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

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  14. This passage has an eerie ring today, when very similar cries of alarm against global warming are being ignored in an apparent world of plentiful water, oil, and other commodities.

  15. The French phrase here, révolutions sidéreales, means radical transformations or “upheavals” determined by the motion of the stars. Such a vision seems strangely “primitive” for this overevolved humanity.

  16. Rosny seems here to have envisioned genetically modified organisms, as well as the controversy that surrounds this process.

  17. The Oxford English Dictionary defines zoophytes as “various animals of low organization, formally classed as intermediate between animals and plants, being usually fixed, and often having a branched or radiating structure, thus resembling plants or flowers.”

  18. Les spiraloïdes, another marvelous neologism.

  19. Though the Darwinian term sélection is used, the term acquis (acquired) points rather to the theory of the transmission of acquired characteristics, subsequently disproven, of Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829) the great French biologist and pioneer of evolutionary theory.

  20. Here is another example of Rosny’s complex evolutionary ecology. This is not the us-versus-them scenario that has proliferated in twentieth-century SF. At work here is a much more subtle interplay of oblique forces, such that a life form simply fills an evolutionary niche. If this is at the expense of humanity, it is not a willed or purposeful action, in the sense that humans understand these terms. It is, at the same time, perfectly “natural” for humans to think in terms of purpose.

  21. Rosny’s ferromagnetics are an early example of what today is called alternative biochemistry: speculation on possible alternate chemical compositions of life forms. Such forms make use of atoms other than carbon to construct a primary cellular structure, where atoms are bound using solvents other than water. Modern SF (and modern science) abounds in such extrapolations. The most common substitute for carbon is the silicon atom. Silicon has chemical properties similar to carbon, and is in the same periodic table group. There is also speculation on nitrogen compounds providing the basis for biochemical molecules, and on substances such as ammonia or methanol acting as solvents. Rosny proposes life forms based on iron compounds, with electromagnetic forces apparently acting as solvent. This is not as far-fetched as it seems. Among SF novels written by scientists, Fred Hoyle’s Black Cloud offers a life form composed of interstellar “dust,” whose particles interact by means of electromagnetic signals, as do cells in carbon-based life. Robert L. Forward goes farther in Dragon’s Egg, conceiving a life form that builds on “nuclear chemistry” rather than electromagnetic forces. Günther Wächterhäuser, in his article “Origin of Life: Life As We Don’t Know It,” Science 289 (August 2000), 1307–1308, proposes an “iron-sulphur world theory” in which he conjectures that primitive life may have occurred as a metabolic cycle that takes place on iron mineral surfaces in the sea, from which more complex compounds of life are generated. This iron-based metabolic process is said to predate genetics in the creation of life in the seas.

  22. Rosny uses the archaic term corpuscule (the same as the English “corpuscle”), a free-floating “little body,” which today would be called a cell.

  23. In this description, Érê seems offer a promise of union between the mineral and organic kingdoms, a union that, arrayed against the forces of nature, can only be a passing fancy.

  24. Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra (the Harp), and the fifth brightest star in the sky. At twenty-three and a half light-years from Earth, it is a “close” star. It is a special star in that it holds the position of a jewel in the harp.

  25. There are clear echoes of Pascal’s Pensée 347, which sees man as a thinking reed, the feeblest thing in nature (ironically for Rosny’s story, it is “a drop of water” that suffices to kill him). The compensating consolation is that this vast unthinking universe (Rosny’s mineral kingdom does not—yet—have thought) may crush us, but does not know it does so, though we know we are being crushed. It would seem that Pascal’s proportions, which restore some equity between infinite, unthinking nature and feeble, thinking mankind, are contradictory to Rosny’s general evolutionary vision. It is easy for the voice of evolution to say that mankind, born of water, must disappear with it. But it is hard, as with Pascal’s “misère de l’homme,” to accept this.

  26. From Sinop or Sinope (Latin: Sinopis), a city on the Black Sea in Turkey; the color of a red iron quartz that comes from this region.

  27. One thinks of Harlan Ellison’s comment on a passage in Robert A. Heinlein (cited in Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-hinged Jaw: Essays on Science Fiction [New York: Berkley Books, 1977], 34): “Heinlein has always managed to indicate the greater strangeness of a culture with the most casually dropped reference: The first time, in a novel . . . that a character came through a door that . . . dilated. And no discussion. Just: ‘The door dilated.’ I . . . was two lines down before I realized what the image had been. . . . A dilating door, it didn’t open, it irised! Dear God, now I knew I was in a future world.”

  28. The narrator’s use of the present tense fits with the shifting pattern of voice and tense. How should we see this? As a “lapse” on the part of the author? Or as a new narrative dynamic suggested by the evolutionary context of the narrative? The lapses of Rosny’s narrative, on the contrary, call on us to read it “backward” from our experience in reading subsequent SF texts. His lapses encourage us to play a game of speculation; we imagine a narrator that is one with the process of carbon life, speaking as a single individual as Targ is increasingly isolated, the sole survivor of what now becomes a shared process.

  29. Canis Major (the Greater Dog) is one of eighty-eight modern constellations. It is said to represent one of Orion’s hunting dogs. It contains Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Sirius means “scorching,” as since ancient times it was noticed that summer heat followed its rising; hence the expression “dog days.”

  30. These are all constellations. Aquila is one of the forty-eight constellations listed by the ancient astronomer Ptolemy. Its alpha star is Altair, the vertex of the Summer Triangle. Pegasus, also one of Ptolemy’s constellations, is a northern constellation configured as a square of four bright stars, notably Sirrah. Perseus, named after the Greek hero who slew the Medusa, contains the star Algol. It is the location of the annual Perseids meteor shower. Finally, Sagittarius, a constellation of the zodiac, has the form of a centaur drawing a bow. It is located to the east of Ophiuchus. Targ has certainly a long visual sweep to be able to embrace all these celestial locations at once.

  31. We think here of the technical manuals the Time Traveler in George Pal’s 1960 version of The Time Machine takes with him to the resurrected Eden in the Eloi future. Where original mankind fell for eating the apple of knowledge, now new mankind will resurrect itself by that same knowledge.

  32. Alpha Centauri is the closest star beyond our solar system, 4.39 light-years away. It is the brightest star in the southern constellation Centaurus. The stars Targ sees along the way indicate that his machines let him sail from one end to the other of our known Earth.

  33. Rosny does not overdramatize the cataclysmic event that forever dashes hope for the human species. More in line with modern chaos theory, it is a small variable, of insignificant size, that causes the collapse of a larger, apparently solid structure. We seem to have here an early example of the so-called butterfly effect. Targ, however, as one who believes in the possibility of a second Eden, cannot abandon his sense of a “cosmic” destiny.

  34. Rosny’s humanized machines are forerunners of Heinlein’s famous waldoes, a name that has passed from fiction to real-world nanomachines that work as extensions of the human hand.

  35. Calamites are fossil plants that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “are abundant in the Coal Measures.” “Arrowhead” is the English name for the endogenous plant genus Sagittaria. It has flo
ating leaves shaped like arrowheads. This is a prime example of Rosny’s use of highly specialized scientific terminology. The narrative context and mood seem to call for use of simpler terms.

  36. Targ’s “dream” encompasses the evolutionary rise of carbon life and its fall. As befits the voice of human evolutionary science speaking inside his head, some of the terms are specialized: the “deinotherium” is a giant prehistoric ancestor of the elephant, reputed to have been the third largest land mammal known to have existed; “machaerodus” is the generic name for sabertooth cats; the “aurochs” and the “urus” are ancestors of today’s domestic cattle; the “diplodocus” is a giant grass-eating dinosaur.

  37. While Targ’s statement here has provided the epigraph to the novella, it is now further qualified, in the perspective of his terminal experience and wisdom: the “death of the Earth,” he adds, means the death only of our reign on this planet, which witnesses the birth of a new life form, of which he now accepts becoming a part.

  Annotated Bibliography

  Editions and English Translations

  The first editions of the SF-related works of J.-H. Rosny aîné are as follows.

  Les Xipéhuz (Paris: A[ndré] Savine, 1888).

  Vamireh (Paris: Kolb, 1892).

  Les Origines (Paris: Borel, 1895). Nonfiction.

  Eyrimah (Paris: Chailley, 1896). With Rosny jeune.

  Elem d’Asie (Paris: Collection Guillaume-Lotus Bleu, 1896).

  Nomaï, amours lacustres (Paris: Collection Guillaume-Lotus Alba, 1897).

  Un autre monde (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1898).

  Le Pluralisme (Paris: Alcan, 1907). Nonfiction.

  La Mort de la Terre (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1910).

  La Guerre du feu (Paris: Fasquelle, 1911).

  La Force mystérieuse (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1914).

  L’Aube du future (Paris: Crès, 1917).

  Dans les étoiles (Paris: Figuière, 1919). Nonfiction.

  L’étonnant voyage d’Hareton Ironcastle (Paris: Ferenczi, 1919).

  Le jeune vampire (Paris: Flammarion, 1920).

  Le Félin géant (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1920).

  Les Science et le Pluralisme (Paris: Alcan, 1922). Expanded version of Le Pluralisme.

  L’Assassin surnaturel (Paris: Flammarion, 1924).

  Les autres vies et les autres mondes (Paris: Crès, 1924). Nonfiction.

  Les Navigateurs de l’infini (Paris: Nouvelle Révue Critique, 1927).

  Les Hommes-Sangliers (Paris: Edition des Portiques, 1929).

  Helgvor du fleuve bleu (Paris: Flammarion, 1931).

  La sauvage adventure (Paris: Albin Michel, 1935).

  Few editions of Rosny’s SF works have been published in French since World War II. His speculative work barely survived in specialty SF series, including the Plon paperback edition of L’étonnant voyage d’Hareton Ironcastle (Paris, 1937), and Les Navigateurs de l’infini, vol. 69 (1960) in Le Rayon fantastique (Paris: Gallimard and Hachette, 1951–64), a pioneering series of paperback SF. Mostly translations of American and UK SF authors appeared initially; after vol. 60, works by French-language SF authors under their own names began to appear (several pseudonymous works by French authors had appeared earlier in the series). Rosny’s work was the second such “open” publication of a French-language writer in the series. The Rayon fantastique publication was the first appearance in print of Rosny’s sequel Les astronautes, which was never published in his lifetime. Other significant postwar editions and publications are La Mort de la Terre, précedé de Les Xipéhuz (Paris: Denoël, 1958); Un autre monde, in Fiction 80 (March 1960; Editions Opta, Paris); La force mystérieuse, suivie de Les Xipéhuz (Verviers, Belgium: Nouvelles Editions Marabout, 1972); Récits de science-fiction (Verviers, Belgium: Nouvelles Editions Marabout, 1975; contains Les Xipéhuz, Un autre monde, La Mort de la Terre, and other stories and novels); La force mystérieuse, suivie de Les Xipéhuz (Paris: Oswald, 1982); Romans prehistoriques (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985; contains La Guerre du feu, Les Xipéhuz, and other novels); La Mort de la Terre (Paris: Flammarion, 1998).

  English translations of Rosny’s work are few and far between. All of the translations listed here are either abridged, are inaccurate, or otherwise show signs of haste.

  The earliest translations were The Giant Cat; Or The Quest of Aoun and Zouhr [Le Félin géant], translated by The Honorable Lady Whitehead (New York: McBride, 1924), and Helgvor of the Blue River [Helgvor du fleuve bleu], translated by Georges Surdez, Argosy 230, 1–4 (May 28, June 4, 11, 18, 1932).

  The success of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film La Guerre du feu (1981) led to a number of more recent paperback editions of The Quest for Fire, in a translation by Harold Talbott that was originally published in 1967 (New York: Pantheon Books).

  Damon Knight’s translation of Les Xipéhuz, titled The Shapes, appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 34, 3, whole no. 202 (March 1968), 91–112, and was reprinted in Damon Knight, ed., One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968). Ironcastle, Philip José Farmer’s version of L’étonnant voyage d’Hareton Ironcastle (New York: DAW Books, 1976), is not a translation but a rewrite.

  The 1978 translations by George Edgar Slusser of The Xipéhuz and The Death of the Earth (New York: Arno Press), done for a limited edition reprint series, take liberties with the text.

  Several recent anthologies of world SF have reprinted Damon Knight’s translation of Un autre monde, including “Another World,” in The Science Fiction Century, edited by David Hartwell (New York: Tor Books, 1997), 539–57, and “Another World,” in The Road to Science Fiction, vol. 6, Around the World, edited by James Gunn (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 25–99.

  The UK online journal Collapse, in “Unknown Deleuze,” a special issue devoted to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (who apparently had a fascination with the work of Rosny), vol. 3, September 18, 2007, claims to print the “first English translation” of Un autre monde. This is none other than the Knight translation.

  Special mention must be made of the recent Black Coat Press set of translations, six volumes in all, under the general title of The Scientific Romances of J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The second volume in this series, The Navigators of Space and Other Alien Encounters (2010), contains translations of the works translated here (Les Xipéhuz, Un autre monde, La Mort de la Terre), as well as La Légende sceptique and Les Navigateurs de l’Infini, followed by its “sequel,” Les astronautes (Rosny is said to have invented this term). The edition announces that the works are “adapted” by Brian Stapleford. This indicates that, in these translations, passages are abridged. What is more, the translations themselves are sometimes inaccurate, due to the prodigious speed with which they were done. There are general introductions and a few historical notes. The purpose of these Black Coat Press publications is to bring French-language science fiction, sadly neglected by major publishing houses, to a wider English-speaking audience.

  Biography and Commentary

  Of interest for Rosny’s biography is Rosny’s Portraits et souvenirs: Notice bibliographique de Robert Borel-Rosny (Paris: Compagnie Française des Arts Graphiques, 1945). Articles on Rosny appear in standard literary reference works, including Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1912), and Daniel Mornet, Histoire de la littérature et de la pensée françaises contemporaines, 1870–1934 (Paris: Bibliothèque Larousse, 1927).

  The most interesting contemporary commentary on Rosny is in Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), vols. 2 and 3, and in Anatole France, La Vie littéraire, vol. 3 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1892).

  After World War II, there was a revival of critical interest, in France, in SF and in Rosny. The first postwar commentaries on Rosny and SF were by Jean-Jacques Bridenne, in La littérature française d’imagination scientifique (Lausanne: Dassonville, 1950), 191–98, and “J. H. Rosny aîné, romancie
r des possibles cosmiques,” Fiction 32 (February 1956; Editions Opta, Paris), 68–72.

  Two significant dissertations have appeared, both dealing with the entire corpus of Rosny’s work. Both tend to dismiss Rosny’s “scientific” novels and to disparage SF. Amy Louise Downey, “The Life and Works of J. H. Rosny aîné, 1856–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1950), makes claims based on access to Rosny’s letters and papers that are today in the hands of the Borel family. Some claims are documented; many others are not. The research in Lorrie Victor Fabbricante, “J. H. Rosny aîné and His Novels: Social, Analytical, and Prehistorical” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1980), is solid as far as it goes; interpretations are based essentially on primary sources. There are no dissertations in French devoted entirely to Rosny to date.

  The following commentaries on Rosny have been published since 1975.

  J.-P. Vernier, “The SF of J. H. Rosny the Elder,” Science Fiction Studies 6 (2), July 1975, 156–165, is a valuable bibliography of articles in French journals and magazines of the 1920s–1940s that pertain to both Rosny’s SF and his naturalistic novels.

  Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle 64, 681–82 (January–February 1986), special issue, features several articles comparing Rosny and Wells: Roger Bozzetto, “Wells et Rosny devant l’inconnu”; Daniel Compère, “La fin des hommes”; Daniel Congenas, “Préhistoire et récit préhistorique chez Rosny et Wells.”

  Pascal Ducommun discusses Rosny’s alien-like beings in “Alien Aliens,” in Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction, edited by George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 37–42.