The Olotelepan

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. A. Lafferty. His stories possess an idiosyncratic eccentricity that makes them highly unusual — a quality worthy of interest and high praise in the field of imaginative literature. There is literally nothing else quite like them. The Olotelepan (1925) is set in an alternative history-a world like our own, but which has diverged as a result of the invention and widespread marketing of the eponymous device, a wireless apparatus that instantaneously transports the senses to indefinite distances. This collection features two other stories, including the ground-breaking A Samsara (1932) in which a scientist devises a new technology that enables the regeneration of souls.