The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  I have already produced a five-volume set of Maurice Renard’s scientific romances similar to this one,2 whose supplementary materials map out that author’s association with the genre in great detail, but it is sufficient to say here that Renard was Wells’s most fervent admirer in France, and a diehard enthusiast for what he called the “scientific marvelous” and the potentialities of “scientific marvel fiction.” Because he came from a wealthy mercantile family, Renard had a private income when he first settled in Paris in 1908, and was able to indulge in a relatively lavish lifestyle. Salon culture had been in steep decline for some time by then, but Renard was as eager to join it as Rosny had been 20 years before, and set out to do so from the opposite direction, by starting one of his own. Although many notable writers and editors became regulars, the writer he was most eager to attract was Rosny, not because of his membership of the Goncourt Academy or his now-deflated reputation as an important neo-Naturalist, but simply because he was an anticipator of H. G. Wells. When Renard penned his “manifesto” for scientific romance, “Du Roman merveilleux scientifique et de son action sur l’intelligence du progress” (Le Spectateur octobre 1909; tr. as “On Scientific Marvel Fiction and its Influence on the Awareness of Progress”), he gave almost equal attention to Wells and Rosny as the pioneers and supposed masters of the fledgling genre—an opinion he had already made known to Rosny in no uncertain terms.

  Perhaps Renard actually succeeded in persuading Rosny that scientific marvel fiction really would acquire the prestige in future that it had been so contemptuously denied in the past, but it seems more likely that he only managed to persuade him that such fiction now had a potential marketability that it had not had when Rosny had first tried it out. That potential proved short-lived, as did Renard’s optimism, but while Renard’s salon was still going, Rosny was persuaded to try his hand at “scientific marvel fiction” again, in a vein clearly influenced by Renard’s manifesto—and, in one instance, by one of Renard’s own novels. The two of them never collaborated, but they definitely “juxtaposed,” each of them taking sufficient influence from the other to enliven his own work considerably, if only for a while. Oddly enough, they were very different writers; Renard was by far the better craftsman, planning his work carefully and revising it assiduously in order to build coherent and intricate plots, but he never had Rosny’s imaginative reach, and the reach he did have owed more than a little to his interest in refining and further extrapolating ideas he had found in Rosny’s work.

  Significantly, Rosny never suggested that any of Maurice Renard’s novels might be worthy of consideration for the Prix Goncourt, and never proposed him for election to the Academy itself (to which his namesake in Jules Renard had earlier been elected). The elder Rosny was prepared to allow Maurice Renard to influence his hackwork, to a degree, but he remained very conscious of the fact that the latter was only a genre writer, and hence a cut below him in terms of apparent status—even though Renard, having been pauperized by the Great War, never sank so low while making his living from his pen as to write pure pulp fiction, while Rosny did so without an atom of conscience.

  Rosny’s first contributions to the principal French imitator of The Strand, Je Sais Tout—which had been founded in 1905—were conventional varieties of popular fiction. “Le Lion” [The Lion], a novella serialized in 1908, was a straightforward African adventure story, and “La Flèche au curare” [The Curare-tipped Arrow] (1909) was in a similar vein; either might equally well have appeared in the more downmarket Journal des Voyages, which was one of the last surviving refuges of Vernian fiction, mostly featuring mundane adventures set in far-flung corners of the ever-shrinking globe. His third sale to the magazine was, however, the serial novel La Guerre du feu (1909; tr. as The Quest for Fire), a new prehistoric romance that revamped the essential substance of Vamireh in the context of a more coherent adventure story, with a more urgent narrative thread. The novel became Rosny’s most successful work, eventually giving rise to the notable 1981 film adaptation by Jean-Jacques Annaud.

  It is possible that Rosny initially intended the first of his “Renardian” scientific romances, “La Mort de la Terre” (tr. herein as “The Death of the Earth”), as a serial for Je Sais Tout, but it did not appear there, being serialized instead in Les Annales Politiques et Littéraire in May-July 1910 before being reprinted as the title-story of a Plon collection in 1912. The story clearly owes some inspiration to Wells’s The Time Machine, but both Rosny and Renard were well aware that Wells’s novel had had a French predecessor in Camille Flammarion’s La Fin du monde (1893; tr. as Omega: The Last Days of the World) and Rosny was, in effect, knowingly carrying forward a French tradition parallel to the English one. Indeed, Rosny took the trouble to equip the book version with a preface, in which he dissented from the opinion that he was a Wellsian writer:

  “It has sometimes been said that I was a precursor of Wells. A few critics have gone so far as to say that Wells had drawn part of his inspiration from such of my writings as Les Xipéhuz, La Légende sceptique, Le Cataclysme and a few others that appeared before the English writer’s fine novels. I do not think that this is true, and I am even inclined to think that Wells has not read any of my works. He certainly does not share the monstrous ignorance of his compatriots in matters of continental literature, but the notoriety of Les Xipéhuz, La Légende sceptique, Le Cataclysme, etc. etc. was negligible in the era in which he started to write—and if he had read my modest books, I would deny all the same that he had been subject to any influence by them. The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau are original works, which it is necessary to admire without reserve. Besides, there is a fundamental difference between Wells and me in the manner of construction of unknown entities. Wells prefers living beings that still offer a considerable analogy with those that we know, while I willingly imagine creatures on a mineral sort, as in Les Xipéhuz, or made of a matter other than ours, or even existing in a world regulated by other forces than ours; the Ferromagnetals that appear episodically in La Mort de la Terre belong to one of these categories.

  “In sum, save for a few points in which all writers occupied with the marvelous are similar, there is only an apparent resemblance between Wells and me, although it was probably not unnecessary to point this out.”

  Rosny’s second Renardian romance—which obviously took its inspiration, and its basic narrative framework, from Renard’s Le Péril bleu (1911; tr. as The Blue Peril)—was La Force mystérieuse (tr. in vol. 3 as “The Mysterious Force”), which was serialized in Je Sais Tout in 1913. This novel went to some lengths to emphasize the point made in the preface to La Mort de la Terre, by introducing phenomena and life-forms even stranger than the ferromagnetals of the earlier novella or the Xipehuz, and much stranger than any featured by Wells or Renard. Curiously enough, however, this story too became accidentally entangled with the history of British scientific romances when readers began to notice coincidental parallels between its opening sequence and a novel that began serialization a couple of months later in Je Sais Tout’s model, The Strand. Again, Rosny was prompted to add a preface to the book version issued by Plon in 1914:

  “On March 11, 1913 an American friend sent the following note to me: ‘Have you given an English writer—one of the most famous—the right to rewrite your novel that is currently appearing in Je Sais Tout; have you given him the right to take the central thesis and such details as the disturbance of the lines of the spectrum, the agitation of populations, the discussions of a possible anomaly of the ether and the poisoning of humanity, in their entirety? The famous English writer is publishing this at the present moment without naming you, without any reference to Rosny Aîné, placing the setting in England.’

  “In consequence of that letter, I read the issue of the Strand Magazine in which my British colleague, Monsieur Conan Doyle, had begun publication of a novel entitled The Poison Belt. There are indeed annoying coincidences between the theme of his story and the theme of mine, inc
luding the disturbance of light, the phases of human panic and depression, and so on—coincidences that will be obvious to any reader of the two works. I confess that I cannot, in view of the extreme particularity of the thesis, restrain certain suspicions—all the more so because, in England, it quite often happens that writers buy an idea, which they then exploit as they please: someone might have proposed my idea to Monsieur Conan Doyle.

  “Certainly, a coincidence is always possible, and for myself, I am inclined to be trusting. Thus, I have always been convinced that Wells had not read my Xipéhuz, my Légende sceptique or my Cataclysme, which appeared well before his fine stories. That is because there is in Wells a certain individual stamp that Monsieur Conan Doyle lacks. In any case, my objective is not to make any claim. I admit the possibility of a transmission of ideas between Monsieur Conan Doyle and myself, but as I know, from fairly long experience, that one is often accused of following those who follow you, I think it useful to establish a time-scale and to point out that Je Sais Tout had already published the first two parts of La Force Mystérieuse when The Poison Belt began to appear in the Strand Magazine.”

  In fact, the time-scale proves beyond all reasonable doubt that the coincidences between the two novels were, indeed, purely coincidental; the fact that Rosny draws no such conclusion is presumably due to the fact that there was a long tradition in France of feuilletonistes writing daily newspaper serials, who delivered their copy on the day before the issue went to press. British magazines worked on a much more leisurely schedule, so the overwhelming probability is that Doyle had delivered the entire text of The Poison Belt to the editor of the Strand before anyone could possibly have told him about the theme of Rosny’s serial in Je Sais Tout. In any case, the divergence of the two stories after their opening sequences is very marked indeed, so any question of imitation rapidly disappears, and could never have seemed likely to anyone but readers who had only read the first episode of each serial.

  Maurice Renard was so delighted with La Force mystérieuse as an example of “scientific marvel fiction” that he wrote an extravagant essay in praise of it: “Le Merveilleux scientifique et la Force mystérieuse de J.-H. Rosny Aîné,” published in the June 15, 1914 isssue of La Vie. When he wrote the essay, Renard was still hopeful that such examples might pave the way for a glorious future for the nascent genre with which he was infatuated, and there seems to be every reason to believe that he and Rosny would have continued to juxtapose such works for at least a little while longer had not circumstances intervened. Unfortunately, they did intervene, in the crushing form of the Great War, into which Renard—who had experience as a cavalry officer—was immediately drafted. By the time he returned to civilian and literary life, impoverished but not yet in despair, the world had changed drastically, and Rosny was all too well aware of the implications of that change.

  In fact, Rosny probably did begin work on a third item of scientific marvel fiction in 1914, but did not manage to get it ready for publication for some time thereafter. Although it is no less of a patchwork than many of Rosny’s other works, the interpolation two-thirds of the way through the finished text of an entirely irrelevant episode in which the hero sinks a German submarine suggests that he felt obliged to modify it in order to fit in with the pattern of wartime propaganda fiction, and that some such insertion was the price of obtaining publication for it in 1917 as L’énigme de Givreuse (tr. in vol. 5 as “The Givreuse Enigma”). He had not published any books at all in 1915 or 1916, and his other 1917 publication, Perdus? [Doomed?] (likewise issued by Flammarion) was a straightforward exercise in propaganda fiction, as was his 1918 collection Confidences sur l’amitié des tranchées [Secrets of Friendship in the Trenches].

  When popular fiction got under way again after the trauma of the war—as Maurice Renard found to his cost—the public mood had turned against science, because of the contribution new technologies had made to the slaughter, and scientific romance was completely out of fashion. The same did not apply, however, to prehistoric romance or more conventional forms of adventure fiction, and that was the kind of hackwork to which Rosny reverted in earnest. Even before the war had ended, he had attempted to repeat the triumph of La Guerre du feu with Le Félin géant, which was serialized in Lectures Pour Tous in May-July 1918 before being reprinted in book form by Plon in 1920. Although it did not do as well as its predecessor, it was translated into English for publication in America. Although the book—The Giant Cat—did not appear until 1924, Rosny might have been aware of the rights sale well in advance of that date, because the lost land adventure L’Etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle (1922; tr. in vol. 3 as “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Journey”) has the appearance of having been constructed with the idea of a similar sale in mind, featuring an American hero and seemingly mimicking the formulae of the pulp magazines.

  Rosny also published a very brief lost land story in Lectures Pour Tous, “La Grande énigme” (1920; tr. in vol. 2 as “The Great Enigma”), in which he offered a brief glimpse of a conventional lost land preserving relics of the Palaeolithic era rather than featuring a variant evolution—a theme swiftly expanded in another adventure story, Le Trésor dans la neige (1920; tr. in vol. 2 as “The Treasure in the Snow”), in which he brought back the protagonist of “La Contrée prodigieuse des caverns” and “Les Profondeurs de Kyamo” for one last fling.

  The extent to which Rosny was in communication with Maurice Renard once the war was over is difficult to estimate, since Renard could no longer afford to host a weekly salon, but the two undoubtedly met on occasion, and presumably shared Renard’s despair with regard to the fortunes of the new genre he had tried to nurture and had virtually been forced to abandon after publishing a truncated version of “L’Homme truqué” (tr. as “The Doctored Man”) in Je Sais Tout in 1921. There was certainly nothing in either man’s experience to encourage them to write more scientific marvel fiction thereafter—but Renard kept trying to get his existing work in that vein into print, and Rosny did manage to place one more novella of that sort in the periodical Oeuvres Libres, which had published Renard’s mock-Wellsian “L’Homme qui voulait être invisible” in 1923 and was also publishing a whole series of “mad scientist” comedies by André Couvreur, who was better known as a Zolaesque Naturalist.

  The scientific romance that Rosny contributed to Oeuvres Libres was Les Navigateurs de l’infini (tr. herein as “The Navigators of Space”), which appeared there in 1925. It is an account of the first voyage to Mars, and the life-forms discovered there. The text makes Rosny’s intention to write a sequel clear, but none materialized at the time, and Rosny abandoned scientific marvel fiction for good, apparently agreeing with Renard that the genre had no future in France. Twenty years after his death, a story called “Les Astronautes” [The Astronauts] was published in a paperback edition of Les Navigateurs de l’infini as if it were the second part of a composite novel. Although I have translated “Les Astronauts” for this collection, in the interests of completeness, the close acquaintance I developed with the idiosyncrasies of Rosny’s style while carrying out this series of translations convinces me that only the first 5000 or 6000 words are actually his, the remaining 20,000 having been juxtaposed by another hand. The new text added nothing significant to Rosny’s scenario.

  Les Navigateurs de l’infini might have been inspired by an interest in the actual possibilities of space travel, although it was the cause rather than an effect of Rosny’s subsequent adoption as an honored member of Robert Esnault-Pelterie’s Nouvelle Societé Scientifique de Recherches pour l’éla-boration de fusées destinées aux futures voyages interplanétaires [Scientific Society for Research into the Development of Rockets Designed for Future Interplanetary Journeys] in 1928.

  Not unnaturally, after the failure of his final venture into scientific marvel fiction, Rosny reverted to more familiar ground. Although L’Etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle had failed to sell in America, as he might have hoped, his next prehistoric advent
ure story, Helgvor du fleuve bleu (1930) had better luck, translation rights being sold to the pulp magazine Argosy—probably for a far greater sum than was paid for French rights. It was serialized there in 1932, a date attached in some bibliographical lists to Rosny’s next adventure story, La Sauvage aventure (tr. in vol. 5 as “Adventure in the Wild”) although I can find no evidence of its appearance in a periodical before the Albin Michel book edition of 1935. La Sauvage aventure is an even more unashamed venture in pulp fiction than L’Etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle, although it is a calculated expansion of a novelette in a very different style (and with a very different ending), which had appeared in a collection of items by different authors in 1929: “Les Hommes-Sangliers” (tr. in vol. 2 as “The Boar Men”). Like its predecessor, La Sauvage aventure failed to sell to its intended ultimate market, and Rosny did no more work in that vein—although the fact that he was now in his seventies was probably the decisive factor in that respect.

  La Sauvage aventure contrasts very markedly with a near-contemporary novel that was initially published as a serial in the Mercure de France, and was then reprinted as a book under that periodical’s imprint: Les Compagnons de l’univers (1934 tr. in vol. 6 as “Companions of the Universe”). If the former was Rosny’s ultimate experiment in pulp fiction, then the latter was his ultimate experiment in Naturalism, tending towards Existentialist fiction in its relentless focus on inner experience and a very peculiar form of angst. Some commentators have likened it to “La Légende sceptique,” some sections of which also have quasi-existentialist leanings, but while the earlier text focused on the angst of social isolation and illness, the later one focuses on sex, with an extraordinary cynicism that belies Rosny’s earlier (mostly highly idealized) treatments of the subject, although it has certain affinities with “Les Hommes-Sangliers” and the last-published of Rosny’s scientific romances, “Dans le monde des Variants” (1939; tr. in vol. 2 as “In the World of the Variants”). The novel does, however, have a minor component of scientific romance, which connects with certain other passages in “La Légende sceptique,” via a chain of reasoning and endeavor that needs special attention if Rosny’s work is to be fully understood.