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In The Biocole (1927), Professor Tornada conquers death itself and becomes the creator and virtual god of a utopian enclave called Biocolia. In The Case of Baroness Sasoitsu (1939), the eccentric scientist solves a baffling murder case by using his psychovisor which translates thoughts into images. The book also includes the novella In the Afterlife…
Henri Austry, born in 1871, was a Parisian attorney, a writer and the editor of La Nouvelle Revue from 1913 until his unrecorded death during the Nazi occupation of France. Virtually forgotten today, he was the author of several remarkable, humorous and imaginative works of science fiction in the vein of Robert Sheckley and R….
Henri Austry, born in 1871, was a Parisian attorney, a writer and the editor of La Nouvelle Revue from 1913 until his unrecorded death during the Nazi occupation of France. Virtually forgotten today, he was the author of several remarkable, humorous and imaginative works of science fiction in the vein of Robert Sheckley and R….
Henri Austry, born in 1871, was a Parisian attorney, a writer and the editor of La Nouvelle Revue from 1913 until his unrecorded death during the Nazi occupation of France. Virtually forgotten today, he was the author of several remarkable, humorous and imaginative works of science fiction in the vein of Robert Sheckley and R….
In this unofficial sequel to Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, astronomer Francois Mathieu-Rollere, Lord Douglas Rodilan and two Frenchmen, Marcel and Jacques, purchase the giant cannon and shell used by the Gun Club to send the first men into space and launch their own expedition to the Moon. Once there, they encounter…
Edgar Quinet’s Merlin (1860) is an epic masterpiece and one of the first works to revisit the myth of Merlin in the 19th century. In it, Merlin is created by the King of Hell to spread evil on Earth, but his love for the fey Viviane turns him instead into a force for good. Forced…
War-anticipation stories began to published just before World War I, reflecting the mood of the times. During the war itself, the archetypal thriller was likely to be a covert spy story featuring new, game-changing technologies and embryonic superweapons. Once the subgenre was established, it was maintained even in peacetime by its inherent melodramatic potential-it is…
Han Ryner (1861-1938) was a French anarchist, a philosopher and a startlingly original science fiction writer in pre-Wellsian, French scientific romance; he was once voted the Prince of Storytellers by a popular magazine. In The Human Ant (1901), a man is miraculously transformed into an ant by a fairy. Trapped into the universe of the…
Set in the 1920s, though written in the 1890s, Jules Lermina’s The Battle of Strasbourg is credited by historians of futuristic fiction with launching the literary genre known as “yellow peril” fiction. It is also one of the first “immersive fantasies” to be completely set in the future and the earliest to do so straightforwardly….
In Paris Before the Deluge (1866), Hippolyte Mettais, the author of The Year 5865, displays his imaginative reach, creating a novel that incorporates the lost city of Atlantis, the biblical story of the Flood, and the founding of Paris. Set more than four thousand years in the past, Paris Before the Deluge is a lesson…
The Revolt of the Machines, translated and annotated by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford, features eight stories written between 1865 and 1918, providing a cross-section of the early development of what the editor of the 19th century magazine La Science Ilustrée, Louis Figuier, called roman scientifique [scientific fiction]. Expanding upon the scientific…
Barillet-Lagargousse’s The Final War (1885), takes the European arms race of the late 19th century to its logical end: a terrifying deadlock due to the political and social paralysis caused by weapons sufficiently powerful to be seemingly unbeatable. Based on a then-new idea, The Final War is the first elaborate extrapolation of the strangely modern…
Before writing The Enchanted City: A Journey to Lake Tanganyika (1885), Eugene Hennebert consulted Jules Verne; the result is a novel that combines exotic adventures with scientific discovery, with a buoyant tone and an action-packed narrative. Following on the trail of past heroic expeditions, a disparate band of French explorers, embark upon the quest for…
Leonie Rouzade, angry, combative, and prominent in the feminist cause, delivered a scathing social commentary in this pair of tales from 1872. When a shipwreck strands a man in a perfect island civilization in A Voyage to the Isle of Utopia, he, after confronting a parade of didactic lectures, accepts that the rigors of logic…
Meet Dr. Marc Vanel, son of a scientist and a beautiful exotic spy, polymath, engineer, gifted with prodigious strength and intelligence, trained by the Brahmins of India. When Vanel acquires the power of invisibility, he becomes Homo-Deus, invisible but for his emerald green eyes, haunting the dreams of evil men and lovely women alike. Felicien…
Edmond Haraucourt’s Daâh: The First Human (1914) begins with the proto-humans Dâh and his wives, Hock and Ta, living a solitary existence, and then sketches, episodically, an account of their slow ascent towards civilization. With Daâh serving as a kind of “collective hero,” the novel proceeds through a sequence of epiphanies that includes the invention…
