“The Great Enigma” takes up that poetic thread, albeit in a straightforwardly nostalgic vein, but it is not surprising that Rosny was tempted to develop the basic theme of the story into a much more elaborate adventure story, of a sort that he was able to tackle much more confidently after 1920 than he had in the 1880s. “The Treasure in the Snow” is, in fact, one of the most coherent and level-paced of all his adventure stories, its relative lack of ambition in terms of the population of its lost land being compensated by a much greater willingness on the part of its author and its hero to involve himself intimately with its personnel. Indeed, “The Treasure in the Snow” can be regarded as a straightforward wish-fulfillment fantasy, whose sexual component is reasonably forthright and quite unashamed. It is that element of its plot which is extrapolated—in two different but not incompatible directions—in “The Boar Men” and “In the World of the Variants.”
Rosny must have been painfully aware, in penning “Nymphaeum,” of the blatant dishonesty of having the heroine carried off by a brutal abductor while forbidding any actual spoliation. He must have felt that, however necessary it might be in terms of reader-appeasement, it was a hypocritical fudge, and it is not surprising, given his willingness to write uncompromising contes cruels when the occasion warranted it (see, for instance, “The Witch” in vol. 6), that he was willing to look at the other side of the coin. Indeed, the more surprising thing is that when he decided to use the same formula again, in the relatively straightforward transfiguration of “The Boar Men” that became “Adventure in the Wild” (see vol. 5), he embraced a different kind of hypocrisy so readily. By the time he wrote “The Boar Men,” he had already expressed the view, in “The Navigators of Space” (see vol. 1), that all human sex, brutal or not, was a poor and ugly thing by comparison with more elevated forms of imaginable love, so it is not surprising that he went on from “The Treasure in the Snow” and “The Boar Men” to pen a very different kind of sexual fantasy in “In the World of the Variants,” which moved beyond the scope of conventional lost land stories to feature one of the multitudinous coexistent realms that Alglave confesses to have always believed to be far closer at hand, although invisible, than any remote polar Eden.
The stories in this volume illustrate Rosny’s lack—through no fault of his own—of an accurate time-scale for the discussion of evolutionary variations, and certain idiosyncrasies in his understanding of evolutionary theory, but those features of his work stand out even more clearly in his prehistoric fantasies, and are more conveniently discussed in that context (see vol. 4). They are, however, the stories that make the most conspicuous display of his occasionally-crude racism. When he was reading popularizations of anthropology in the 1880s, he could hardly help encountering race theories of the crudest sort, because anthropological theory was saturated with them at that time, and Rosny belonged to a generation—and, for that matter, to a colonial culture—that took it for granted that white people were superior to people of other races. It is, however, worth noting the evidence that these stories provide that Rosny did not suffer from the horror of miscegenation that afflicted so many 19th century race theories, and that he compensated for his racist assumptions with a frank xenophilia that made hypothetical new races—as well as the recovered prehistoric race of “The Treasure in the Snow”—more attracted to him than his own. Again, this is a topic that will be developed more fully in the commentary to volume four of this series.
The lost land subgenre is so obviously unviable in the context of modern geographical knowledge that stories of that sort cannot help but seem dated, and irredeemably quaint. Indeed, it is arguable that the subgenre was obsolete even before it was pioneered by ambitious Utopian writers, let alone adapted into quasi-Romantic adventure fiction by such late 19th century writers as H. Rider Haggard. It may be the case, therefore, that the primary appeal of all Rosny’s ventures in this vein to modern readers is nostalgic, but they are deliberately and quintessentially nostalgic in their substance as well as their appearance, and their superficial nostalgia might actually be held to add to their inherent nostalgia for evolutionary circumstances that never were, but might have been—and which might perhaps have represented better paths of development than the one that humankind actually took.
That possibility is intrinsically Romantic, and has a particular enshrinement in French Romanticism by virtue of the contribution made to its inspiration by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is not at all Naturalistic—but the kind of “poetic passion” for science that Rosny had is itself intrinsically and irreducibly Romantic, and in developing that thread of his work in the winding way that he did, he was only following its logic in a slightly more forthright and ambitious fashion than other, less audacious, explorers of strange lands.
Notes
1 Le Félin géant (The Giant Cat a.k.a. Quest of the Dawn Man) and Helgvor du fleuve bleu (Helgvor of the Blue River) will be reprinted in their original English translations in a seventh volume.
2 In ancient Greece, a nymphaeum was a sanctuary dedicated to water-nymphs. The word was imported into French, as nymphée—not to be confused with nymphéa, which is a kind of water-lily—because it was borrowed for reference to fountains decorated with sculpted nymphs, but never made it into English, save for technical references to the Greek institution.
3 Amur, or Sakhalin, is a province of eastern Siberia, north of Manchuria. The French spell the name Amour, so Rosny’s choice of it as a location has a certain metaphorical resonance.
4 Ctesias was a Greek historian and physician of the 5th century B.C., contemporary with Herodotus, who produced an account of India, some fragments of which survive, most famously a passage dealing with the Cynocephali—a race of “dog-headed” people.
5 Hanno was a Carthaginian navigator of the 5th century B.C. who allegedly led an expedition southwards along the west coast of Africa; a Greek account of the voyage is preserved in the Periplus.
6 Rosny’s narrator inserts a footnote here: “All this, of course, I only learned later.”
7 Rosny’s narrator inserts another footnote: “As I never had the corpse of a Water-Man in my possession, my experimentation was necessarily limited.”
8 The phrase “île des peupliers” [isle of poplars] has a particular significance in France because it is the name of the burial-place of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the popularizer of the notion that people uncorrupted by civilization are—or were—happy and peaceful, which became a key element of French Romanticism.
9 Rosny is often exceedingly casual in the consistency of his accounts of the phases of the Moon and its course across the sky, but it is odd that he went to some trouble to inform the reader that the waning Moon was three-quarters dark about a week ago, given that the story now requires it to be in mid-cycle.
10 The Belgian jurist Edmond Picard (1836-1924) was the founder of L’Art Moderne, a significant periodical supporting the Jeune Belgique movement; he also served as a socialist senator in the Belgian government.
11 This reference is to one of the prose poems contained in “La Légende sceptique” (tr. in vol. 1 of this series as “The Skeptical Legend”), which sets out a prospectus for the future establishment of nature reserves where animals in danger of extinction might be conserved and man’s primal relationship with nature partly restored.
12 The reference is to Homer’s Odyssey, where “Argos” is sometimes used to signify the homeland of all the Greeks, rather than a part of it.
13 Choerotherium sansaniense is a fossil pig from which modern domestic swine might have descended; sivalensis is a common second component of Linnean names, but in this instance it obviously refers to the species known in Rosny’s day as Hippopotamus sivalensis and nowadays as Hexaprotodon sivalensis.
14 What Gabriel de Mortillet—the anthropologist from whom Rosny derived most of the terminology found in his prehistoric romances (see the introduction to vol. 4)—called the Tourassian epoch, after remains found in a cave called La Tourasse in the Haut Ga
ronne, corresponds to the Azilian period of other classifications; as the text indicates, it was supposedly a transitional period between two major elements of his classification.
15 Marcasite is a kind of iron sulphide, also known as “white pyrites,” although the name is also employed more loosely to refer to any kind of pyrites employed as a gemstone.
16 Rosny’s narrator inserts a footnote here: “All the following dialogues are imperfect translations, my hosts’ language containing neither verbs nor adjectives; the verbs are represented by gestures, the adjectives by the repetition or special pronunciation of nouns. In the same way, the proper nouns only distantly resemble the correct pronunciation of the names.”
17 A region of Algeria.
18 “Jean Revel” was the pseudonym of Paul Toutain (1848-1925), a regional writer famous for his celebration of the culture of Normandy. The quote probably comes from one of the items in Contes normands (1901)
19 The word that I have had to translate as “Bandits” is the much more colorful Ecorcheurs [flayers], a designation initially given to gangs of rogue mercenaries active in France in the 14th and early 15th centuries—the name represented their alleged habit of stripping their murdered victims bare. It was subsequently used to refer to any unusually rapacious robbers.
20 A literal (if somewhat euphemistic) translation of this Dutch term of abuse would be “knave.”
21 Literally “spy-holes.”
22 Sexual symbolism is inevitably difficult to translate, because French double entendres and English ones frequently lack correspondence, so English readers will have to take it on trust that such passages as this one seem somewhat less inelegant in French.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION
Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
Didier de Chousy. Ignis
C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid; The Thieves of Silence
Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
Charles de Fieux. Lamékis
Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic
Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
André Laurie. Spiridon
Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
Jules Lermina. Mysteryville; Panic in Paris; The Secret of Zippelius
José Moselli. Illa’s End
John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril; Doctor Lerne; The Doctored Man; A Man Among the Microbes; The Master of Light
Jean Richepin. The Wing
Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries; Chalet in the Sky
J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River; The Givreuse Enigma; The Mysterious Force; The Navigators of Space; Vamireh; The World of the Variants; The Young Vampire
Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
Han Ryner. The Superhumans
Brian Stableford (anthologist) The Germans on Venus; News from the Moon; The Supreme Progress; The World Above the World; Nemoville
Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
Kurt Steiner. Ortog
Eugène Thébault. Radio-Terror
C.-F. Tiphaigne de La Roche. Amilec
Théo Varlet. The Xenobiotic Invasion
Paul Vibert. The Mysterious Fluid
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The Scaffold; The Vampire Soul
Acknowledgements: I should like to thank John J. Pierce for providing valuable research materials and offering advice and support. Many of the copies of Rosny’s works and critical articles related to his work were borrowed from the London Library. Also thanks to Paul Wessels for his generous and extensive help in the final preparation of this text.
English adaptation, introduction and afterword Copyright 2010 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2010 by Vincent Laik.
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ISBN 978-1-935558-36-1. First Printing. April 2010. Published by Black Coat Press, an imprint of Hollywood Comics.com, LLC, P.O. Box 17270, Encino, CA 91416. All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The stories and characters depicted in this book are entirely fictional. Printed in the United States of America.
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