Brian Stableford
The Perils of Prophecy: A Cautionary Tale
Futuristic fiction has always struggled to avoid the dire suspicion of prophecy. Writers can protest to no avail that all their work is about the present, no matter what its ostensible temporal setting might be, or they can recite the formula beloved by such writers as Ray Bradbury and John Brunner to the effect that “I’m not trying to predict the future; I’m trying to prevent it!” They will still be judged and inevitably found wanting by the inaccuracy of their anticipation of things to come.
It does no good to cite the perfectly sound arguments put forward by Anatole France and Karl Popper, among others, that the future is essentially unpredictable and is forever engaged in a game that G. K. Chesterton dubbed “Cheat the Prophet.” There will always be imbeciles like Hugo Gernsback to proclaim, while reinventing the wheel that he initially renamed “scientifiction” in the guise of apologetics, that it is “always prophetic.”
It is, of course, true that there are few innovations that have come to pass in the last few decades, especially technological innovations, that have not been foreshadowed in futuristic fiction, alongside the billion other suggested innovations that have not come to pass. Nor is that a mere matter of random mud slinging, because many writers of futuristic fiction do have sufficient common sense to spot the likelihood of certain real but as-yet-unrealized possibilities, especially technological ones. Where anticipation fails as prophecy is not generally at the level of individual hypotheses but in the extrapolation of those hypotheses to glimpse a coherent fraction of the pattern of further technical and social consequences that would follow from a particular innovation. That is because such extrapolations, being context-dependent, are exceedingly difficult to calculate with any degree of security. There have been successes, even striking ones, but they have mostly been limited. Sets of three solid hits in chains of hypothetical extrapolation are rare, sets of four very rare indeed.
The problems of prophecy do not stop there, of course; a particularly thorny one is that prophecies cannot be evaluated in terms of their accuracy immediately or even soon. It is only after they have eventually “come true” that they can be properly measured. That is God’s gift to false prophets, who thrive on postponement and are often undisconcerted even when specific prophecies fail, because there is always more future to come in which errors might yet be repaired. Any writer of futuristic fiction who did get a set of hits right, therefore, might well have to wait until after he was dead for anyone to be able to notice or give credit to his acumen. And in the meantime, what is to prevent his being forgotten?
Let us take an example. Let us consider a story that was first published in 1925 which did not even claim to be futuristic in that it is explicitly set in the year 1924, but which nevertheless set out to track the potential social employment of a technological device that did not exist at the time, or even for half a century afterwards, although something like it does exist now—sufficiently similar, in fact, to allow us to check, very belatedly, the whole pattern of extrapolation that the author developed.
The story’s protagonist is Horace Gourdebec, a French landscape painter desirous of following his vocation in rugged terrain, who decided in 1909 to tag along with a French military expedition to the Moroccan Atlas mountains. Unfortunately, his escort proved useless and was slaughtered to the last man by an unruly Arab warlord. The warlord, however, assumed that the civilian accompanying the expedition must be a doctor and appointed him as his personal physician, keeping him captive for fifteen years, during which he maintained such robust good health that he was never disabused of his error. When he finally falls ill in 1924, however, immediately before the story opens, the well-meaning but ignorant physician advises him to surrender to the French and have himself transported to Paris, where he can be treated by the best surgeons in the world. Gourdebec assures him that the French will be so glad of his surrender that they will treat him like royalty as they had the Algerian warlord Abd el-Kader half a century before.
The warlord agrees and is indeed promised the very best in French surgery and anything else he wishes; grateful to his friend, he demands that the protagonist be appointed a Maréchal de France and given responsibility for French Army Medical services outside France—a request that is duly granted. Gourdebec, however, cannot wait to get out of Paris to go and visit his old friend, Félix Gigolus, an author of popular fiction, now resident in the Dordogne. The two have a lot of catching up to do; Gourdebec has no idea that there has been a Great War and is completely ignorant of the marvelous technical innovation that has been slowly but dramatically transforming French society since the war’s conclusion in this curious alternative history.
As they are walking from the railway station to Gigolus’s house, the two men’s conversation is continually interrupted by a ringing sound coming from Gigolus’s fob pocket. After ignoring it several times, he finally takes out what Gourdebec initially assumes to be a pocket watch. Gigolus tells him, however, that it is actually an olotelepan and shows his friend a set of ten buttons, which, he explains, compose a kind of keyboard, although one does not need to be able to type or play the piano to use it. Each key has a number, and by tapping them one can spell out a number of any length, which appears on a display panel.
The numbers thus keyed in are the numbers of other olotelepans, with which the user is put in contact. Gourdebec comments that wireless telephony has obviously come a long way while he has been in the Atlas, but Gigolus assures him that the olotelepan is far more advanced than a mere wireless telephone. It allows the user not only to hear the person holding the collecting olotelepan, but also to see them and even to obtain some touch sensations.
Most of the olotelepans to which people connect themselves are carried by other individuals—the call that Gigolus tried so hard to ignore is from his housekeeper, who wanted to know what to prepare for dinner—but there are also olotelepans that provide views of different places, access to performances and sporting events, tours of museums, and so on.
As the story progresses, Gigolus gradually explains other things that can be done by means of the olotelepan. He informs Gourdebec that he, like many other olotelepanists—there are, of course, many neophobic individuals who are still refusing to use such machines—now conducts his amorous affairs at a distance by means of “telerasty” and that many other people are now doing likewise.
Gourdebec is also told, after suffering an unfortunate inconvenience due to his unfamiliarity with the technology, that the device has made a big difference to police surveillance. Criminals are now routinely monitored after release from prison, being forced to wear an unobtrusive olotelepan that permits them to be continually monitored and called to account for their actions and whereabouts at any time. Children can be subjected to similar surveillance by parents and wives by husbands—but not vice-versa, at least legally.
When Goudebec asks what happens if people will not consent to such surveillance, he is told that as well as surveillance devices whose wearers know that they are being monitored there are “occult olotelepans”: miniaturized devices that can be secreted in a ring, a belt buckle, or the sole of a shoe in order to keep tabs on them secretly. He is told a very amusing anecdote about the manner in which the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris—who has naturally been subject to clandestine surveillance by the Republican Government, of which he is a diehard opponent—discovered that his pastoral ring concealed an occult olotelepan.
Gigolus also speculates about longer-range effects that are still in their infancy. He points out that there are a great many jobs that do not actually require physical presence and can just as easily be done via the olotelepan. He suggests that the eventual consequence of this possibility will be the gradual shrinkage of big cities as people no longer have to huddle together and the gradual dispersal of population—although he presents cogent arguments to support his contention that Paris will not and cannot disappear, even though many of the em
ployments currently concentrated there will be dispersed to distant olotelepanists.
All this was, of course, pure fantasy in 1925, and it remained pure fantasy for a long time afterwards. We can now see, however, that the author of the story demonstrated a remarkable extrapolative acumen in suggesting the consequences that might—and, indeed, must—flow from the development of a technology permitting versatile, hand-held wireless telephones, even anticipating with a reasonable degree of accuracy the manner in which the form of such devices would follow their function. He was by no means the only person to anticipate personal telephones, of course, but he surely outperformed all his contemporaries in describing the corollary uses to which the inhabitants of his alternative world of 1924 have swiftly put them.
Nobody knew in 1925, of course, how clever the author was, nor was anyone in a position to make such an assessment for the next half-century and more, but we do know it now, and we are finally in a position to compliment the author of the story on his farsightedness. What most people do not know, of course, is the story, which has been so completely forgotten that it seems to me to be highly likely, at the time of writing, that I am the only person currently alive to have read it. That fate and the various reasons why the story suffered it might be of interest to any contemporary writers of futuristic fiction who harbor some slight hope that they might be capable of a similar feat of extrapolative logic.
The short novel in question is entitled “L’Olotélépan,” and it was serialized in the Nouvelle Revue between June and September 1925. It was never reprinted in book form, and that is the first and perhaps the most important reason why it was lost to sight. Books hang around, but even when old issues of periodicals survive, they do not often survive in a fashion that allows eight-part serials to be easily reconstructed and read. For that to happen, a revolution in communication technology was required—the same revolution, in fact, whose basic aspects are glimpsed in the story. It is also worth noting that the story might never have reached print at all had its author not been the editor-in-chief of the Nouvelle Revue at the time, and thus able to publish it without anyone else’s assistance.
The author in question is Henri Austruy, who had been hired as editorial secretary of the Nouvelle Revue in 1901, shortly after selling two novelettes to the then-editor, Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi. Gheusi had bought the periodical from its founder, the famous feminist and left-wing activist Juliette Adam in 1899, but he sold it in 1913 when he was appointed director of the Opéra-Comique, presumably to Austruy, who remained its editor-in-chief until 1940 when it ceased publication immediately after the Germans occupied Paris. Austruy, a committed pacifist on the far left of the Republican Movement, had been writing a regular column on foreign affairs for the previous twenty years, explicitly representing international diplomacy as an uphill battle to conserve peace, in which the arch-enemy, since the Nazis took power in Germany, was Adolf Hitler. He would certainly have been near the top of the Gestapo hit list when they began operations in Paris, and he vanished along with his periodical, probably murdered.
Since then, Austruy has been completely forgotten, and he might well have seemed marginal at the time to all but his close political allies—many of whom probably suffered the same fate as he—and his vengefully resentful enemies, none of whom would have been particularly interested in his literary endeavors. He had tried to build a literary career independently of the Nouvelle Revue before he took over as editor-in-chief, but the attempt had foundered. His first novel, L’Eupantophone, following serialization in the magazine in 1904, was published in book form by Ernest Flammarion and was soon followed by a second novel, L’Ère “Petitpaon”, ou La Paix Universelle (The Era of “The Little Peacock,” or, The Universal Peace), published by Louis Michaud in 1906. From that moment on, however, he was never published by anyone but himself, perhaps because that second novel, a scathing satire featuring an impending world war, succeeded all too well in offending the people attacked therein: the allegedly evil triple alliance of capital, the church, and the military. The climactic scene, in which a priest uses a crucifix to beat a helpless man to death at the door of Notre-Dame before the body is gleefully violated by a banker and a general who are about to seize imperial power in a coup d’état is all the more shocking for being the conclusion of a jocular comedy.
What might have helped Austruy to be remembered in one admittedly esoteric sector of literary history is the fact that four of his five novels and three of his six novelettes contain a significant element of speculative fiction. Many such works by other hands have attracted the attention of assiduous modern bibliographers because of their retrospective association with the American genre of science fiction. Austruy, however, has no entry in Pierre Versins’s Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972), which is the foundation-stone of all such bibliography in the French language, presumably because Versins never happened upon any of his works.
Later bibliographies of speculative fiction, such as the one complied by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficer in their French Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Pulp Fiction (2000), do mention the existence of L’Eupantophone and L’Ère “Petitpaon” but do not list any of the material that was only published in serial form. Even the BDFI forum—the discussion board of the Bases de Données Francophone de l’Imaginaire—which is normally a mine of useful information about obscure works of French speculative fiction, only mentions the existence of the two books without any comment suggesting that any of the contributors to the forum had actually read either of them—which, had any of them done so, might have prompted them to search gallica, the Bibliothéque Nationale’s web site, for further Austruy material. Had they done so, they would have come across all the rest, because gallica has an almost-complete run of the Nouvelle Revue.
Apart from the contributors to the BDFI Forum, there is probably only one person in the world who was ever likely to search gallica for material by Austruy, and even he would never have thought of doing so had he not come across the London Library’s (incomplete) run of the Nouvelle Revue while browsing the stacks one day and noticed the existence of L’Eupantophone while scanning the index to the 1879–1909 issues of the magazine. Even then, I think I can say without false modesty that carrying the search through to its eventual conclusion required a bizarre eccentricity that not many people possess.
Perhaps, too, it requires a bizarre eccentricity fully to appreciate the results of the search, because Henri Austruy, in purely literary terms, was a writer of truly heroic bizarrerie. I would not like to say that his later work would not have been published had he not published it himself, but because I would prefer to believe that there would have been other editors around not only brave enough to take it on but sufficiently passionate to boast about its merits, but it has to be admitted that there is certainly no one else like him. As a writer of idiosyncratic black farce, he had few peers.
That is, of course, another reason why no one could possibly have taken “L’Olotélépan” seriously; its speculations are not couched as “realistic” extrapolations but as an unfolding sequence of jokes: jokes that eventually turn sour when—as is typical of Austruy’s work—the comedy abruptly turns to stark tragedy. The part of the story that now seems very clever in its anticipation of such modern phenomena as electronic tagging, bugging, telecommuting, and phone sex comes to an end halfway through; it is followed by a comic account of the tribulations of the inventors of the olotelepan’s less practical predecessor, the telebus. But the climax of the story deals with the unfortunate fate of the luckless warlord, who suffers direly in the hands of the military surgeons of Paris and the unfortunate, reluctant Maréchal, who is ordered to take his mutilated body back to the Atlas for burial.
The prophetic success of “L’Olotélépan” was, of course, a freak of chance; none of the inventions in Austruy’s other works achieved anything similar. The two devices featured in L’Eupantophone, a reading machine and a tech
nology for restoring sight to the blind, are still on the drawing board, although neither seems nearly as incredible now as they must have done in 1904. The political “solution” to the problem of world peace—which actually precipitates a hugely destructive world war—featured in L’Ère “Petitpaon” was always beyond the pale of absurdity as are the life-preserving element tropheon that creates a temporary earthly paradise in “Miellune” (1908) and all the bizarre fish engineered by the ichthyomaniac hero of “La Révélation de Maître Flaver” (1939). The new atomic theory and the resulting therapeutics described in Austruy’s fourth novel, “Un Samsâra” (1932), are primarily contrived as a weirdly refractive lens through which to view the exceedingly strange but sharply poignant love story that provides the main plotline rather than as a serious scientific speculation. The threatened ecocatastrophe featured in “Le Jungle républicain” (1919) does seem much more pertinent today than it probably did then as does the argument that present political systems are utterly incapable of meeting such challenges, but that is so commonplace a contention that it hardly merits any particular congratulation.
What make all these stories interesting, in fact, is not so much their speculative elements per se as their peculiar manner of handling them, juxtaposing the farcical and the brutal, and sometimes intertwining them to surreal effect—a narrative method whose development is rooted in the work the author did before he began to dabble in speculative fiction. Like many of the French writers who dabbled in roman scientifique in the early 1900s, Austruy had begun his literary career as an affiliate of the Symbolist movement, and his early short stories include several heavy allegorical fantasies, the best of which are the first three novelettes he published in the Nouvelle Revue, “La Statue” (1901), “Le Château” (1901), and “Le Pays d’Humanie” (1902). As the Symbolist movement came to seem obsolete, however, its writers moved on in several different directions; in developing a penchant for satirical humor and studied grotesquerie, Austruy was following in the footsteps of Frédéric Boutet and probably took some inspiration from Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire, two writers who were among the most important precursors of the Surrealist movement. Although he was never identified with that movement and never published any of its writers in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue, the dreamlike development of some of his stories (especially “La Taverne” [1899], “Miellune,” and “La Révélation de Maître Flaver”) suggests that he had some interest in the Surrealists’ hypnopompic methods as well as employing similar imagery.
The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue 310, June, 2014 Page 4
