The Man with the Blue Face

This is the ninth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique. The eight stories collected here were published between 1860 and 1928. They include two remarkable short novels: Charles Guyons’s A Voyage to the Planet Venus (1888), a significant early “planetary romance” in which human explorers visit the colorful, prehistoric world of Venus, and Arnould Galopin’s The Man with the Blue Face (1907), in which the author of Doctor Omega describes in frightfully realistic terms how a scientist driven mad by grief uses deadly germs to revenge himself on the inhabitants of Paris.