Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  The struggle with the alien question has had a long life in SF. The phenomenon of déjà vu was much discussed in Rosny’s time. Maupassant’s protagonist in the second version of “Le Horla,” for example, considers the possibility that the demons and monsters of popular lore were in fact sightings of aliens, misunderstood at the time by the superstitious mind.21 Some eighty years later, Arthur C. Clarke, in Childhood’s End (1953), created a story line in which, in hard SF fashion, a significant figure of legend is revealed in fact to be a physical reality, and “supernatural” terror is explained away by rational observation. A race of aliens, the Overlords, appears in humankind’s near future. They have wings, horns, and tails, and part of the plot centers around their being mistaken for devils. In the end the Overlords themselves explain the mystery: long ago they visited Earth; they were spotted by early humans, who in their fear associated horns and a tail with their most terrible superstitions. In the Xipéhuz, Rosny offers his reader the same problem but, unlike Clarke, does not actually work out a concrete solution in narrative terms. But he does seem to offer his reader, in Bakhoun’s efforts to devise a winning military strategy, a concrete example of how humankind, at an early stage of development, might have acquired its geometrical mode of thinking, in this case from physical observation of beings whose essence itself was geometry. Indeed, might not the tight phalanxes Bakhoun employs be the natural response to his observations of the bodily shapes and movements of the enemy facing him?

  Seen in the light of Rosny’s pluralist vision, the idea of alien invasion marks a persistent refusal to accept an objectively ecological sense of humankind’s place in the universe. For it is alongside the alien that the Cartesian ghost slips into SF’s back door. In fact, the act of naming another species “alien” is just another way of preserving the Cartesian sanctity of the human mind, now seen to be under threat from hordes of so-called aliens who are automatically presented as physical monstrosities, beings by definition devoid of reason.

  In Rosny’s work another problem arises, one that is most significant for the future development of SF. This problem is one that threatens, we could say, from within: it is the spontaneous mutation that evolves out of the normative human species, and appears to menace it. Un autre monde addresses this question in a very strange manner, given the climate of 1890s fiction; this period saw numerous alien invasion tales, but there were also many tales in which invisible forces take over human victims. These forces’ purpose of course is to create a hidden mutation, such that the outward form remains human but the being inside is transformed into an unhuman monster. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the most famous of these “body snatchers.” But even earlier in France, the protagonist of Maupassant’s “Le Horla” sees himself locked in mortal combat with an invisible being bent on invading his life and mind. Emerging from the research of Pasteur and the theory of germs as microbiological vectors for disease, there appears to arise a fear of unseen alien forces taking hold of our bodies and minds. In light of this fear, it appears to have been more comforting to invent a visible agent, such as Dracula, in order to locate this fear. Once a visible enemy is named, we can perhaps contain or defeat it. Dracula is ultimately tracked down; Maupassant’s protagonists are judged to be insane, and put away in an asylum. In contrast, the mutant in Un autre monde, much like the Xipéhuz in their story, appears as a natural, neutral phenomenon. He is not the product of “evil” forces or of any human agency. One might imagine that for Rosny, given the phobias of the late nineteenth century, the spontaneous appearance of a mutated being, the potentially dangerous product of a natural process like evolution, might seem all the more frightening. But this is not so. Rosny treats the mutant as a clinical problem, one that human science assimilates, rather than rejects.

  Un autre monde in fact has both aspects; there are invisible beings (the Moedigen), and there is a human who has undergone a significant mutation. But they are presented separately, in two very different configurations. First, Rosny’s Moedigen are the very opposite of invaders. Even if, as is postulated, they may share with humans the same ecosystem, they exist in a different dimension of that system, going about their business indifferent to, and till now unknown by, human beings. Second, the way Rosny introduces his mutant differs surprisingly from the treatment of mutants in other tales of this kind: the mutant himself serves as the intermediary between the visible and invisible worlds. Instead of being a menace to humanity, his mutant powers prove a boon to human science, for they enable humans to observe and study the invisible beings. Not only are they no direct menace to humanity, but we make no attempt to “contact” them either. The humans in this story treat the strange invisible beings as nothing more than another phenomenon to observe, beings apparently as neutral toward us as subatomic particles. They are facts; we may, through observation and study, discover that they could be problematic to us; but this is not a question of intention or malicious agency. They are not “against” us; they are simply with us.

  There is another striking difference as well, this time in Rosny’s attitude toward science. In the scene in Maupassant’s “Horla” in which Dr. Parent hypnotizes and manipulates the narrator’s cousin we have the impression that science itself may have some unholy alliance with the invisible forces of the “other.” Rosny’s Dr. Van den Heuvel, on the other hand, is a “pure” scientist. His bias, if anything, is ecological in nature. For he is able—unusual for a scientist in the last half of the nineteenth century—to entertain the postulate that all phenomena, those we see and those we do not see, may somehow share a common physical world, and perhaps because of this may impact each other in ways yet to be discovered. This hypothesis in itself is radical for a work written at the same time as Wells’s War of the Worlds. Indeed, the very idea that Moedigen are among us, and that they might be invisibly at work destroying our world, might seem likely to strike more terror in readers’ hearts than Wells’s overt Martian invasion. Instead, Rosny’s scientists propose to study them, much as we study “invisible” particles today, in order to learn about the broader foundations of nature. If in Maupassant and Stoker, as in many of the myriad SF mutation tales that followed, the invisible remains a place of terror, in Rosny, the invisible realm is simply another observational landscape. In this story, Rosny goes against the logic of his time by touting scientific objectivity over fear of the unseen.

  There is an even stranger aspect to Un autre monde. Rosny’s protagonist, though obviously a mutant, is never once referred to as such. Nor do the scientists who deal with him, and thus know his powers, seem to fear him as such, despite the fact that such a spontaneous transformation of human senses would have been deeply troubling to Rosny’s contemporaries. For if evolution itself appears to be a safely long-term affair, here radical change suddenly emerges from a normal human situation, implying some terrible breakdown in the processes of nature themselves. No Dracula is responsible for creating Rosny’s protagonist; he simply comes to be. What is more astonishing yet is the scientists’ lack of reaction when the mutant reveals something infinitely more troubling in the final paragraphs: that he is not a one-time sport of nature but in fact the founder of a lineage of mutants. He calmly informs us that he has found a mate, in an asylum of all places, married her, and produced an offspring who has the same mutated sense of sight, who is “l’exact réédition de mon organisme (the exact replica of my organism).” No reader of the time could miss this blatant dismissal of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Even more astonishing is the serene absence, in Dr. Van den Heuvel, of Frankenstein’s horrified response to the same prospect—that a “race” of mutants might ensue.

  Rosny’s mutant, like Frankenstein’s creature, is presented as a mixture of monstrous and superior traits. Shelley’s creature addresses its creator and requests he give him a mate. Frankenstein refuses, fearing the consequences for humankind of this new race of beings. Denying his creature its future, Frankenstein forces it, in the role of avenger, to turn on and destroy its creator
’s present existence. This is the Frankenstein impasse: to deny the bride is to obliterate all possibility of an evolutionary future for the new species; to give the bride is to breed fear of the future, of the creation of a more powerful and intelligent race that, although somehow born of man, threatens the destruction of mankind. This impasse stands in the way of an evolutionary vision of humankind going beyond itself. Most subsequent SF has come up against this barrier.22 Classic works such as Van Vogt’s Slan, Sturgeon’s More Than Human, and Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children feature groups of mutated humans whom society, out of fear of their difference and potential power, persecutes. If such stories suggest any evolutionary message, it is generally a twisted one. In Heinlein especially, the mutants fight back, developing their new genetic material in secret in order to create the superior “race” that Frankenstein (as these cases rightfully prove) so feared.

  Rosny’s story simply ignores the Frankenstein impasse. Without resistance or fear, Rosny’s world seems to accept the advent of this new race of mutants, in the name of the advancement of science. Moreover, the mutant protagonist himself has no real fear of being persecuted. He has no intention of using his mutational advantage for any other purpose than aiding human science. “J’eus le frisson de la Terre promise” (I trembled as if I saw the Promised Land), he exclaims, when he enters the presence of Dr. Van den Heuvel, the scientist he will work with. To be sure, Rosny’s mutant is aware that he is different. He prudently (given the cultural climate in which he appears) conceals his differences on the road to Amsterdam and modern science. Even so, even though he looks and acts odd, and his speech seems incomprehensible, the crowd is not hostile, merely bemused, taking him for a savage from Borneo (a Dutch colony at the time).

  He has a brief fear of his otherness when taken in the hospital to a room filled with aborted monstrosities of nature in jars: “Je me trouvai assis parmi des monstres conservés dans l’alcool: foetus, enfants à forme bestiale, batraciens colosses, sauriens vaguement anthropomorphes. C’est bien là, pensai-je, ma salle d’attente. . . . Ne suis-je pas candidat à l’un de ses sépulcres à l’eau-de-vie?” (I found myself seated amidst monsters preserved in alcohol: fetuses, children with bestial shapes, colossal batrachians, saurians that were vaguely anthropomorphic. . . . Am I not a candidate for one of these sepulchers, to be preserved in alcohol?) This fear, however, is not the paranoia of Maupassant’s protagonists. It is placed on an evolutionary level—the fear that he might be a one-time “sport,” an evolutionary dead end. But the scientists do not quarantine him, either in a jar or in an asylum. They simply accept him and his mutated sense as an object of study. And he in turn accepts existing for the good of science. He knows he has further powers of use to science, and will reveal them when the time is right.

  There remains the problematic fact that his new optical sense can perceive invisible beings in another dimension. Society would surely brand this as “paranormal,” and “rational” science of the time would reject his claim without seeking to verify it. Rosny’s mutant, however, not only knows he has this ability but also knows he has a moral duty to use it solely to obtain scientific knowledge of the physical world. The mutant in fact has a plan to circumvent social obstacles. He cleverly maximizes the impact of a full revelation of his powers: “Avant d’appeler l’attention sur mes connaissances extra-humaines, ne pouvais-je exciter le désir de faire étudier ma personne? Les seuls aspects physiques de mon être n’étaient-ils pas dignes d’analyse?” (Before calling attention to my knowledge of extrahuman phenomena, might I not stimulate the desire in people to study my person? Were not my physical attributes alone worthy of being studied?) The mutant makes odd assumptions for his time. He assumes all future scientists will be Van den Heuvel. He also assumes that they will, like Van den Heuvel, accept this gift in his descendants, and will continue to use this new sense of sight as a scientific instrument to study the Moedigen. In the opposite sense, he is serenely certain that his descendants will continue to serve human science the way he has, that they will not seek personal advantage, or launch a vendetta against humankind: “Pourquoi ne naîtrait-il pas, de lui-aussi, des voyants du monde invisible?” (Why would there not be born, from [my son] himself as well, more seers of the invisible world?) and so on down the line.

  Rosny’s scientists, unlike Victor Frankenstein and his progeny, prove capable of looking beyond their fears of a mutant future. Instead of a struggle, they seek partnership with the mutants, such that both can focus on a common goal, in this case the avoidance of a possible ecological crisis brought on by the Moedigen. Rosny’s mutant embodies the spirit of science in its purest form. In his final moment, he says “une béatitude infinie me pénètre” (an infinite bliss passes into me, an expression of his disinterested love of learning). In this sense, Un autre monde is the ancestor of later SF tales that favor cooperation with other species over paranoia and conflict, for example Murray Leinster’s “First Contact” (1946). More to the point, as a story of cooperative scientific research between potentially rival human evolutionary variants, Un autre monde moves toward a transhuman vision.

  It can be argued that most hard SF confronts the same questions Rosny raises—aliens, intelligent nonhuman beings, mutants, the Frankenstein impasse—in the same rigorous way his work does, opposing objective reason to sentimental anthropocentrism. The implacable evolutionary logic of Rosny’s depiction of the death of humankind and humankind’s Earth, however, offers a situation that even the hardest SF has great difficulty in resolving. In La Mort de la Terre Rosny presents carbon life at the end of its tether, with humankind literally its last form, in a world ecology terminally hostile to its existence. Humanity’s end, however, as seen here in the broader ecology of evolving life forms, raises the possibility of a transhuman event. Can, in strictly evolutionary terms, some aspect of humanity not only pass to its successor life form, but have a significant effect on that life form’s future development? Can some kind of human legacy survive the death of humans’ carbon environment? How might this legacy be encoded—as species memory, genetic codes, or some other form of biophysical information—so as to be read by a posthuman entity?

  Hard SF has speculated much on the posthuman, from Bernal to the significant symposium in Foundation 78 (2000).23 In all of this, humankind’s successor tends to remain a Bernalian construct: either some form of hybridized “enhancement” or a being composed of mental energy, like Bernal’s dimorph. In neither aspect do we see beyond the mind-matter duality that continues to ensure humankind a central role in future evolution, in a sense making evolution humankind’s evolution. In contrast, Rosny’s pluralistic sense of multiple life forms’ continuity-in-transformation opens a field of speculation where process is more important than product, where the transhuman rather than the posthuman is the focus. Even after a century of speculation—scientific and fictional—on humanity’s future, Rosny’s rigorously evolutionary Last Man scenario remains unique, and should make us rethink our approach to this problem. Such rethinking is especially needed today, in light of recent scientific theories of the possibility of “extremophile” forms of life on Mars and, most telling, of the NASA discovery, right here on Earth at Mono Lake, California, of a form of life that has arsenic as an essential element of its DNA. The idea of an iron-based life form reclaiming the Earth seems less preposterous in light of these discoveries.

  Rosny’s title La Mort de la Terre is significant. Its focus on the death of humankind’s Earth cements the evolutionary link between human beings and their changing physical environment. Targ is both Last Man and last example of carbon-based life. Where he stands, there can only be two possibilities: life as we embody it perishes entirely, leaving no trace, or some aspect of that life is transmuted, passed on through the ferromagnetics to some future life form. Increasingly, as we follow Targ’s heroic but futile efforts to find water, to restore the lost environmental conditions that support his life form, death appears to be the only possible outcome. If
science sees life going on, that is small consolation, for our life form will not. Even so, a close look at Targ’s final moment suggests that a transhuman event might be possible within the parameters of a thoroughly scientific view of things. Indeed, if we respect the logic of the narrative, it may already have occurred.

  The account of Targ’s struggle is moving. He is clearly the conventional hero, the special man who struggles valiantly against impossible odds, and loses. On the level of human myth, he at first appears to be a recurrent figure: the chivalric knight who by means of his deeds claims the hand of the woman he most desires. Rosny’s Last Man is, in this traditional sense, the finest example of human tenacity, ingenuity, and virtue. But no hero in previous fiction has faced such an extreme collective tragedy. The idea itself of a hero assumes there will always be heroes, Beowulf will always arise to fight against darkness and brutish nature. Now, however, Targ’s sole “enemy” is a radical and irreversible transformation of life conditions, for which humans are only partly responsible. As hero, he is beyond good and evil. And he knows—as all forms of carbon life perish with him, despite moments of hope and wishful thinking—that there is no possibility, mythical or physical, of survival.