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Richard Bessière made his mark on 1960s French science fiction through a number of novels that featured an original blend of horror and SF. In The Masters of Silence (1965), Engineer Milland has been summoned to a secret lab by Professor Watson, but when he arrives, Watson has just been murdered by his wife, Valerie,…
Homicron, a NASA physicist whose body is inhabited by an alken intelligence, Starlock, the fugitive servant of awesome cosmic entities, Jaydee, a teenage alien metamorph abandoned on Earth, Jaleb, the telepathic agent of the Galactic Federation and Futura, a mysterious woman from another dimension, are gathered together by Tanka, a former jungle lord and agent…
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…
When inhuman monsters walk the Earth, threatening the good and the helpless, Justice has no stronger defenders than Harry Dickson and his assistant Tom Wills, who fight the forces of evil and cast them back into the Darkness from whence they came. Harry Dickson began as an unauthorized Sherlock Holmes pulp series in Germany in…
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…
One night a week, NYPD officer Lisa Kilpatrick plays the piano and sings in a club-her true passion. But after she witnesses the phenomenon known as ” Manhattanedge “, a solstice event during which the setting sun is aligned with the east-west streets of the main grid of the island, she suddenly topples into another,…
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. In this tenth…
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…
At long last, Arsène Lupin sets his sights on the fourth and final secret of Cagliostro: the God-Stone of the Kings of Bohemia, a miraculous stone that has the power “to give life and death,” hidden on the island of Sarek, nicknamed the “Island of the Thirty Coffins” because of its barrier of deadly reefs….
Force Majeure! Two words which convey the notion of catastrophe, a sense of urgency, earth-shaking events when only the greatest of champions can successfully face off with the most cataclysmic of threats! Here is Gilgamesh, the Lord of Bronze, challenged by the Devil Doctor… Arsene Lupin relentlessly pursued by the invincible Adam Adamant… The indomitable…
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…
