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The modern literary archetype of the mad scientist was wonderfully incarnated in the French proto-science fiction saga of The Mysterious Dr. Cornelius, a sprawling novel serialized in eighteen volumes in 1912-13, written by the prolific Gustave Le Rouge, author of The Vampires of Mars and The Dominion of the World. Dr. Cornelius Kramm and his…
Imbued with a sense of light-hearted cynicism, literary crictic Jules Janin (1804-1874) penned a vast number of eccentric and sometimes improvised fantastic and horror stories, now mostly forgotten. This first-ever American collection gathers a sampler of his unusual talent, as exemplified by the eponymous tale about a dead man kept alive by magnetism, published several…
On 25 June 1906, the readers of the daily newspaper LE MATIN discovered this terrifying headline: “SOMEONE IS STEALING CHILDREN IN PARIS! EVERY DAY! On the Grands Boulevards and quiet residential streets! Children have disappeared Boulevard Montmartre, Rue Caumartin, Rue Royale, Rue Racine, Avenue Niel, Passage des Panoramas, Cité Rougemont. In full daylight, with diabolical…
The Necessary Evil (1899) features Dr. Armand Caresco, a conscienceless surgeon carrying out medical experiments. Caresco sees himself as an intellectual superman whose discoveries might enable humankind to take a leap forward. This daring book dared to broach such shocking topics as the methodology and occasional necessity of hysterectomies. André Couvreur (1863-1944), himself a medical…
Dr. Caresco returns in Caresco, Superman (1904), in which the brilliant but mad scientist rules the body-shaped island of Eucrasia whose inhabitants have been transformed–“improved”–by a variety of advanced surgical techniques. The natives are addicted to sensual pleasures, subservient to the will of Caresco, whom they call the “Superman”, for fear that he will castrate…
The deadly Madame Atomos is a brilliant but twisted Japanese scientist who is out to avenge herself against the United States for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where she lost her family. Opposing her are Smith Beffort of the FBI, Dr. Alan Soblen, and Yosho Akamatsu of the Japanese Secret Police. This classic French…
The Vampires of London (1852) is a nested series of contes cruels aggregated into a quintessentially Romantic roman frénétique, and one of the most excessive and convoluted works of that kind. Some of the scenes featuring the necrophilic vampire Lord Lodore or the one in which a young man tries to pimp his sick sister…
Published in 1908, the same year as Gustave Le Rouge’s The Vampires of Mars, this pioneering planetary romance is the third French Martian epic after Doctor Omega (1906) and Jean de La Hire’s The Nyctalope on Mars (1911), written three years before Burroughs began work on A Princess of Mars. The bold French Engineer Serge…
Elric of Melinoboné… Duke Dorian Hawkmoon of Köln… Prince Corum Jhaelen Irsei of the Scarlet Robe… The unflappable English Assassin Jerry Cornelius… Time-lost Oswald Bastable… Count Renark von Bek of the Sundered Worlds… Over the years, Michael Moorcock has captivated readers with his unending versions of the Eternal Champion, the timeless warrior who serves the…
There was a chaotic tumult of ideas in his head, a cerebral activity a hundred times more intense than that of the most exalting drunkenness. He clasped his forehead with his hand, thinking that he was going mad. Gabriel Mirande inherits a serum from a friend, the chemist Brion, which enables him to read minds….
In An Invasion of Macrobes (1909), Professor Tornada, unhinged by the death of his wife and daughter, and unable to withstand the blow of having been rejected by the French Academy, unleashes giant, flesh-eating bacteria, immune to the assaults of artillery and high explosives, on Paris, intent on smashing it flat. In the ground-breaking The…
In The Phosphorescent Waltzer(1923), the indomitable Professor Tornada creates an android and in Memoirs Of An Immortal(1924), he tackles the concept of suspended animation. André Couvreur (1865-1944) was a medical doctor who penned several medical treatises, and was also the author of eight romans scientifiques dealing with “medical concepts” featuring the mad scientists Doctor Caresco,…
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….
