Electric Life
Written and illustrated by
Albert Robida
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
La Vie électrique by Albert Robida, here translated as Electric Life, was serialized in La Science Illustrée from 28 November 1891 to 30 July 1982 and published in book form by La Librairie Illustrée in 1892. It was advertised as a continuation of the “Vingtième siècle” sequence begun with Le Vingtième siècle (Dentu, 1883; tr. as The Twentieth Century) and La Guerre au vingtième siècle (La Caricature 27 octobre 1883; same illustrations with a different text, Decaux 1889; tr. as War in the Twentieth Century), and was presumably commissioned by Louis Figuier, the editor of La Science illustrée for the roman scientifique section of the magazine with that specific brief.
The author subsequently added a fourth long story to the series in the juvenile novella “Un Potache en 1950” (Mon Journal 8 septembre-22 décembre 1917; 1919; tr. as “A Schoolboy in 1950” 1), but that was a mere afterthought, which added little that was new to the image of life in the mid-twentieth century and is very much milder in its satire. Of the three major elements of the series, “La Vie électrique” is the most savagely critical of the way the world appeared to the author to be going, in parts at least, and even when it eventually settles more contentedly into blatant and unrepentant farce, it retains a trenchant black edge. It must have seemed more farcical in 1892 than it does now, however, given that so many of its sarcastic anticipations have actually been realized. Robida was only extrapolating visible trends in constructing his image of the future, but he probably assumed that he was extrapolating them to absurd extremes; modern readers, on the other hand, can see that in certain instances, he did not go as far as he might have done.
It is important to remember that when Robida began writing the novel, in 1891, the phonograph was only fourteen years old, and the cylinders employed by early manufacturers had yet to be replaced by the flat disks employed when the machine mutated into the gramophone. The telephone had been patented only a year before the phonograph, and it too was still in its infancy in 1891. Although patents for electric light bulbs had been granted previously, it was not until the 1880s that Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison developed commercially viable products. Radio waves had only recently been detected, in 1886, and the notion of wireless telegraphy was still a fanciful one, the idea of “broadcasting” even more so. Robida was by no means the only writer to anticipate a glorious future for electric lighting, domestic power supplies, phonographs and telephones—even telephones augments with visual apparatus—but no one else writing in the nineteenth century took the combination of those devices to the extreme that he did, in imagining a future where most communication would take place electrically, by means of what he calls “la plaque du télé” [the Tele screen] which would also serve as significant inputs of home entertainment, relaying music and theatrical performances.
Other nineteenth-century writers, too, anticipated the rapid and enormously expansive development of technology, in association with big business, and envisaged drastic changes to the pace of everyday life in consequence, but no one else envisaged a state of affairs in which almost everyone might be in a perpetual state of fatigue and nervous stimulation, surmenage [overstressed] to the point of debility and illness. Again, Robida was not alone in suggesting that improved technologies of communication might increase friction between nations, thus increasing the likelihood of armed conflict—and the commercial opportunities thus created for arms dealers—especially in combination with dramatic increases in population facilitated by technology, but he was unusual in depicting such matters as routine aspects of everyday life, virtually taken for granted.
The notion that weapons of war would become increasingly sophisticated was also commonplace in French speculative fiction by 1892—although it had not yet arrived in English-language fiction to any significant extent—and the idea that common-or-garden explosives might soon be supplemented and partly displaced by poison gases was already familiar, but no one other than Robida described in such detail, and with such sardonic vitriol, the day when the artillerie chimique [Chemical Artillery] would be in danger of being rendered redundant in its turn by the corps medical offensif [Offensive Medical Corps], equipped with all the latest custom-designed microbial weapons. In all probability, too, anyone else who had found it possible to envisage such things would not have done so in the context of a slapstick comedy.
Even in 1892, French speculative fiction abounded with caricatures of scientific geniuses whose turn of mind was very different from that of common mortals, especially with regard to the sentimental side of life, but Robida’s Philox Lorris still stands out in that regard as a brilliantly bizarre archetype. Unlike many such eccentrics, he is not at all unworldly in matters of business, and is, indeed, a relentlessly efficient opportunist, well aware of the power of advertising and the necessity of having friends in parliament; he is, in that sense, the ultimate modern entrepreneur, a symbol not merely of science, but of the close alliance of science with what is nowadays knows as the military-industrial complex: the real driving force of technological development and diehard enemy of what less narrow-minded individuals might think of as moral progress.
There are, of course, aspects of La Vie Électrique that now look like gross errors, if the novel is mistakenly construed as prophecy. His chronology is dubious; although set in 1953, sixty years in the future the world envisaged in the story bears a closer resemblance to that of 2013, sixty years after that—but that is surely to his credit, given that the vast majority of futuristic fantasies err in the other direction. The most significant specific element of non-resemblance is the fact that virtually all traffic in Robida’s twentieth century is air traffic, and most of that consists of dirigible airships. (The development of heavier-than-air flight was, of course, still more than a decade away in 1892.) That assumption leads to corollary architectural fancies with regard to the construction of the houses of the future and technologies of traffic control. Even this nexus of anticipations, however, has a certain basic intelligence that is ahead of its time. If one leaves side the focus on airships, what is being suggested—radically, at the time—in that in the twentieth century, large numbers of people will have their own private vehicles, and that houses, public buildings and the environment in general will have to undergo sweeping changes in order to accommodate those vehicles.
La Vie électrique no longer qualifies as a work of futuristic fiction, and cannot really qualify even as an exercise in alternative history, but it can and does qualify as a “steampunk” fantasy, and perhaps as the ultimate steampunk fantasy, given that it is possessed of a blissful innocence that no modern writer, jaded by an excess of historical knowledge, could ever duplicate. A modern writer could probably contrive to be just as bitterly ironic in his satire, but it would be a different kind of irony, based in an inescapable overfamiliarity with all the actual technologies that were, for Robida, boldly glimpsed possibilities, the realization of which he only lived to see in very scant measure.
Viewed in the context of the approximate trilogy of which it forms the capstone, La Vie électrique is less substantial than Le Vingtième siècle and less spectacular than La Guerre au vingtième siècle, but is, in its way, more impressive than either. Like its predecessors, it has not much plot, the story-line essentially consisting of a series of vignettes strung together in a rather haphazard fashion, continually interrupted by brief essays—or tirades—but its imagery is quite remarkable, in its extent and in its visionary penetration. The number of echoes the narrative strikes with the way that we actually live nowadays, and the way the wor
ld still seems to be going, is quite phenomenal. It is a far richer text now than it was in 1892, because so many of its jokes have become much more sharply pointed. We can see now more clearly than ever before exactly what a masterpiece of imaginative fiction the novel was, and still is.
This translation has been taken from the version of the Librairie Illustrée text available of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website.
Brian Stableford
To my friend, Angelo Mariani.
A.R.
Electric Life
PART ONE
I
On the afternoon of 12 December 1953, as a consequence of some small accident whose cause remained unknown, a violent electric storm—a “tornado,” according to the technical term—was unleashed over the entirety of Western Europe and occasioned, in the midst of the confusion and profound disturbances to life in general, very unexpected results for certain individuals whom we shall introduce in due course.
Snow had been falling in large quantities for two weeks, covering all of France except for a small area in the Midi with a thick white carpet, magnificent but very inconvenient. As usual, The Ministry of Highways and Aerial and Terrestrial Communications ordered an artificial thaw, and the huge Power Station No.17 in the Ardèche, charged with the operation, succeeded in less than five hours in clearing the entire north-west of the continent of snow, the white mourning-dress that Nature, her horizons already saddened by the livid mists of winter, had once worn for weeks on end.
Modern science has recently placed powerful means of action in human hands, to help in the struggle against the elements, including the harsh weather of winter, to all the rigors of which it was once necessary to submit with resignation, wrapping oneself up and huddling at one’s fireside at home. Today, the Observatories are no longer content to record atmospheric variations passively; equipped for the battle against intemperate variations, they act, and correct the disorders of Nature to the extent that they can.
When the North Wind blows the chill of the polar ice-sheets toward us, the electricians direct stronger countercurrents against the northerly airflow, which enclose them in an artificial cyclonic nucleus and take them to warm up over the deserts of Africa or Asia, which they fecundate as they pass overhead with torrential rainfall. The sands of Nubia and torrid Arabia have already been rendered fecund. Similarly, when the summer sun overheats our fields and makes the blood and brains of poor peasants and city-dwellers simmer painfully, artificial currents establish a refreshing atmospheric circulation between us and the Arctic seas.
Humans no longer submit to the whims of the atmosphere, sometimes so harmful or disastrous, as a fatality against which no contest is possible. Humans are no longer humble, timid, fearful insects, defenseless against the release of the brutal forces of Nature, bowing their heads beneath the yoke and sadly supporting the routine horror of interminable winters, as well as tempestuous upheavals and cyclones. The roles are reversed; today, it is Nature that meekly submits to the reflective will of humans, who know how to modify the eternal cycle of the seasons at will, as necessary, and to give each region what it requires, in accordance with the various needs of different countries: the quantity of heat that is necessary, the share of coolness for which it sighs, or the refreshing rains demanded by soil that it too dry. People no longer want to shiver unnecessarily or cook in their own juices.
Humans have also regulated the seasons and distributed them more suitably. They have captured the rain by means of electric apparatus and, so to speak, taken in hand the clouds charged with humidity, the inundations of which threaten to ruin crops, in order to guide them elsewhere, toward regions where the earth is scorched, and where depleted agriculture yearns for beneficent rain.
This marvelous conquest of modern science, scarcely fifteen years old in 1953, has already changed the face of the globe in many ways; it had rendered life to areas that had become virtually uninhabitable, deserts of crumbled rock or arid sands, in which creatures vegetated miserably between hunger and thirst. Go and see ancient Nubia reborn, or the burning steppes of Persia, strewn with ruins that were the capitals of extinct nations. The once-desiccated breasts of Asia, the veritable mother of peoples, are once again giving milk to the sons of humankind!
It is the definitive conquest of Electricity, the mysterious motor of worlds, that has permitted people to change what appeared to be immutable, to restore the ancient order of things, to resume control of Creation, and to modify what was once believed to remain eternally above and beyond the reach of human hands.
Electricity is the Great Slave. Electricity, the respiration of the universe, the fluid running through the veins of the Earth or wandering in space in fulgurant zigzags radiating through the immensities of the ether, has been seized, enchained and domesticated. Now, it is obedient to the orders of the human beings who were once terrified by the manifestations of its incomprehensible power; humbly and submissively, it goes where it is commanded to go, working and striving on their behalf. It is the inexhaustible source of light and force; its captive power is employed to activate the enormous accumulation of colossal machines in our millions of factories, as well as the most delicate and subtle mechanisms. It carries voices instantaneously from one end of the earth to the other, suppresses the limits of vision, and transports its human masters—once ridiculous earthbound creatures, like larval insects—through the air. Finally, while it is a tool, a torch, an intercontinental, transoceanic—and soon interplanetary—voice-carrier, and a thousand other things, it is also a terrible weapon, a terrifying instrument of war.
However, the slave that we have been able to compel to render us so many and varied services is not so completely domesticated, so securely riveted to its chains, that it does not rebel occasionally. It has to be watched, and watched perpetually, for the slightest error, the smallest negligence or inattention, can give it an opportunity, which it will not neglect, for a sneak attack, or even one of those abrupt uprisings that cause catastrophes to burst forth.
On the December day in question, unfortunately, one of those accidents, caused by an oversight or a momentary distraction on the part of some employee, occurred during the defrosting operation carried out by Power Station No. 17. At the very moment when the task had just been successfully completed, the great Storage Unit sprung a leak, so suddenly that the personnel could only preserve two sectors out of twelve; an enormous leak and a formidable deflagration ensued.
A tornado was unleashed: one of those terribly destructive electrical storms, a few of which occur every year in the electrical centers, in spite of all provisions and precautions. It is necessary to accustom ourselves to them, like the thousand other serious or trivial accidents to which we are exposed as we move through the extreme complications of our ultra-scientific civilization.
To begin with, the Station 17 tornado followed a capricious trajectory, along which a certain number of people who were telephoning were struck dead or paralyzed; then the crazy current, attracting latent electricity to it with an irresistible force, took on a rapid gyratory movement, after the fashion of natural cyclones, producing a further series of accidents in the regions through which it passed and imparting a disastrous disturbance to general life, which would soon have resulted in a serious of violent regional cataclysms if the captation apparatus of the various regions had not gone into immediate action. The electricians were alert, though, and, as usual, after a few more or less serious disasters, the tornado would be aborted and the crazy current captured and channeled before the final explosion.
In Paris, in a sumptuous dwelling in the sixty-second arrondissement, on the heights of Sannois, a father was in the process of scolding his son vehemently when the tornado burst. The father in question was none other than the famous Philoxène Lorris, the great inventor, the world-renowned scientist, the biggest of all the big brains of scientific industry.
In Philoxène Lorris, we are by no means dealing with the meek and timid bespectacled scienti
sts of old. Tall, stout, red-faced and bearded, Philoxène Lorris is a man of decisive appearance, with curt and precise gestures and a loud voice. The son of a petty bourgeois family living—or, rather, vegetating—placidly on their annual income of forty thousand livres, he is a self-made man. Having graduated top of his class, first from the École Polytechnique and then the Institute of International Scientific Industry, he refused to accept the offer made by a group of financiers to exploit him—to use the technical term—and set out forthrightly to do that for himself, issuing four thousand ten-year shares at 5,000 francs apiece, which were all snapped up on the day of issue, on the strength of his reputation.
With the millions thus raised, Philoxène Lorris immediately founded a huge factory for the implementation of a large-scale project that he planned and nurtured with love, the profits of which were so considerable that the returns on the major share-holding reserved to him by the company charter enabled him to buy back all the issued shares before the end of the fourth year. From then on, his business took on a prodigious momentum; he set up an admirably well-organized research laboratory, surrounded himself with first-class collaborators, and launched a dozen major operations one after another, based on his inventions and discoveries.
Honors, fame and wealth all arrived at the same time for the fortunate Philoxène Lorris. He needed the money for his immense enterprises, his innumerable projects, his factories, laboratories, observatories and testing-grounds. The business enterprises supplied the necessary funds for research on a lavish scale. As for honors, Philoxène Lorris was by no means disdainful of them; he was soon a member of all the Academies and all the Institutes, a dignitary of every Order of Old Europe, Mature America and Young Oceania.
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