An International Mission to the Moon

by Jean Petithuguenin

  An International Mission to the Moon

  and Other Stories

  by

  Jean Petithuguenin

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  AN INTERNATIONAL MISSION TO THE MOON

  THE GREAT CURRENT

  THE SECRET OF THE INCAS

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION

  Introduction

  Une Mission internationale dans la lune by Jean Petithuguenin, here translated as “An International Mission to the Moon,” was originally published as a feuilleton serial under the title “Une Mission dans la lune” in the Journal des Voyages between July and September 1926. It was reprinted in book form under the fuller title by Jules Tallandier in 1933. With the exception of a few paragraphs of material additional to the book version—which were probably cut from the original to fit that section more accurately to the pagination of the Journal des Voyages—the two texts are identical, save for a few trivial alterations. Those include the introduction of extra chapter breaks in the book version and the alteration of some chapter titles; the correction of an arithmetical error; the addition of a more recent reference to a footnote; and the amendment of a series of annoying omissions in the feuilleton version inflicted by the magazine’s editor, who decided to run a competition for readers, inviting them to deduce the omitted words, all of which were proper names or technical terms.

  The second novella in the present volume, Le Grand courant, here translated as “The Great Current,” was serialized in Science et Voyages in 1931 prior to being reprinted by Tallandier in 1932. The periodical in which it first appeared was a popular science magazine whose proprietor attempted to combine the long-standing appeal of the Journal des Voyages with much wider scientific interests, with the side-effect that the fiction it published in feuilleton form became far more imaginatively ambitious than the stodgier Vernian materials of its predecessor, including a good deal of futuristic and interplanetary fiction closely resembling the fiction that was currently being produced for the recently-born American science fiction magazines.

  The third story completing the collection, Le Secret des Incas, here translated as “The Secret of the Incas” was reprinted by Tallandier in 1934 in the same format as the other two items, after a prior serialization in 1926-27. It could easily have appeared in the Journal de Voyages, and its didactic inclusions seem to have been designed for that periodical, but it is sufficiently conventional as an adventure story to have appeared in any one of several magazines of the period that routinely featured “geographical fiction” of the kind that Jules Verne had done so much to popularize and standardize.

  Jean Petithuguenin (1878-1939) attempted to make a career writing for the theater, having two one-act plays produced in 1902, before switching media and becoming a prolific writer of popular fiction. Most of his early work consisted of feuilletons and part-works, including a long series featuring the adventures of Stoerte-Becker, le roi de l’océan [Stoerte-Becker, King of the Ocean] (1910-1913). He was one of many writers involved in chronicling the adventures of the detective Nick Carter, a character from American “dime novels” and pulp magazines, who took on an independent life in French popular fiction as a result of the popularity of imported silent movies featuring the character. In the same vein, Petithuguenin chronicled the adventures of Ethel King: le Nick Carter féminin [Ethel King, the female Nick Carter] (1913),1 which is perhaps more interesting in its employment of a female detective in an era when they were still thin on the ground.

  Inevitably, Petithuguenin’s career was severely disrupted by the Great War, but he was one of many writers who turned their hands to writing propagandistic fiction for morale-building purposes in 1917, when he began the “Patrie” series of novelettes featuring heroic French exploits during key incidents of the war. He also published a considerable number of love stories in booklet form in 1917-18, most of which had probably appeared previously in feuilleton form. When the war was over he continued to produce downmarket genre fiction on a lavish scale until the early 1930s, including numerous movie novelizations. As well as love stories and crime stories he made occasional ventures into adventure fiction, sometimes with a supernatural component, and occasionally attempted more respectable endeavors, most notably his account of La Vie tragique de Marguerite d’Anjou, reine d’Angleterre [The Tragic Life of Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England] (1928).

  Within that overall pattern, Petithuguenin’s two ventures into speculative fiction, undertaken relatively late in his career, are strikingly anomalous. Although produced as feuilletons for relatively downmarket publications, they are both highly distinctive and original. Although neither has any great literary merit, and in narrative terms they are spectacularly awkward by comparison with his usual fluency, but that awkwardness is a by-product of their remarkable imaginative ambition and earnest didactic intent. The author’s interest in technological advancement and the possibility of space travel was obviously real, and also well-informed; he was, in consequence, one of the first experimenters in France with what would later come to be called in America “hard science fiction”: fiction supposedly based on real technological possibilities, imagined and described with appropriate technical detail and discipline.

  Une Mission internationale dans la lune is particularly interesting within the context of the evolution of speculative fiction because it is one of a group of novels produced in several different countries that attempted to produce realistic accounts of a voyage to the moon effected by means of rocket propulsion—or, as Petithuguenin puts it, “reaction engines.” The notion that such devices were the only practical means of sending projectiles into space was initially popularized by the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who published an essay advancing that argument in 1903, and then attempted to popularize it further in a novel, Vne zemli (serial version 1916; book version 1920; tr. as Outside the Earth). Tsiolkovsky’s endeavors and those of experimenters such as the American Robert Goddard and the German Hermann Oberth—whose non-fictional Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen [By Rocket into Interplanetary Space] (1923) was followed by the fictional popularization Der Schuss ins All (1925; tr. as The Shot into Infinity) by his friend Otto Willi Gail—resulted in the foundation in the mid-1920s of societies in Russia, America, Germany, France and England dedicated to propagandizing the possibility of space travel by means of rockets.

  It is not surprising that the members of those societies routinely opted to use fiction as a means of propaganda because almost all of them had initially been inspired by works of fiction, most especially Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune (1865) and its sequel Autour de la lune (1870), initially translated into English in the omnibus From the Earth to the Moon…and a Trip Around It. Verne’s archetypal novel had prompted previous imitations in France, most notably the first volume of Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant russe (1888)2 by Georges Le Faure and Henri de Graffigny, the sequel by another hand Un Monde inconnu (1896 but written in the early 1880s)3 by “Pierre de Sélènes” and Les Allemands sur Vénus (1913)4 by “André Mas.”

  The pseudonymous Mas appears to have been a member of a propagandist group formed in advance of the 1920s rocket societies, and Petithuguenin might have known him; he certainly knew of his somewhat esoteric novelette, because he takes time out in the text of his own novella to explain why the unusual method of space travel proposed therein would not work. Petithuguenin also explains why Verne’s giant cannon, the Columbiad, would not be practical and why the modification to that method suggested by “Pierre
de Sélènes” would not work either, although Verne is the only other author he mentions by name.

  Although Une Mission internationale dans la lune was not the first quasi-documentary work of fiction popularizing the notion of traveling to the moon by rocket, therefore, it was the one with the most substantial literary pedigree, and it is also the most realistic. Although it seems naïve now that we have the actual mission to the moon with which to compare it, it is nevertheless far closer to that eventual reality than the even more primitive efforts of Tsiolkovsky and Gail. In spite of the Vernian precedent, however, it was something of a departure for the Journal des Voyages—which had previously steered clear of interplanetary fiction—to publish it, and its unusual nature prompted the periodical’s editor to supplement the first episode with a justificatory note insisting on the story’s rational plausibility and educational value, the competition to identify the missing words being a rather eccentric method of emphasizing the latter claim. Petithuguenin’s work thus became an interesting experiment in “drama-documentary” format, perhaps too unusual to garner much approval in its own day, but now recognizable as a fascinating, if not entirely successful, literary experiment.

  Le Grand courant is similarly experimental, and even less successful, although arguably all the more interesting for it. It illustrates very clearly the difficulties faced by writers eager to use fictional means of addressing questions of technical possibility and the philosophical issues surrounding the existential consequences of far-reaching technological progress. The first chapter includes a long speech on the necessity of developing new sources of energy to replace the fossil fuels that are inevitably in limited supply, and possible means of capturing solar radiation more directly—a topic that has only become far more urgent since 1932—whereas the third chapter is almost entirely taken up with scientific discourse. The attempt to frame these essays with a plot that is part love story and part “yellow peril” melodrama is extremely awkward, especially in the abrupt variations of its narrative pace and narrative distance, but such clumsiness is inevitable when writers move into new narrative territory for the first time, at least when they do not possess the exceptional brilliance that Jules Verne brought to that kind of thematic interweaving.

  Many writers for the early American science fiction magazines were obliged to confront the same problems of narrative strategy that Petithuguenin did in constructing Le Grand courant, and many were equally maladroit in coping with them. Many would not have been able to publish that kind of work without the protective umbrella of the science fiction magazines’ specific agenda, and the same is true of Petithuguenin, who would not have been able to publish Le Grand courant as a feuilleton anywhere other than Science et Voyages, and Tallandier would surely not have published the book version without the encouragement of that former publication. Writers of generic science fiction soon learned to develop the special narrative techniques required to make such endeavors more “reader-friendly,” and modern readers now expect that particular kind of sophistication, but pioneering work like Le Grand courant still retains a certain primitive charm as well as deserving respect for its vaulting ambition, and it is a fascinating historical specimen.

  Le Secret des Incas makes an interesting comparison precisely because it does not have to tackle the narrative difficulties that arose from the uniquely challenging aspects of the other two novellas, and is thus permitted a much smoother, faster-paced and coherent deployment of standard tropes. It is far more reader-friendly than its predecessors precisely because it is so amicably familiar, restricting its didactic intrusions to the kinds of “local color” necessary in adventure stories set in remote places, and drawing economically on history, ethnology and mythology by way of decoration. The story is a conventional Vernian potboiler—but it is worth bearing in mind that if such bland materials had not served to keep the Vernian pot boiling in such a lively manner for such a long period of time, the market space would not have existed for more ambitious and exotic ventures such as Une mission internationale dans la lune and Le Grand courant, each of which was unusually enterprising in its day, and can now be seen as significant stepping-stones in the progressive evolution of imaginative fiction.

  The translation of Une Mission internationale dans la lune was made primarily from a photocopy of the Tallandier text made by Jean-Marc Lofficier, from an original supplied by Marc Madouraud; they also supplied a copy of the feuilleton version for the purposes of comparison, and I am greatly indebted to them for their efforts. The translations of Le Grand courant and Le Secret des Incas were made from the versions of the Tallandier editions reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website.

  Brian Stableford

  AN INTERNATIONAL MISSION TO THE MOON

  I. Wisdom or Madness?

  There was a large crowd that day on the Delaware Quay in Philadelphia, on the edge of pier 49, alongside which a steamship, the Montgomery, was moored, with a strange object in tow.

  About three miles wide at that point, between Philadelphia and Camden—the annex of the great American port—the river was covered with small boats laden with curiosity-seekers, which were hampering the maneuvers of the cargo-ships and ferries.

  Everyone was pointing at the bizarre object that the Montgomery, whose engines were under pressure, was about to take out to sea. It was somewhat reminiscent of a powerful submarine about a hundred meters long, which, to judge by the superior part emerging from the water, affected the form of a long rectangular parallelepiped, tapered at the rear and terminated at the front by a rounded section like the head of a fish. The surface, entirely smooth, was coated with a kind of blue varnish on which seven capital letters were displayed comprising the word SELENIT. At the front, over about a fifth of the length of the machine, a number of small portholes could be seen, perfectly fitted, with neither hollows nor projections.

  To the right and the left of the upper section, the rounded prow broadened out; it formed swellings over the rest of the side wall, which were prolonged at the rear by tubes some fifteen meters long, like large-caliber cannons, slightly oblique relative to the Selenit’s axis. The spectators who were close enough, and whose gaze pierced the surface of the river, were able to see other similar tubes disposed over the inferior surface. Those lateral cannons where welded along their entire length to the walls of the vessel by strong metal bulkheads that met the hull at an angle, in such a fashion that the entire apparatus resembled an enormous crossbow bolt.

  The flanks of the Selenit were, moreover, partly masked by large pieces of wood fixed with cables, to which a series of large cylindrical floats were moored. It was easy to conclude that the machine was too heavy to float unaided and that it needed to be buoyed up to prevent it from sinking.

  People endowed with good eyesight were also able to remark a thin circular line on the superior wall toward the front, and four solid handgrips that revealed the presence of a screw-hatch.

  On the quay, and in the boats laden with sightseers, conversations were in full swing. Even the most sober individuals could not help feeling a considerable emotion at the thought that ten men would soon be enclosed in the metal monster, in order to attempt the most extraordinary adventure ever: a voyage to the moon.

  For more than a year, that great project had occupied the minds of the entire world. Sufficient publicity had been generated by certain clauses in the will of Elie Spruce, the celebrated founder of the naval shipyard at Camden that bears his name.

  Elie Spruce had been struck by the studies of certain scientists, which had indicated the possibility of sending a projectile to the moon in conditions such that humans could be enclosed within it without the risk of being killed by shocks either on departure or arrival. He had, in particular, retained the idea of Monsieur Esnault-Pelterie, who had advocated the employment of an apparatus propelled by the recoil of a fulminating powder.5

  To tell the truth, Esnault-Pelterie concluded that in the present state of knowledge, the solution to
the problem, although theoretically possible, could not yet be realized in practice. He observed that the most powerful modern explosives do not yield, for a given weight, the energy necessary for the propulsion of a vehicle designed to accomplish the journey from the Earth to the Moon.

  Elie Spruce, however, did not accept the conclusions of the expert engineer without reservations. He made the observation that the latter limited the consumption of explosive arbitrarily, in admitting that a vehicle weighing one metric ton cannot burn more than three hundred kilograms of powder, less than one third of its weight, because, according to Esnault-Pelterie, at least seven hundred kilos has to be devoted to the construction of a habitable vehicle.

  Now, the proportion is notoriously insufficient to oblige the projectile to quit the Earth.

  Elie Spruce envisaged the problem in another fashion:

  Given a mass of fulminating explosive capable of burning in its entirety and constituted in such a way that the energy disengaged by its deflagration propels it vertically as it draws away from the Earth, at what moment will it have acquired a velocity sufficient to escape the globe’s attraction, and what will be, at that moment, the proportion of the mass that has not yet burned?

  It is evident that that proportion could be replaced by incombustible materials, and it would be the latter that would constitute the useful weight of the vehicle. It is of little consequence that it is small, or even tiny; that would have no other consequence than obliging the constructors to employ an enormous quantity of explosive. For example, if it were necessary for them to consume nine hundred and ninety-nine kilos to launch a useful weight of one kilo, they would be far from the proportion of three hundred to seven hundred fixed by Monsieur Esnault-Pelterie, but they could nevertheless send a one-ton vehicle to the Moon by attaching it to nine hundred and ninety-nine tons of powder.