.
23 Rosny inserts a footnote: “The aunt is evidently adopting the opinion of those Church Fathers who consider Behemoth to be an emblem of Satan.”
24 Jean-Baptiste Marchand crossed Africa from west to east in 1898.
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br /> 25 Bas-de-Cuir [Leatherstocking] is the appellation usually used in France to refer to James Fenimore Cooper’s archetypal character Natty Bumppo, more often known in England and America by his other nickname, Hawk-Eye.
26 Cercopithecus is a genus of long-tailed monkeys; the adventurers’ sense of biological kinship with other primates obviously extends no further than the great apes.
27 Psalm 107:33-36.
28 Psalm 91:3
29 These are the concluding words of “La jeune captive,” written by the poet André Chenier on the night before his execution, during the Terror, in 1794; the poem’s immediate reference is to Aimée de Coigny, who was guillotined on the same day. The version in the Flammarion text omits a significant comma, which I have restored to the translation.
30 Genesis 1:28.
31 This reference is gnomic in French as well as English. The first of the three terms Sir George uses is bousiers, a common name that translates easily as “dung-beetles,” but the others seem to be derived, not necessarily correctly, from Latin terms. Rosny’s “cyclomattes” is presumably intended to refer to Cyclommatus elephus, a giant variety of stag-beetle, but the only marginally-relevant uses of galofas I can find—in English—are to a blood-sucking fly (whose proboscis might, I suppose, be thought vaguely reminiscent of an elephant’s trunk).
32 At one point there were five; one escaped, but the others appear to have been forgotten.
33 Aesa is a personification of Fate or Destiny, probably originating in Assyria but also recognized by the Greeks.
34 A decisive battle fought in 338 B.C., in which Philip of Macedonia defeated the Athenians, ended Greek independence and paved the way for the Alexandrian Empire.
35 A battle in which Hannibal defeated a Roman army led by Flaminius in 217 B.C.
36 The opening words of Psalm 130 (De Profundis).
37 “The greater shadows fall from the tall mountains.” The quotation is from Virgil’s Eclogues, but it became a widely cited proverb.
38 The reference is to the eponymous heroine of George du Maurier’s famous novel, who was mesmerized by Svengali into becoming a marvelous singer, although her natural voice was markedly discordant.
39 This quotation is given in English in the original; it is taken from a prayer commonly used in the Church of England, based on the text of Psalm 31.
40 The sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) is so-called because of its unusual reactivity, and there are numerous other species in the same genus capable of rapid movement, including the telegraph plant and the Venus fly-trap. Rosny elects to use the more general Mimosée [Mimosacea] as a general descriptive noun for his superior plants, but it is plants of the genus Mimosa—most of which are tropical and subtropical shrubs or flowering plants—that he has in mind as “advanced” plants likely to have evolved even greater capabilities, given the opportunity, so I have used the less cumbersome term.
41 The sarigue, or quica, is a small American opossum; it is presumably included here because it is a marsupial, to supplement the observation that the flora seems primitive.
42 Gamopetalous means that the petals of a flower are fused together to form a solid corolla. In fact, plants of the genus Mimosa are not gamopetalous, the small petals of their complex flower-heads only appearing to form a single flower. Darnley would know that, but Rosny can be forgiven an understandable mistake in his attempt to imitate scientific discourse.
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
Acknowledgements: I should like to thank John J. Pierce for providing valuable research materials and offering advice and support. Many of the copies of Rosny’s works and critical articles related to his work were borrowed from the London Library. Also thanks to Paul Wessels for his generous and extensive help in the final preparation of this text.
English adaptation, introduction and afterword Copyright 2010 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2010 by Vincent Laik.
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ISBN 978-1-935558-37-8. First Printing. May 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 book are entirely fictional. Printed in the United States of America.
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