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Two thrilling novels featuring scientist and world-saving explorer Doctor Ardan, created in 1928, five years before Doc Savage. These two ground-breaking SF adventures have been translated by award-winning authors Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier. In The Troglodytes of Mount Everest (1929), young Francis Ardan, who has just earned his title of Doctor, embarks for a cruise…
“Let’s return to Baker Street, Harry,” he said. “The evidence is indisputable; the conclusion inescapable… We face Fantômas!” Southampton, England, 1910. Jack the Ripper is back — or is he? A series of ghastly murders are reported near the estate of Lord Beltham. Young detective Harry Dickson is mentored by Sherlock Holmes to take over…
The Mirror of Present Events (1790) is an irreverent political allegory in which a Syracusan beauty, following Archimedes’ death, offers her hand in marriage to the inventor who can produce the most innovative homage to the great man’s mechanical genius. A series of suitors comes forward, each offering a mechanical device ostensibly more marvelous than…
Forty-three years before Jules Verne, and ninety-three years before Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jacques Collin de Plancy, remembered today for his Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology, penned Voyage to the Center of the Earth (1821), which is both an adventure story and a utopian fantasy in the Voltairean tradition. An expedition is mounted to discover the…
The Chimerical Quest (1932) deals with an eccentric scientist, crippled during the Great War, who has discovered a method of converting lead into gold but wishes to give his secret away as soon as he has perfected it, so that anyone will be able to make gold, thus fulfilling his dream of turning society upside…
In 1810 the French bade good-bye to torture, including whipping and the rack. Beginning in 1832 those convicted of parricide no longer needed suffer the amputation of their right hand before being put to death. Death by guillotine, however, endured until 1977, despite the opposition of Victor Hugo, his son Charles, and many others to…
The Virgin Orient, an Epic Novel of the Year 2000 (1897) is the account of a preventive strike by Europe, united under the government of Anarchism, against the perceived Yellow Peril. Even though his accounts of two crucial battles fought in India are extended and bloody, Mauclair’s primary purpose is not to detail the war…
British, French and American traditions of speculative fiction developed separately for more than a hundred years, with only slight overlaps prior to 1926, and continued to develop thereafter in accordance with different foci of interest and narrative methods, until the importation of the American label of “science fiction” initiated a process of fusion that was…
Emile Gaboriau, who was Paul Féval’s secretary, penned these two masterpieces of early detective novels in 1867: The Orcival Murder: Poachers discover the lifeless body of Countess of Tremorel in the woods near her castle. Her home has been ransacked and her husband has vanished. Despite the myriad of clues left to mislead the police,…
The Secret Bureau (1849) is the first volume in a series of four that tells the story of the Hulet family which, for generations, has headed the government’s spy network, the Secret Bureau, that intercepts and opens all private mail. It follows the ambitious Henri Hulet as he tries to avoid the fatal destiny marked…
This collection presents four French “utopian fantasies” which were all ground-breaking in their day. Victor Considerant’s The Complete News from the Moon (1836) is a utopia in which the society described is only related to existing societies in satirical terms, and very subtly. Fernand Giraudeau’s The New City (1868) and Joseph Déjacque’s The Humanisphere (1899)…
In The Discovery of the Austral Continent by a Flying Man (1781), Victorin devises a set of artificial wings to abduct his beloved Christine, before setting her up on top of a mountain as queen of her own utopia. Then he relocates to the southern ocean where he visits islands inhabited by giants and other…
Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) produced over 180 books, totaling some 57,000 pages, many of them printed by his own hand, on almost every conceivable subject. Praised in Germany, he was mostly forgotten in France until being rediscovered by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. Two of his most important seminal works are…
Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) produced over 180 books, totaling some 57,000 pages, many of them printed by his own hand, on almost every conceivable subject. Praised in Germany, he was mostly forgotten in France until being rediscovered by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. Two of his most important seminal works are…
Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) produced over 180 books, totaling some 57,000 pages, many of them printed by his own hand, on almost every conceivable subject. Praised in Germany, he was mostly forgotten in France until being rediscovered by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. Two of his most important seminal works are…
Henri-René “Jimmy” Guieu (1926-2000) was one of the leading French SF authors of the 1950s and 60s, before he turned to the exploration of UFOs and parapsychological phenomena. In this classic six-volume saga (presented in English in two volumes), written in 1954 through 1956, Guieu introduced his signature hero, French paleoanthropologist Jean Kariven, and imagined…
