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The Year 5865 was published in 1865. It is a remarkable novel, consisting of a first-person narrative related by a character living 4000 years hence, after various disasters have obliterated almost all the documents relating to the world with which we are familiar. In consequence, the narrator’s knowledge of the reader’s world is severely limited…
Joseph Méry (1798-1866) was the nearest French equivalent to Edgar Allan Poe as a ground-breaking pioneer of speculative fiction. The title piece is a significant exercise in alternate history, in which Méry imagined that Napoleon’s life took a different turn in Egypt in 1799. The Truth About Creation argues in a mock-serious manner that there…
This is a new collection of seven French proto-science fiction stories devoted to explorations of the future, as imagined in the 1850s and early 1900s, translated and annotated by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford. This collection includes fantastic explorations of Future Paris by Théophile Gautier, Arsène Houssaye, Victor Fournel as well as…
The Future City signed “Alain le Drimeur” (a Frenchification of “Alan the Dreamer”) was published in 1890, probably inspired by Edward Bellamy’s best-selling Looking Backward, 2000-1887. The Future City postulates that the Conservatives left France in 1891 to emigrate en masse to the island of La Réunion, where they established a Roman Catholic kingdom that…
Félicien Champsaur’s Ouha, King of the Apes (1923) is the thematic “missing link” between Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and Edgar Wallace’s King Kong (1933). In it, Ouha, an exceptional ape from the jungles of Borneo, is educated and transformed into the “Napoleon of Apes” by a well-meaning American scientist. But tragically,…
In The Human Microbes, a man unjustly accused of a murder by an evil mastermind manages to escape the guillotine and embarks on a quest for revenge that will draw in its wake a cast of characters, including mad doctors, lost children, strange gypsies, Irish revolutionaries, Russian anarchists and Utopians. In 1883, the notorious anarchist…
In The New World, the Arctic Utopian community founded at the end of The Human Microbes by Dr. Gaël, comprised of the victims of tyranny rescued by Captain Josiah and his “phantom brig,” is threatened by the evil Judge Roll Wolff, intent on destroying it to cover his crimes… In 1883, the notorious anarchist Louise…
In 1925, Ernest Pérochon, a winner of the prestigious Goncourt literary award, penned The Frenetic People, a prescient warning against unchecked technology. The novel takes place in our 30th century, the 5th century of the new Universal Era, after a bacteriological war with Asia. Boundless energy is provided by the controlled disintegration of matter. The…
In 1849, the mysterious Doctor Salomon Kanali and his family arrive in a Paris ravaged by a cholera epidemic. But is this Kanali the same embalmer who claimed to have the power to resurrect the dead? And why does his wife fear that her daughter Marthe is being wooed by the same vampire who once…
Shortly after the end of World War I, the fall of an asteroid in the Atlantic causes a tidal wave and gives birth to a new island. An expedition sent by the French government discovers that it is made of iron… and gold! The exploitation of the new island could upset the world’s economic order…
In 1775, industrial chemist Louis-Guillaume de La Follie wrote The Unpretentious Philosopher, in which an inhabitant of Mercury who employs a spaceship powered by electricity to undertake a voyage of exploration to Earth, becomes stranded on our planet when his ship crashes. This forces him to embark on a long search for the exotic materials…
Who is the Baron de Saint-Magloire? Coming from nowhere, he has quickly become the most prominent banker in Paris. Ministers and generals flock to his parties, and he has no equal when it comes to amassing money through speculations. But what is his relationship with Macaron, the dreaded anarchist, and Professor Sokoloff, a genius who…
Mad scientists, parrots from Atlantis, witches, madmen, monsters, korrigans, demons, magical paintings and a water sprite trapped in a mirror are but a few of the amazing characters featured in this collection of 45 stories from the 1890s and early 1900s, aptly entitled The Crazy Corner, which maps out the frontier between madness and nightmare….
Within the history of the French popular fiction, The Conquest of the Air (1875) with its trip around the world in forty days in a steam-powered flying machine, is significant in terms of its prediction of the development of future aviation; as well as its contribution to the development of Vernian fiction. Alphonse Brown was…
In Rouletabille at Krupp’s (1917), Gaston Leroux followed the template created by John Buchan in Greenamtle (1916), in which a heroic secret agent is conscripted to carry out an officially-sanctioned dangerous mission in enemy territory. Here, it’s fearless investigative journalist Joseph Josephin, aka Rouletabille, who is sent into the heart of the Kaiser’s armaments factories…
Judith Gautier (1845-1917) was the daughter of the great Romantic writer, Théophile Gautier. Isoline features an extraordinary heroine and recycles Sleeping Beauty with a sharp ironic edge. The Serpent-Flower deals with guilt and vengeance from beyond the grave. Too Late is a subversive pastiche of hallucinatory erotic obsession. Her Oriental stories, such as The Prince…
