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Love in Five Thousand Years (1908) belongs to the brief surge of ambitious French romans scientifiques that followed the enthusiastic publication of H.G. Wells’ novels in France around the turn of the century. In a futuristic post-apocalyptic world, thousand of years after the Martians, disgusted by Earth’s bloody history, almost exterminated the Human Race, births…
In New York, the Mage Ormus, claiming to be the reincarnation of Tutankhamun, has gathered around him a coterie of disciples chosen amongst the world’s wealthiest elite in order to relive the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt. One of them, the Duchess of Rutland, may well be the reincarnation of Am-Phaoli, the Pharaoh’s wife. But is…
Paris in the Year 2000 by Doctor Tony Moilin was published in 1869. A year later, Moilin was charged with involvement in a plot to assassinate Napoléon III and sentenced to prison for five years. He was liberated during the Prussians’ siege of Paris, and enlisted in the National Guard as a surgeon. When the…
Louis Boussenard’s two most memorable novels were The Secrets of Monsieur Synthesis (1888) and its sequel, Ten Thousand Years in a Block of Ice (1889). In the former, we are introduced to the title character, the eponymous “Monsieur Synthesis,” a mad scientist who seeks to control the evolution of Man and modify the orbit of…
In 1675, a female vampire possessing the secret of immortality was burned alive. Forty-five years later, during a dinner at the table of the French Regent, her then-lover, Marquis de la Roche-Maubert, discovers that another guest, Chevalier d’Esparron, is in love with the same immortal woman. However, her attraction to him is not to satisfy…
Aurore Lescure, the first woman astronaut, who starred in The Xenobiotic Invasion, returns in this ground-breaking novel about the first successful interplanetary flight to the planetoid Eros. There, the intrepid explorers discover that evolution on Eros has taken a different turn than on Earth, producing a species of intelligent dinosaurs… The notion of a Japanese-financed…
In Electric Life (1892), Albert Robida imagined the life of the future, imbued with all kinds of fantastic devices meant to simplify the lives of their users. The father of science fiction illustration, and the author of The Clock of the Centuries and The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul, Robida (1848-1926) was the most significant of…
The Centaurs (1904) chronicles the last days of the Era of the Beasts that preceded ours, when Fauns, Tritons and other now-mythical creatures shared the Earth. In that wild world, the balance of nature is maintained by the Centaurs. The One Law is Thou Shalt Not Kill. But one day, Klevorak, the King of the…
The Eternal Flame (1931) and its sequel Pink Sky (1933) (included in this volume) are two of the few novels about scientific discovery to focus on the economic implications of such discoveries, including publicity, capitalization and the conflict of vested interests. It was a pioneering work in its development of those themes, especially with regard…
In a Thousand Years (1884) is solidly set in the tradition of “euchronian” fiction, arguing that political reform goes hand in hand with technological progress. Calvet paints a ground-breaking picture of a world transformed by prolifically-distributed electric power and aerial transportation, demonstrating an attention to utilitarian detail rare among other constructors of futuristic utopias. Calvet’s…
In the midst of World War I, German and French explorers discover a vast, mysterious Pacific island where they encounter a race of “missing links” that time forgot. But they also bring to that peaceful utopia the ravages of the bloodiest war ever fought. The Children of the Crab (1921) shares some common themes with…
In Danse Macabre, set in 1438, the sinister Macabre lives in the cemetery of the Saint-Innocents in Paris, sleeping in a coffin with his wife Giborne. He has amassed a fortune through producing the eponymous play in a ghastly theater made of bones, and selling clothes stolen from the dead. His partner, Benjamin, falls in…
Artist André Fortis is the victim of a strange curse that suddenly and unexpectedly turns him into an entirely different man, with his own life, artistic styles and preoccupations, thus splitting his existence into two separate lives — his and the Other’s. Can he be cured by the mysterious Dr. Klipper who claims to have…
The story told in Ahasuerus (1834) begins with the Creation of the world and moves rapidly to the Last Judgment. But it does not end there, as have previous literary visions of the Apocalypse, but goes beyond it, in order to pass judgment on the verdict. In this startingly original epic, the Last Judgment is…
In 1908, Jean de La Hire, the creator of The Nyctalope, penned The Fiery Wheel, a classic space opera in which five Earthmen are abducted in the eponymous spacecraft by aliens from Saturn, and taken to Venus and Mercury where they encounter strange lifeforms, before returning to Earth through mind transfer. The Fiery Wheel is…
Captain Cap was the fictitious mouthpiece that Alphonse Allais used to tell the tallest of his tall stories and develop his most exotic story ideas, including the majority of those that would nowadays be considered science-fictional. Allais liked to keep up with contemporary developments in science, and was ever ready to adapt ideas therefrom —…
