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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…
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,…
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…
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 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…
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 short stories included in this collection are like bottles thrown into the vast ocean, each containing a fragment of a universe inside… Alf… The Ghostbusters… Hellraiser… Judex… The Nyctalope… Arsène Lupin… The Black Coats… From Paris in 1925 to Diaspar at the End of Time, from New York to Alphaville, the walls between the…
This is the thirteenth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique. The seven stories collected here were published between 1784 and 1928. They include two remarkable tales about Future Paris, the first story to seize upon the potential of air balloons as imaginative devices,…
The enigmatic immortal Axel Rathenius has been commissioned to paint a triptych illustrating the life of Orpheus. Meanwhile, an enigmatic legacy propels him, his agent Myrica Mavor, Madame Vashti Savage the medium, and the mournful poet Hecate Rain in the midst of a conflict between the rival cults of Orpheus and Dionysus. Brian Stableford’s latest…
The Second Life of Doctor Albin (1902) belongs to a set of fictions that explore the supposed psychology typical of scientists with considerable analytical intensity. One of the central tenets of these is that scientific genius is incompatible with, and perhaps antithetical to, love between the sexes. The novel provides what is perhaps the most…
Carte Blanche! The complete freedom to act without restrictions! When heroes let their passions or thirst for justice go unchecked, and villains go wild, spreading chaos and destruction! Doctor Ardan meet the People of the Pole! Doctor Omega teams up with Ki-Gor to find the secret of the Yeti! Maigret, Father Brown and Dr. Watson…
This is the twelfth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique. The eleven stories collected here were published between 1832 and 1932. They include three remarkable tales about automata and homonculi, including one in which the manufacture of an artificial human being is credited…
The New Moon (1770) follows in the footsteps of Cyrano de Bergerac’s History of the States and Empires of the Moon, describing the epic journey of a lunar native, which takes him on a tour of the nations of the Moon, ending on the island of Eutoquia, the fictional equivalent of Utopia. A Journey from…
Jim Click invents a robot in the image of his friend, Admiral Horatio Gunson, on the eve of a great battle. Everything starts going wrong when the robot kills his model. Frightened, the inventor then sets up a fabulous hoax, in which his automaton will act as if he were the real admiral. And after…
From the sun-bleached streets of Tunis to the bottom of the seas, from the sordid back alleys of Paris to the blood-drenched trenches of the Somme, Sâr Dubnotal, the Great Psychagogue, his disciple Rudolph, his medium Gianetti Annunciata, and his trio of assistants, Frank, Fréjus and Otto, pursue evil wherever it hides. The evil hypnotist…
Five utopian fantasies: * The Aerial Valley (1810) proves that a utopian society can only maintain stability if it remains technologically limited and isolated from outside influences; it is a sensitive challenge to the philosophy of progress as an instrument of perfectibility. * The Year 2800 (1829) bases its anticipations of future improvement on bold…
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