The Germans on Venus
And Other French Scientific Romances
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
Restif de la Bretonne: Posthumous Correspondence 12
Charles Nodier: Perfectibility 31
Louis Ulbach: The Story of a Naiad 86
X. B. Saintine: Astronomical Journeys 99
Adrien Robert: War in 1894 115
Eugène Mouton: The Origin of Life 123
Jules Lermina: Quiet House 133
Rémy de Gourmont: The Automaton 181
Marcel Schwob: The Future Terror 199
Louis Mullem: A Rival of Edison 207
Alphonse Allais: Erebium 217
André Mas: The Germans on Venus 224
Théo Varlet: Telepathy 296
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION 311
Introduction
This is the second anthology of French scientific romances that I have compiled for Black Coat Press, following News from the Moon and Other French Scientific Romances.1 The introduction to the first volume defined the genre and offered some comments on the fundamental pattern of its development, which there is no need to repeat here. I shall introduce each story individually, so all that remains to be done in this general introduction is to offer a few observations about the tenor of this particular showcase.
I have attempted to provide a representative cross-section of texts spanning the entire period in which the genre of scientific romance thrived, before it went into a decline and eventually gave way to “science fiction” imitative of the work produced under that American label. Any such cross-section confined to a single volume is bound to be highly selective and therefore somewhat distorted; although it was not my initial intention, this one is somewhat biased in favor of the humorous, not so much because I wanted to emphasize the comical aspects of the genre as because I wanted to emphasize stories that had uncommon imaginative range. It is when writers forearm themselves against charges of absurdity by a deliberate intention to be absurd that they are most likely to let their imagination run free—and, indeed, to push it all the way to its apparent limits.
This narrative strategy works backwards as well as forwards; even when writers set out to write dramas or melodramas, they tend to excuse the more extravagant reaches of their imagination by adding in an apologetic note of irony. For this reason, even an earnest and calculatedly propagandistic work like André Mas’ “The Germans on Venus”—an early attempt to use scientific romance as propaganda for the feasibility of space travel—finds it politic to adopt an uneven gloss of satirical comedy, and a heartfelt plaint like Marcel Schwob’s “The Future Terror” cannot help acquiring a taint of the kind of grand guignol grotesquerie that is more carefully cultivated in such contes cruels as Rémy de Gourmont’s “The Automaton.”
Another consequence of reaching for the limits of the imagination is that it poses acute challenges in terms of narrative format. The general history of literature during the period covered by this anthology—the 1780s to the 1920s—was one of the steady sophistication of techniques of narrative realism: the development of better ways to give a reader to enter into a story as if it were a lived experience, often by “identifying” with the characters. The result of that methodical evolution was the gradual development of the standard features of the modern novel—a process that was perhaps more conscious and studied in France than anywhere else. Although it is not strictly necessary for techniques of narrative realism to be applied to mundane content—the development of modern horror fiction has largely been a matter of their careful application to supernatural materials—problems inevitably arise when the intention is to deal with matters of scientific speculation, futuristic extrapolation and cosmic visions.
An early discussion of such problems is found in and exemplified by Félix Bodin’s Le Roman de l’avenir (1834; tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as The Novel of the Future 2). Bodin wrote that book in order to stake his claim to the idea of using novelistic techniques in a story set in the future, but his attempt to practice what he preached soon ran into problems that he had not anticipated, and became a kind of tortured commentary on its own frustrated ambitions. Before starting out on his exemplar, Bodin had observed that previous literary works dealing with the future mostly fell into the categories of “utopias” and “apocalypses,” both of which were species of visionary fantasy. Such works inevitable resemble expository non-fiction more closely than novels, usually having ideological axes to grind with relentless intensity. As soon as he started to write his own futuristic fantasy, however, Bodin found it impossible to put away, or even to blunt, his own ideological axe as a committed believer in and (in his capacity as an elected deputé in Louis-Philippe’s government) a would-be activator of social progress.
Not only did Bodin’s narrative voice and characters alike find it difficult to adopt any topics of conversation but issues relating to past and future progress, but they could not help acting out a plot whose motive threads were orientated towards an apocalyptic climactic battle, which would presumably have settled for good and all the question of whether the perfectibility of human society—which is to say, the establishment of an Earthly utopia—was feasible. Somewhat to the author’s horror, as expressed by a slightly panic-stricken narrative voice, he found that the simple fact of adopting the conventions of the novel—which meant, in that era, the conventions of the Romantic novel—revealed a fundamental contradiction between the assumptions of that kind of fiction and the ambitions of progress, to the remarkable extent that the narrative voice began to deplore and mourn the fact that his readers (especially the female ones) were likely to find his satanic arch-villain more attractive than his intrinsically-reasonable hero, and root for the insanely evil Anti-Prosaic organization against the thoroughly sane Association for Civilization.
The fact that the cause of social progress had its enemies was, of course, as indisputable in post-Revolutionary France as it had been in pre-Revolutionary France, but the series of upheavals that had taken France through the 1789 Revolution, the Terror, the Empire, the Restoration and the July Revolution of 1830 before Bodin set pen to paper had already made the most diehard champions of progress deeply anxious as to the viability of their cause, and their opponents—who, as Bodin reluctantly concluded and admitted, included a clear and perhaps unassailable majority of Romantic writers and artists—lost no opportunity to feed that paranoia. The situation got no better, of course, as France proceeded its political drunkard’s walk through the Revolution of 1848, the coup d’état of 1851, the Second Empire, the disastrous Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the consequent Paris Commune, a new Republic and, ultimately, the Great War of 1914-18.
Against that historical backcloth, it required unusual ideological heroism to maintain any sort of faith in the probability of future sociopolitical progress, and a pair of rose-colored glasses to confirm the believe that much more than a smidgen had recently been accomplished. On the other hand, there was not an atom of doubt that vast strides had been accomplished in scientific and technological progress, and it began to require a perversely stubborn lack of imagination to cling to the conviction that progress of that sort would soon run out of steam—or, eventually, electricity.
The early philosophers of progress—Anne-Robert Turgot, the Encyclopedists and the Marquis de Condorcet—had taken it for granted that social progress towards liberty, equality and fraternity would go hand-in-hand with scientific and technological progress, each facilitating the other in a healthy feedback loop, but their successors not only began to doubt that it was so but also began
to wonder whether the feedback might be negative rather than positive, and that further scientific and technological progress might actually be inimical to the utopian causes of liberty, equality and fraternity. Not long after Bodin’s heroic failure to write a novel of the future—and, incidentally, to plot a course for the future development of the novel—the utopian mode of optimistic speculative thought that he had identified was confused by the emergence of its pessimistic opposite, rapidly christened (probably by John Stuart Mill) “dystopian.”
This combination of ideological conflict and anxiety was the fertile ground in which scientific romance sprouted and eventually flourished, and it is clearly reflected in this anthology, not merely by the stories themselves, which use the conflict and anxiety as dramatic fuel, but also by their writers, who include among their number a crop of ideological malcontents as rich as one could ever hope to find, even in a country as fecund in the production and proliferation of ideological malcontentment as France. Restif de la Bretonne, Charles Nodier, X. B. Saintine, Louis Ulbach, Jules Lermina, Rémy de Gourmont, André Mas and Théo Varlet cannot be said to constitute any kind of uniform group—politically and philosophically, they are scattered about a broad spectrum—but they were all, in their different ways, deeply discontented with the world as they found it, and even those who had little or no faith in their capacity to make a difference to it were determined not to let it rest easy without hurling a little vitriol in its face. The writers featured in these pages that I left out of the above list were generally less flamboyant in their manner than those cited, but the difference was one of degree rather than kind.
The early philosophers of progress also took it for granted, of course, that scientific and technological progress went hand-in-hand as a matter of logical necessity, given that the former was the parent, or at least the midwife of the latter. This assumption too came under stress, as it became increasingly fashionable to distinguish between the abstract and philosophical enlightenments of science and the brutal pragmatic effects of industrial technology and “mechanization.” Both kinds of progress had their reactionary opponents, who were often allied if not identical, but the grounds of their opposition were often quite distinct and sometimes wildly divergent.
The ideological opposition to the main plot-threads in the narrative development of science was religious, consisting of the digging of trenches in defense of divine creation and all its corollaries, and to inhibit the advance of materialist theories of life and all their corollaries. The ideological opposition to the development of technology was, on the one hand, more straightforwardly and primitively paranoid, and, on the other, more mundanely pragmatic; in the former instance, the fear was that our inventions would get out of hand and run amok; in the latter, it was simply that they would throw us all out of work and make us redundant.
As all the stories in this collection, without exception, illustrate clearly and rather strikingly, the war between inherited faith and empirical revelation was not one a simple one in which battle-lines were drawn up between Biblical “fundamentalists” and geologically-inspired evolutionists, although the import of Genesis was a key pivot of controversy. The question of how life originated, on a cosmic scale, and what the implications of different theories of origin might be for its extraterrestrial distribution and manifestation, was far more complicated than a simple matter of the exact point, or points, in time and space at which God or some automatic process of spontaneous generation had imparted, or was still imparting, the vital spark. Old theological quarrels regarding the plurality of worlds, and more recent theological speculations regarding the possibility of cosmic palingenesis—the interplanetary transmigration of souls—were very much alive in late 18th century France, and they remained significant throughout the history of French scientific romance, making a substantial contribution of its distinctive flavor.
Because fiction trades so heavily in conflict and fear—those being essential components of drama, especially the strategic exaggerations of melodrama—scientific romance inevitably draws very heavily on paranoid objections to technological development. The 20th century science fiction writer Isaac Asimov called attention to the prevalence of what he called “the Frankenstein complex:” a neurotic anxiety that any new technology, however useful or benevolent it might seem, is bound to have disastrous consequences. He objected strenuously to the prevalence of this complex in speculative fiction, and declared his own intention to resist it with all his might—which turned out, in practice to be slightly less mighty than he might have supposed or hoped.
Despite its extreme convenience in enabling the construction of sturdy story-arcs, the Frankenstein complex is only given full-blooded expression in three of the stories in this anthology,3 but its haunting presence is tangible in the background of a further three,4 and it is arguable that those phantom manifestations are more interesting than more flamboyant displays. The more pragmatic aspect of anti-technological sentiment is far less visible here, precisely because its essential mundanity made it less attractive to the editorial sieve, but it lurks in the background of at least two of the stories,5 more like a shabby tramp than a hungry ghost, but by no means devoid of menace.
Like Félix Bodin and Isaac Asimov, most all of the writers represented here believed themselves to be on the side of progress, and the minority who stood up against it damned the idea of social perfectibility because it was impracticable, not because it was undesirable. Charles Nodier, for instance, was absolutely convinced of the impossibility of perfectibility, but he was not delighted by that impossibility—indeed, the main reason why he took the trouble to put the boot into it with such febrile determination was that he was venting his sense of anger and disappointment regarding the tragedy of its impossibility.
The underlying story told by the collection—which does have an underlying narrative of sorts, despite its carefully-contrived variety—is the story of the problem discovered and mourned by Félix Bodin: that the covert fundamental assumptions of Progress and Romance are at odds, and that anyone who sets out to amalgamate or alloy the two, no matter how well-intentioned or ingenious he might be, will eventually find his work racked and tormented by contradictions, pulling in different directions. From a literary point of view, however, that is not entirely a bad thing, and perhaps not a bad thing at all, because fiction—especially Romantic fiction—is, at the end of the day, and whether we like it or not, the purest and most defiant celebration of our cherished imperfections that we possess.
Brian Stableford
Restif de la Bretonne: Posthumous Correspondence
(Excerpts)
(1796)
Nicolas-Edmé Restif de La Bretonne (1734-1806) was the son of a farmer named Edmé Rétif; he elaborated his name in imitation of aristocratic nomenclature, mainly by adding that of the farm his father had taken over in 1742. After receiving an education of sorts from Jansenist clergymen before the order was suppressed he was apprenticed to a printer in Auxerre, acquiring skills that he allegedly later put to use when he became a writer, sometimes allegedly composing straight to type without bothering with an intermediary manuscript. That allegation would help to account for the eccentric typography of some of his works, but might be somewhat exaggerated, as many tales about him were—especially those he told himself in his autobiography, Monsieur Nicolas (1794-97), which was supposedly intended to “lay his heart bare.”
Restif went to Paris in 1755 after completing his apprenticeship and lived a hectic and somewhat dissolute life there, prowling the city by night—he nicknamed himself le hibou [the owl] and apparently helping to pioneer the dubious art of graffiti. He published his first novel, La famille vertueuse, in 1767 and produced prose of a prolific scale thereafter, much of which was regarded as disreputable because of his obsessive interest in sex and the necessity of social reforms that would better accommodate the sexual urge. When his friend and fellow “Rousseau du ruisseau” [gutter Rousseau], Louis-Sébastien Mercier, supported by Jacques-H
enri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, suggested nominating him for the Académie to the president Jean-François de La Harpe, the latter vetoed the nomination on the grounds that Restif “had genius but lacked taste;” Mercier is said to have replied, modestly but undiplomatically, “Ah, but which of us has genius?” Restif was certainly a great admirer of Rousseau, more for the latter’s determinedly oppositional mentality than his actual philosophical convictions, but La Harpe might have been closer to the mark in cruelly labeling him “the chambermaids’ Voltaire.” Subsequent generations were more inclined to lump him in with the Marquis de Sade, and his erotic fascinations are certainly reminiscent of Sade without the sadism, but both men were well aware of the possibility of confusion, and affected to loathe one another.
Unfortunately, Restif’s reputed “lack of taste” minimized his literary reputation long after his death as well as during his life, until champions of his unique combination of erotic frankness and philosophical adventurism began to emerge in the mid-19th century, including Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire. It was, however, too late to recover much of his canon, many items of which had already become fabulously rare, and almost all of which lingered in esoteric obscurity throughout the 20th century. When Pierre Versins devoted a long article to Restif’s Utopian writings in his Encyclopédie de l’Utopie et de la Science Fiction (1972), only one of the works he discussed, La Découverte australe par un homme volant, ou le Dédale français [Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere by a Flying Man; or, The French Daedalus] (1781) was reasonably well-known. Of the others, which hardy anyone then alive had ever cast eyes on, by far the most interesting is Les Posthumes, Lettres reçues après la mort du mari, par sa femme, qui le croit à Florence [Posthumous Correspondence: Letters Received after the Death of a Husband by his Wife, who Believed him to be in Florence] (1802 but first drafted, according to Versins, in 1787-89 and then rewritten in 1796). The original four-volume text remains extremely rare, never having been reprinted, although a substantial sample was reprinted in 1990 as Les Voyages de Multipliandre and shorter excerpts have been published in other samplers of Restif’s work. The following translations have been taken from one of these shorter samples (even the 1990 text is now very difficult to obtain).
The Germans on Venus Page 1
