Volume 1: The Mystery of the Fifteen
by
Jean de La Hire
translated, with an Introduction and an Afterword, by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
Le mystère des XV [The Mystery of the Fifteen], here translated as The Nyctalope on Mars, was initially published as a serial in Le Matin from April 23 to July 17 1911 and was reprinted in a two-volume paperback edition by J. Ferenczi in 1922. The novel was one of a number of French romans feuilletons to take aboard the influence of the English writer of scientific romances, H. G. Wells, and is explicitly framed as a sequel to The War of the Worlds. It also forms part of a significant group of French scientific romances involving the planet Mars, following fairly closely on the heels of Arnould Galopin’s Le docteur Oméga (1906; tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as Doctor Omega) and Gustave Le Rouge’s Le prisonnier de la planète Mars and La guerre des vampires (1908-9; tr. in the Black Coat Press omnibus The Vampires of Mars).
Like these predecessors, and in keeping with the French tradition of feuilleton fiction, Le mystère des XV adapts Wellsian materials to the kind of popular adventure thriller fiction that would later become the staple crop of the American pulp magazines. La Hire was careful to emphasize the French affiliations of his work by co-opting the famous astronomer and proto-science fiction writer Camille Flammarion into his story, not merely as a frequently-referenced authority but as a character, and also be redeploying some standard Vernian motifs, but his novel also foreshadows the developments of American pulp science fiction by introducing primitive elements of what would later become known as “space opera.”
Unlike its predecessors, which use essentially-arbitrary means of transportation to remove their characters to Mars in order to undergo exotic planet-bound adventures, Le mystère des XV envisages spaceflight as a natural extension of aviation, which will eventually permit regular traffic between the two worlds and open up the possibility of a military invasion. Although the only space “battle” that La Hire depicts in the novel is an extremely primitive affair, severely handicapped by a lack of appropriate weaponry, it does mark a tentative step forward in what was soon to become a hectic game of giant leaps.
By the time Le mystère des XV was written, most feuilleton fiction was published in weekly or monthly installments rather than being serialized in daily newspapers, as it had been during the genre’s heyday in the mid-19th century, but La Hire’s serial was produced according to the classic model, which posed particularly extreme challenges to a writer’s imagination and flexibility. Daily serials had to be made up as the author went along, and were perennially vulnerable to interim editorial demands, often formulated in response to reader feedback. Many novels written—or, more likely, dictated—in this way were replete with internal inconsistencies, produced because writers blithely introduced innovations in contrast to what they had earlier written, fudged or discarded inconvenient corollaries of ill-thought-out improvisations, responded to editorial instructions to develop their stories in different directions, or simply changed their minds. Le mystère des XV is no exception to this generalization—and, indeed, provides a typical example of rambling indirection and hectic confusion, presumably resulting from an unusually toxic combination of these causes. Very few writers of romans feuilletons ever revised their works for subsequent reprinting, and La Hire was no exception to that rule either, presumably recognizing that there was no easy way to bring any semblance of coherence to a story as muddled as Le mystère des XV—not, at least, without starting again from scratch, with the aid of hindsight.
It has to be admitted that, mainly as a result of the vicissitudes of this method of procedure, Le mystère des XV is a dire mess, which only warrants the attention of modern readers by virtue of the precedents it set within the development of 20th century popular fiction. The most significant of these, as seen in retrospect, is its invention of a hero who qualifies as the first “superhero” endowed with a particular paranormal talent: the Nyctalope. This aspect of La Hire’s inventiveness is as primitive in its development as his handling of interplanetary conflict, but it is interesting nevertheless, especially in sketching out the narrative devices that were subsequently brought to perfection as the well-honed clichés of baroque thriller fiction in general, and its superheroic subvariant in particular. Indeed, it is arguable that the mistakes La Hire made, having no precedents to draw upon, are now more interesting to the connoisseur reader than the workable moves whose future development he feebly anticipated.
As I have already translated the later novel in which La Hire reinvented the same superhero, as The Nyctalope vs. Lucifer (Black Coat Press, 2007), there is no need to go into the same detail here as the introduction to that volume did with respect to the subsequent development of the character, or to repeat the biography of La Hire included in that introduction. It will, however, be useful to the reader to know that, although it was the first novel to feature the Nyctalope, Le mystère des XV was a sequel to an earlier sciencefictionalized thriller also serialized in Le Matin, L’homme qui peut vivre dans l’eau [The Man Who Could Live Underwater] (1908), which had featured the same villain in opposition to a team of more orthodox heroes, one of whom turned out to be the Nyctalope’s father. The gap between the two serials was narrow in terms of elapsed time, but abyssal in terms of certain interim events that had an important bearing on the future of technology. Put simply, the first novel was written without any acute awareness the dawn of the Age of Aviation, whereas the latter is a wholehearted visionary celebration of that dawn.
Although modern history now places the dawn of the Age of Aviation in December 1903, when the Wright brothers allegedly accomplished their first flight, that event passed largely unnoticed at the time—especially in Europe, where the development of heavier-than-air flying machines took its first crucial tentative steps in 1905. In that year, the French pioneers Gabriel Voisin (1880-1973) and Louis Blériot (1872-1936) attempted to set up the world’s first commercial aircraft factory to market aircraft built to their own designs. They fell out before production could begin, and Blériot went his own way, but he was replaced in the commercial venture by Voisin’s younger brother Charles (1882-1912). The Voisin biplane went into production in 1907, and the brothers’ first customer was Henri Farman (1874-1958), who soon went into business himself, marketing a biplane of his own design, in 1908. The pivotal year in the history of French aviation was, however, 1909, when Blériot upstaged his rivals by flying his own monoplane across the English channel on July 25, beating two other rivals to claim a huge prize. Two months later, on September 25, above Moulins, the French army dirigible République fell victim to the worst aerial disaster to date when the hydrogen in its envelope caught fire and all the men aboard were killed. From that moment on, clear-sighted men realized that the future of manned flight belonged to winged aircraft rather than dirigible balloons; the flamboyant Paris-based Brazilian millionaire Albert Santos-Dumont (1872-1932), who had long been obsessed with technologies of flight, switched his attention conclusively from dirigible airships to airplanes thereafter.
Actual technological progress after 1909 was slow; by 1912, the Voisin brothers had only sold a total of 75 aircraft. Aviation remained a dangerous hobby of the rich and reckless until the Great War broke out in 1914, when a race to develop effective military aircraft began. It was, however, the events of 1909 that opened up spectacular horizons to the imagination of contemporary visionaries and fiction-writers—none more so than Jean de La Hire, whose entrancement with the possibilities of aviation is th
e heart and soul of Le mystère des XV.
It so happened that the key events in the early history of aviation coincided with another significant event: a long-anticipated opposition of Mars and Earth, which brought the two planets into closer proximity than they had enjoyed in the previous 80 years or were to enjoy in the next 80. The excitement generated in the U.S.A. by Percival Lowell’s recent popularization of the notion that the Martian “canals” were evidence of the existence of an advanced civilization was somewhat tempered in France by the fact that France’s leading popularizer of astronomy, Camille Flammarion, had always been a trifle skeptical about the canals, even though he was convinced that Mars must be habitable; the opposition of September 1909 offered a seemingly-unique opportunity for Flammarion and other French astronomers to collect new evidence in relation to Lowell’s hyperbolic claims.
It is not surprising that La Hire, who was already established as a significant pioneer of popular scientific romance, should undertake to combine the inspiration of these two high-profile developments. Indeed, the most surprising thing about his decision is that he took so long to put it into operation. Le mystère des XV might well have been too innovative for its own good, though, as it was brought to an abrupt halt—presumably in response to editorial command—when it finally got around to dealing with its more imaginatively adventurous materials. (By comparison with the exceedingly long and wholly conventional account of the adventures of Le corsaire sous-marin [The Submarine Pirate] that La Hire went on to produce in 1912-13 as a weekly feuilleton for Ferenczi, Le mystère des XV is not unusually protracted.) Not only does the story stop dead when—at least, from the viewpoint of a modern science fiction reader—it has rather belatedly got to the real narrative meat, but the vague promise of a sequel, offered as an excuse for that interruption, was never fulfilled.
The suspicion that Le mystère des XV proved to be too extravagant for a significant sector of its audience is further encouraged by a peculiar shift in the novel’s internal chronology, whose uncertainties I shall investigate in detail in an afterword. Despite the pruning of story’s ambitions while it was in progress, however, and its author’s mistaken assumption that future aircraft would imitate the flapping wings of birds, there is a case to be made for La Hire having seen, more promptly and more clearly than any of his contemporaries, what the actual implications of Louis Blériot’s epoch-making flight might be, extrapolated over the next two decades. Although his particular representation of interplanetary aircraft is nonsensical, by virtue of unconsidered technical details that I shall point out while footnoting the text, there is also a case to be made for his having predicted the course that popular space fiction was likely to follow in the next 50 years.
This prescience has much to do with the fact that, more than any of his rival writers of scientific romance, Jean de La Hire was swept up by the particular dream of progress that inspired the Italian writer Filippo Marinetti and his associates to compose their Futurist manifesto, which made its first appearance a year after the serialization of Le mystère des XV. As a writer of lowbrow popular fiction, La Hire was in no position to take an interest in the stylistic innovations proposed by highbrow Futurists—although he had been a Symbolist in the first phase of his checkered career, and his wife subsequently became a noted Surrealist painter—but he took aboard all of their fascination with speed and the various kinds of machines that would facilitate the literal acceleration of human life.
In 1911, there had never been a work of fiction as obsessed with calculations and celebrations of velocity as Le mystère des XV, and that, perhaps even more than its invention of the Nyctalope, establishes it as a genuinely prophetic work. Although its literary crudity is bound to make it seem woefully inept—and sometimes accidentally hilarious—to the modern reader, there is a sense in which it could not have achieved its visionary scope without that crudity, because its hectic pace and casual inventiveness arose from La Hire’s careless discarding of chains of previous plausibility and his determination to display his initial, unrehearsed and unfocused responses to his new fascination.
In addition to mapping out some of the novels’ internal contradictions and puzzling improvisations in the afterword, I shall add some further comments there regarding its awkward use of narrative moves and devices that were subsequently standardized as elements of formularistic 20th century melodrama.
In closing this preparatory introduction, it is only necessary to add that this translation was made from the Ferenczi paperback editions, which I have not been able to compare with the original newspaper serial. The Ferenczi version contains numerous obvious typographical errors and there are several points in the narrative at which text—especially minor items of dialogue—is obviously missing, but I have compensated for these deficiencies as best I could, occasionally improvising necessary items of dialogue. I have deleted a few particularly annoying or excessively redundant instances of repeated information, but I have been careful to retain the flavor of the original; the business of issuing frequent reminders to readers was a necessary feature of newspaper serial-writing, as well as a godsend to tired writers temporarily in need of some undemanding padding. I have also shortened some of La Hire’s many references to “la planète Mars” to “Mars” (the fuller specification is necessary in French because Mars is also the name of a month).
Acting under instructions from the publisher, I have altered the spelling of the hero’s surname (from Sainte-Claire to Saint-Clair) in order to bring it into conformity with the name that La Hire eventually settled on when he extrapolated a series of Nyctalope novels, but the only other substantial alteration I have made is to modify the text’s use of the symbol XV—the Roman numeral equivalent to 15. There is only instance in the paperback text where “quinze” is substituted for “XV” with reference to the secret society that has adopted that designation in its title, but it seems to me to be ridiculous to use “XV” in dialogue, where the term would have to be rendered phonetically by a French speaker as “quinze.” I have, therefore, used “Fifteen” in dialogue and subvocalized speech throughout my translation, while restricting “XV” to the observations of the narrative voice. I have annotated a few other individual instances where I have made translation decisions that might be deemed controversial, in order to explain my reasoning.
Brian Stableford
Part One: Saint-Clair the Nyctalope
I. Arrival at Argyre Island
When she woke up, Xavière de Ciserat remained dazed for a moment, and was then suddenly possessed by a frightful and maddening terror.
She wanted to cry out, but her throat would not let anything pass but a hoarse croak. In her confusion, she felt that she must have fainted or gone mad. With a desperate effort, the young woman fought to calm her rapidly-beating heart, her jangling nerves and the horrors possessing her flesh. She collected herself momentarily, recovering her habitual coolness and the lucid courage with which nature had endowed her.
The first effect of this mental dominion was that Xavière was able to speak.
“Where am I?” she cried.
The sound of her voice further strengthened her will to live and to know. The mist that veiled her bulging eyes dissipated, and Xavière was able to look around.
The young woman immediately perceived that she was bound by the waist, arms and legs to the back, arms and feet of a bizarre shiny metal armchair in which she was seated. In front of her, beyond a sort of bulbous crystal carapace, was the immensity of a nocturnal sky. Innumerable stars shone therein, but directly in front of her there was an immense red star, visibly increasing in size, seemingly approaching her rapidly with vertiginous speed.
Was it a nightmare? No!
Again Xavière felt herself invaded by fear: a tortuous, mortal fear; the nameless terror that overwhelms and kills…
“Oh! No, no! I don’t want to!” she cried.
A new battle began between her mind and the weakness of the matter from which human flesh is kn
eaded, from the limbs that act to the brain that thinks. Xavière emerged from that battle exhausted, but again victorious. She immediately fixed her gaze on the red star. It had increased in size again, become closer. Sidereal space extended all around it…
Xavière turned her head slightly to the left, then—and she saw a man: a strong man, dressed in white, wearing a colossal helmet, shod in soft tan leather boots. The man was sitting motionless on a metal armchair beside Xavière’s, and he seemed to be asleep. The young woman stared at him, dazedly. Then, moved by instinct, she turned her head to the right—and saw another man, dressed exactly like the first, with the sole difference that a sheet of cloth, whose color was indefinable in the bloody light emanating from the red star, covered the sleeves of his white jacket. This one was not asleep. His open blue eyes were attentively observing a compass fixed to a thin stalk of rigid metal that was mounted in front of him, immediately within the crystal carapace, and his hands, which were pale, elongated and muscular, were gripping a steering-wheel very similar to that of an automobile.
There was no noise, no vibration… but the steering-wheel gave rise to an idea of direction, and hence of motion. Nevertheless, Xavière had a sensation of absolute immobility. Was it the red star that was coming closer, or were they going towards the red star?
Thoughts whirled furiously in the young woman’s mind; there was chaotic disorder in her disturbed brain.
My God, she said to herself, calm down, calm down! I need to find out what’s happening.
She was still looking at the man to her right, who did not seem to have heard her, or even to be aware of her presence.
This is obviously madness, she thought. If I’m dreaming, I must wake up.
The Nyctalope on Mars 1: The Mystery of the Fifteen Page 1
