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In 1925, Ernest Pérochon, a winner of the prestigious Goncourt literary award, penned The Frenetic People, a prescient warning against unchecked technology. The novel takes place in our 30th century, the 5th century of the new Universal Era, after a bacteriological war with Asia. Boundless energy is provided by the controlled disintegration of matter. The…
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…
Shortly after the end of World War I, the fall of an asteroid in the Atlantic causes a tidal wave and gives birth to a new island. An expedition sent by the French government discovers that it is made of iron… and gold! The exploitation of the new island could upset the world’s economic order…
In 1775, industrial chemist Louis-Guillaume de La Follie wrote The Unpretentious Philosopher, in which an inhabitant of Mercury who employs a spaceship powered by electricity to undertake a voyage of exploration to Earth, becomes stranded on our planet when his ship crashes. This forces him to embark on a long search for the exotic materials…
Who is the Baron de Saint-Magloire? Coming from nowhere, he has quickly become the most prominent banker in Paris. Ministers and generals flock to his parties, and he has no equal when it comes to amassing money through speculations. But what is his relationship with Macaron, the dreaded anarchist, and Professor Sokoloff, a genius who…
Within the history of the French popular fiction, The Conquest of the Air (1875) with its trip around the world in forty days in a steam-powered flying machine, is significant in terms of its prediction of the development of future aviation; as well as its contribution to the development of Vernian fiction. Alphonse Brown was…
In Rouletabille at Krupp’s (1917), Gaston Leroux followed the template created by John Buchan in Greenamtle (1916), in which a heroic secret agent is conscripted to carry out an officially-sanctioned dangerous mission in enemy territory. Here, it’s fearless investigative journalist Joseph Josephin, aka Rouletabille, who is sent into the heart of the Kaiser’s armaments factories…
Love in Five Thousand Years (1908) belongs to the brief surge of ambitious French romans scientifiques that followed the enthusiastic publication of H.G. Wells’ novels in France around the turn of the century. In a futuristic post-apocalyptic world, thousand of years after the Martians, disgusted by Earth’s bloody history, almost exterminated the Human Race, births…
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…
Paris in the Year 2000 by Doctor Tony Moilin was published in 1869. A year later, Moilin was charged with involvement in a plot to assassinate Napoléon III and sentenced to prison for five years. He was liberated during the Prussians’ siege of Paris, and enlisted in the National Guard as a surgeon. When the…
Louis Boussenard’s two most memorable novels were The Secrets of Monsieur Synthesis (1888) and its sequel, Ten Thousand Years in a Block of Ice (1889). In the former, we are introduced to the title character, the eponymous “Monsieur Synthesis,” a mad scientist who seeks to control the evolution of Man and modify the orbit of…
Aurore Lescure, the first woman astronaut, who starred in The Xenobiotic Invasion, returns in this ground-breaking novel about the first successful interplanetary flight to the planetoid Eros. There, the intrepid explorers discover that evolution on Eros has taken a different turn than on Earth, producing a species of intelligent dinosaurs… The notion of a Japanese-financed…
In Electric Life (1892), Albert Robida imagined the life of the future, imbued with all kinds of fantastic devices meant to simplify the lives of their users. The father of science fiction illustration, and the author of The Clock of the Centuries and The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul, Robida (1848-1926) was the most significant of…
The Eternal Flame (1931) and its sequel Pink Sky (1933) (included in this volume) are two of the few novels about scientific discovery to focus on the economic implications of such discoveries, including publicity, capitalization and the conflict of vested interests. It was a pioneering work in its development of those themes, especially with regard…
In a Thousand Years (1884) is solidly set in the tradition of “euchronian” fiction, arguing that political reform goes hand in hand with technological progress. Calvet paints a ground-breaking picture of a world transformed by prolifically-distributed electric power and aerial transportation, demonstrating an attention to utilitarian detail rare among other constructors of futuristic utopias. Calvet’s…
In Jean de La Hire’s original 1943 novel, The King of the Night, translated by Brian Stableford, the Nyctalope travels to Rhea, a wandering planetoid inhabited by two warring races of ape-men and bat-men, and forces the two species to make peace. In its all-new sequel, Return of the Nyctalope, by Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier,…
