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

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  22. The French “barrières idéales” is as vague in the original as in the translation; Rosny could mean “virtual” boundaries, or “absolute” ones.

  23. Bakhoun, in his supremely quantitative analysis of the Xipéhuz’s mobility, speaks of physical “limits” that are in fact evolutionary limits. Rosny’s creatures are in effect a collective entity. The field of action of any individual unit is directly proportionate to the number of individuals present, and to the energy field they generate. Robert A. Heinlein’s later rejection of collective beings and “group minds” is relevant here. Heinlein’s protagonist Kip in Have Space Suit, Will Travel shouts defiantly at the group entity that would judge humanity: “We have no limits.” The idea here is that evolutionary development depends on the initiative of individuals, each one imperfect, but each with a desire to strive, to invent, to substitute dynamic actions for equilibrium: in short, to defy the apparent “laws” that regulate the action of the Xipéhuz, that make them, effectively, an evolutionary dead end. In all of Bakhoun’s descriptions of the Xipéhuz, nothing emerges that could be called “individual.” Bakhoun, by contrast, is—like his god—a unique being, the individual who initiates evolutionary change.

  24. In the light of evolution, the reproductive patterns of the Xipéhuz, described by Bakhoun, are of particular interest. They reproduce four times a year, by means of the fusion of three beings into a single group. From this, one might imagine rapid expansion of their energy field, by which they could essentially conquer all in their path. This potential for insect-like expansion, however, has compensating limits. For example, the Xipéhuz “newborn” are huge, vague, vaporous forms who begin to shrink at birth and within ten days transform into amber cones. Their period of “childhood” lasts two months, after which they become like others of their species. One thinks of Rabelais’s Gargantua, born a sprawling giant, who must learn to conform, physically and socially, to human norms. In terms of the evolutionary category of neoteny, the Xipéhuz have a short developmental period, a disadvantage in relation to the long “childhood” gestation of humanity. Gargantua, we remember, after a few gigantic antics, rapidly shrinks to human proportions. His education, however, is a long and arduous process, during which he “matures” into a creative individual. Again the information Bakhoun gives, though not interpreted, details for the reader aware of evolutionary theory a species that cannot beat humanity in the survival of the fittest.

  25. We have used other signs than in Rosny’s text, as the latter could not be reproduced typographically. Our use of signs, however, is consistent with the original, and each Rosny sign is given an equivalent in our system.

  26. The “literal” nature of the Xipéhuz language is curious, given the earlier suggestion that they might possess some kind of telekinetic faculty, whereby mind moves matter. But if all their signs are out in the open, so to speak, how can there be any hidden “inner” thoughts or motives that accompany the act of communication? Moreover, because this practice of “signing” one’s interlocutor is so ponderous and slow, it is hard to see how (as Bakhoun suggests) they can engage in abstract discourse, as the process of building ideas would take an inordinate amount of time. Unless, of course, the observed long moments of inability are in fact moments of telepathic communication. Finally, because they inscribe signs or characters literally on each other’s bodies in order to communicate, they have not reached the stage of writing as Bakhoun practices it, for he inscribes symbols on a tablet, or other external object, that can then be transported in space and time. Thus their language, like their system of energy distribution, reveals itself a closed system, which denies them the mobility of ideas necessary for rapid and complex evolution.

  27. Again the word “individual” does not designate the upward-striving monad. Bakhoun refers rather to character traits, which allow certain beings among the Xipéhuz to be more or less taciturn, friendly, or reclusive. Bakhoun of course does not have much time to observe and classify. Nor can he do much more than remark that the Xipéhuz teach their young. But he is a bit hasty in crying inscrutable mystery, the inherent limitations of his “poor senses.” Rosny’s mutant observer in Un autre monde realizes that science is long, life short. Bakhoun, in his defense, has a more immediate and practical observational task: to discover points of vulnerability, and devise a plan accordingly to defeat the enemy.

  28. The shifting tenses here are carefully calculated to illustrate Bakhoun’s aptitude for scientific discourse. When Bakhoun says “They educate their young,” he expresses a general observation, a “law” valid for all times. When he recounts individual adventures, or provisional conclusions of the observing scientist (“To me these lessons were marvelous”), he limits his field of observation to his own past, be it to a singular event or a plural observation (“How many times . . .). Bakhoun after all is the first human to think “scientifically.”

  29. The superstitious tribesmen, faced with the strange appearance and great power of the Xipéhuz, have assumed them to be gods. Bakhoun, in contrast, patiently observes, allowing no metaphysical idea to prevail until it is tested, and either verified or rejected. He discovers that they can physically perish.

  30. In solving this problem by the process of reason, Bakhoun proves a forerunner of the famous Asimov protagonist in stories like “Reason,” where the key to the narrative is less an action than a reasoned solution to a crucial problem, often one on which the fate of humanity hinges. In extremis a solution is always reached, and it is always a solution based on principles of rational scientific investigation.

  31. The word “solitude” has connotations of meditation for French Romantic literature (Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques). Solitude, the condition of being alone and finding harmony with self and nature, is also associated with genius in English Romanticism (e.g. Newton sailing strange seas of thought, alone; or Keats’s nightingale). Rosny presents Bakhoun as such a solitary genius, who by means of his meditations on the Xipéhuz is able to bridge the gap between humanity and the natural world, of which they are a menacing presence. If one wonders what happens to Bakhoun’s many wives and children during such solitary moments, one must realize they are expendables in this thoroughly patriarchal prehistorical world. And Rosny, alas, did not benefit from today’s political correctness: Bakhoun has license to shut out family problems around him; his wives serve to bear the children he needs to win humanity’s battles, and no more.

  32. Bakhoun is not only a keen observer and reasoner. He is also crafty, using ruse against superior force, a key survival trait for homo sapiens.

  33. There is more here than a simple statement of so-called Darwinian “survival of the fittest.” When the destruction of one species becomes “the terrible condition of life” for the other, we are reminded of the religious overtones that surround that other, modern, evolutionary tale Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the famous scene in which prehistoric humankind discovers weapons, human advancement is inexorably linked to a vision of the Fall, whereby all subsequent Edenic or utopian constructions of humankind—machines waltzing to Strauss, moon colonies, spaceships controlled by a supposedly beneficent machine intelligence, the white room at the end of infinity—are somehow “wormed” with the original stigma of the Fall. Bakhoun’s words imply that there may be more than just the necessary survival traits involved in mankind’s survival. A teleological dimension, in fact an almost Calvinist election, is suggested by this “terrible condition of life” that says that of two comparable species, one survives, the other perishes.

  34. The question of a linear calendar dating back (or forward) to the precise date 22,649 is interesting. The Sumerians may have used artificial time units as early as the twenty-seventh century BCE in referring to such things as the tenure of public officials and agricultural cycles. If Rosny’s dates do refer to a time before the Common Era, this calendar is much earlier than subsequent known calendars, Assyrian or Babylonian. “The sixth moon of the year 22,649” implies
they counted months as well. The Sumerians of Babylon were probably the first people to devise a calendar that used phases of the moon, with twelve lunar months to a year.

  35. All the names of these “tribes” are invented by Rosny, with the exception of one: the Khaldes. The Khaldes apparently came from the region of Kurdistan, in what today is Armenia or Georgia. Again, Rosny probably chose the name for its “ancient” sound, not for any particular characteristics of a given people. The invention of suggestive names for yet-unknown or nonexistent “peoples” has a long history in modern SF, and Rosny seems to be the first to pursue such invention. Just as Frank Herbert bases his names in the Dune series on “arabized” or arabic-seeming names, so here Rosny improvises on cradle-of-civilization-sounding names like “Khaldes,” whose very orthography is highly suggestive.

  36. The cubit is the first recorded measure of length. It is apparently based on the average length of a human forearm. The ancient Egyptians divided the cubit into “palms” and “digits,” with six palms or twenty-four digits equaling one cubit. This is posited on the average length of the human finger, palm, or forearm, which is approximately eighteen inches. This helps us understand the military tactic being described. The Xipéhuz is on the average one and one-half cubits tall (twenty-two and one-half inches), much shorter than the average ancient human carrying the six-cubit frame. Because the frame is six cubits long, and the inclining crossbeams five cubits long, the latter can be inclined upon encounter with the Xipéhuz, allowing the men inside to use lances and arrows, while protected from their shorter adversaries. Rosny’s technical descriptions, on the whole, are amazingly precise. They find their equal only in the technicallly specialized descriptions of a modern military SF writer like David Drake.

  37. All we humans know is human history. Thus here, as in subsequent fictional future (or past) histories, the speculative writer is destined to adapt the known to the imagined unknown. One could say that Bakhoun here is preadapting Roman military tactics to this key battle with the Xipéhuz. The Romans used similar square formations to resist cavalry (repellere equites). Foot soldiers within tight squares advanced holding pila (javelins) in the spaces between their shields. Bakhoun adjusts these tactics in accordance with his battlefield analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy, very much as Caesar says he did in his narrative of his wars in Gaul. We should note that Bakhoun, like all good generals, is in fact modifying, turning to his advantage, tactics the enemy has used. For in the previous battle, the Xipéhuz routed their adversaries by forming similar battle squares, their vulnerable stars pointing inward in order to protect them from arrows. And note that Caesar admired and respected his enemy, the Gauls, just as Bakhoun respects the Xipéhuz.

  38. The memory of Napoleon’s usurpatory reign is still vivid for Rosny, who echoes Benjamin Constant’s condemnation of absolute power. Bakhoun, that summation of French history, is acts as a prehistoric incarnation of the man of the French Enlightenment, invoking Wisdom as the sole ruler of mankind.

  39. Rosny’s term here is a strong one: “Meurtre,” personified with a capital M. The invocation of such a dark, murderous Fatality has Jansenist overtones that go beyond the simple statement of “nature red in tooth and claw.” The term fatalité would not be used by a Darwinist, for whom evolution is a nonteleological process.

  Another World

  1. Gelderland is a rural province in the middle to eastern part of Holland, bordering on Germany. Its principal city is Arnhem. We must remember that Rosny is Belgian by birth. Although a Francophone, he is culturally linked to Flemish and Dutch speakers. What is more, a French-language readership would have a mixed reaction to the presentation of Gelderland as the place where what is ostensibly a mutant species of human being emerges. For such a reader, there are two Hollands: the homeland of Renaissance free-thinkers and the freedom of expression that produced Erasmus and sheltered Descartes, and the Flemish provinces as depicted in, e.g., Balzac’s La Recherche de l’Absolu (1834)—a stolid, unimaginative, bourgeois world that is hostile to science and all manner of change. Indeed, the Amsterdam Rosny’s mutant finds is a world of genuine enlightenment. For this, we need only compare Rosny’s Van den Heuvel and the way he treats the protagonist with how people with “special” powers are treated in the world of Rosny’s contemporary Guy de Maupassant, where they are routinely institutionalized as madmen.

  2. Rosny’s mutant is aware of the long tradition of “monstrous” births that precedes him in Western culture. Physical deformities, at least since the Renaissance, were seen as signs of moral depravity. The line runs from Shakespeare’s Richard III to Frankenstein’s monster. Indeed, the treatment of the latter’s physical abnormality by average humanity certainly lurks in the background of Rosny’s work. But what is remarkable in Rosny, in fact, is the relative lack of revulsion his protagonist’s family and peers have toward his oddities. They do not reject him; he decides of his own volition to find a scientist who will study his mutations. Moreover, while Frankenstein’s creature possesses physical and intellectual powers that make people all the more fearful because these powers frighten them, Rosny’s protagonist’s new power, is a change in the organ of sight, which is the conventional instrument of knowledge in Western culture. This, along with the relatively unmenacing nature of his other differences, makes it easy for Rosny’s scientist to accept him, indeed to utilize him as one would a microscope or telescope.

  3. A strong aromatic schnapps from the city of Schiedam in southern Holland.

  4. Readers and critics in Rosny’s time commented (often pejoratively) on his use, often seemingly gratuitous, of highly specialized scientific terminology in his stories. This sentence is an example that seems strange coming from the mouth of a country boy in the early stages of formation (unless he possesses some extraordinary innate knowledge). “Corneous” means horn-like. “Elytra” are the anterior wings of beetles that serve to protect the posterior pair of functional wings. “Coleoptera” are beetles.

  5. Rosny’s mutant possesses powers not immediately visible to human observers, which prove to be much more significant than his physically observable deviations from the human norm (skin color, rapid speech). What surprises the SF reader is the equanimity with which these, once known, are accepted by human society. In A. E. Van Vogt’s Slan (1940), for example, mutants are persecuted for having the same extrasensory perception as Rosny’s mutant, as well as thoughts so fast they cannot be recorded by normal human media. In comparison with Rosny’s world of dignified science, Van Vogt’s (like many others in SF) is a world of paranoia and power fantasy. Van Vogt’s sacrificial mutant is even named Jommy Cross.

  6. Violet represents the shortest wavelengths of light visible to the human eye. Ultraviolet [ultra: Latin “beyond”] light is electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths shorter than visible light, but longer than X-rays. Near ultraviolet light waves (closer to visible light) measure 400–320 nanometers, far to extreme ultraviolet light (toward X-rays) measure 200–210 nanometers. Near or long-wave ultraviolet light is sometimes called “black light.” Some animals, birds, and insects (bees) can see into the near ultraviolet spectrum. Rosny’s mutant apparently sees into the far ultraviolet end of the spectrum. One has to assume that the reason ordinary glass remains opaque to his eyes is because ordinary glass blocks far ultraviolet light. At the same time, his ability to see through objects that are ordinarily opaque to human eyes makes him literally a “man with X-ray eyes.”

  7. Green is midspectrum for the human eye (c. 565 nanometers). We remember that Rosny’s protagonist sees primarily in the ultraviolet end of the spectrum (380 nanometers and fewer). Green is thus a zone where his faculty of sight overlaps the human, in the imprecise manner described.

  8. This idea is astonishing for its time. The turn of the century was a period when writers in England and France were obsessed with tales of alien invasion, other worlds intruding on our own with the express purpose of destruction. Here to the contrary is a specie
s that both is unperceived by us and does not perceive us. Even more troubling however, if you think about it, is the fact that its actions (however unintentionally) might have some negative effect on the environment, the physical realm, it shares with us. In turn, our actions might effect its environment. But has this species perceived us yet? Or our potential impact on their world? It appears from the story that they go blithely about their doings, while the advent of the mutant seems to give humans a subtle evolutionary edge, a window into their world.

  9. One thinks of Edwin A. Abbott’s popular Flatland, published in 1884, which Rosny may have read in England. In Abbott’s book a two-dimensional being named Square discovers the marvels of the world of three dimensions. Abbott’s work remains, despite its accurate geometry, a conventional imaginary voyage, in which a contemporary observer (Square is a typical late nineteenth-century Englishman) compares the strange place with his familiar world, in ways invariably unflattering to the latter. Rosny’s narrator, in contrast, is a neutral observer, an instrument of pure scientific investigation.

  10. “Why does Rosny capitalize the word Kingdom? The French word is “règne,” and here it refers to the “kingdom” of life forms. Rosny, on the one hand, uses it as a technical world, part of the scientific classification system that includes “species,” “kingdoms,” etc. On the other hand, Rosny has an almost mystical reverence for Life as a vital force. His personification of the word signals this. The scientist would not capitalize the word; the mystic would. Rosny’s application of scientific method may be more rigorous that that of Verne or Wells. But in these capitals, Rosny the mystic is ever present. In an interesting sidelight on this matter, Jacques Chabot and Normand David, in their article “La Majuscule dans la noménclature zoologique,” published in the June 1988 issue of the Bulletin de l’entomofaune, of the Centre de recherches écologiques de Montréal, see French-language science, as early as Rosny’s time, normalizing a practice that capitalizes the generic names of species (as well as any attached adjectives), while using lowercase for such general categories as species, genus, kingdom. Rosny’s use of the capital, then, is not standard scientific usage.