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In the middle of the Great Hungarian Plain, there are two graves. Each is covered by a black stone, which carry inscriptions in French. On the larger one: Jean T?n?bre, Chevalier; on the smaller: Ange T?n?bre, Priest. They are the T?n?bre brothers… On many occasions, during the last four hundred years, those graves have opened,…
In vita mors, in morte vita! In life, death; in death, life! The particular gift of Countess Addhema was to be reborn beautiful and young every time she could apply to the hideous bareness of her skull a living head of hair, a scalp, torn from the head of a living victim. This was why…
Some tell of a great city of black jasper which has streets and buildings like any other city but is eternally in mourning, enveloped by perpetual gloom. Some call it Selene, some Vampire City, but the vampires refer to it among themselves by the name of the Sepulchre… To destroy the dreaded vampire lord Otto…
A balloon ascent to the Heavens… A man with X-ray vision… A utopian metal city built on giant pylons above Paris… A sexless world in which women reproduce parthenogenetically and man is unknown… Is science insane? Unholy? See nine French authors of the 19th century grapple in a ground-breaking fashion with the future themes of…
The mysterious Lord Ruthwen travels to Venice and strikes again, killing the beautiful Bettina and torturing her lover, Léonti, who swears to avenge her. He joins vampire hunters Aubrey and Nadoor Ali to search for the elusive monster… Cyprien Bérard’s The Vampire Lord Ruthwen (1820) was the first sequel to continue John-William Polidori’s 1819 ground-breaking…
Published the same year as Jules Verne’s classic From the Earth to the Moon and Henri de Parville’s An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars, Achille Eyraud’s Voyage to Venus (1865) was the first novel to describe an interplanetary rocket-powered spaceship. Eyraud supports his design with an elaborate (but ultimately flawed) pseudo-scientific argument and describes its…
The undisputed masterpiece of Gabriel de Lautrec (1867-1938), THE VENGEANCE OF THE OVAL PORTRAIT, which borrows its title from Edgar Allan Poe, is a collection of 28 stories at the crossroads of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Its singular inspiration owes as much to the author’s predilection for dark humor, Grand Guignol and the mixing…
In Albert Bleunard’s Ever Smaller (1893), the first modern novel on the theme of the “Shrinking Man,” a group of scientists are shrunken down, first to insect-size, to explore an ordinary garden, which becomes as perilous to them as an alien world; then, to microbe-size inside a drop of water and, finally, into a rose…
In the 40 stories assembled in this collection, originally published in 1901, journalist Paul Vibert explores such ground-breaking concepts as the artificial insemination of elephants with the seed of prehistoric mastodons found preserved in ice, the artificial production of microbe-sized humans, the existence of an underwater world inhabited by Ancient Jews, communication with Mars and…
Twenty years before Peary, a French scientific expedition to the North Pole becomes stranded in the ice. Because of their knowledge and local resources, they manage to build a super-scientific city dubbed Crystalopolis. However, rival American and Russian explorers threaten the new conquerors of the Arctic… Alphonse Brown was one of the first French writers…
1866. After the disappearance of their master, Colonel Bozzo-Corona, fourteen years earlier, the Black Coats are a mere travesty of their former selves. Taking advantage of the situation, young Saladin, nicknamed the “Sword-Swallower,” the son of Similor, a gang member, now the wily Marquis de Rosenthal, steps into the void and becomes the new Godfather….
Henri Allorge’s The Great Cataclysm (1927) takes place in the Age of Science in the year 9978 when Earth has cooled down and a population of scientists and artists live in a handful of great cities scattered across the globe. They spend their time studying the ruins of the great cities of the past and…
Illa’s End (1925) begins with the emergence of a new island on which are found a cache of ancient documents and a small fragment of “zero-stone.” A scientist manages to decypher the documents, which tell the tale of the apocalyptic clash between the lost Gondwanan cities of Illa and Nour. Illa’s End features an array…
During one of Napoleon’s military campaigns, Edouard Delmont, a young officer, promised to marry Alinska, a Hungarian girl. Back in France, he goes back on his vows and marries someone else. Several years later, Alinska suddenly reappears in his life, transformed into an avenging vampire. She threatens to kill his wife and children unless he…
In Amilec (1753), Charles-François Tiphaigne de la Roche conceived the concept of journeys through the Solar System. His extrapolation of the manner in which human seeds are used to populate other planets may seem primitive, but it is a fascinating prediction of what will eventually become cosmology and embriology. In 1760, Tiphaigne sent his characters…
During a tropical storm over the Pacific, French Air Force Captain L’Herbaudière is mysteriously transported to a utopia-like society of free love which rejected money and technology two thousand years earlier. But even that utopia has its dark side: the Accursed, a prison-state locked behind an impregnable magnetic barrier, where those who refuse to live…
