The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “La Légende sceptique” is the most diverse of all Rosny’s patchwork texts, and demonstrates in no uncertain terms that his early writings were much more various in style and affiliation than his published novels suggested. It includes a sequence of eleven prose poems, clearly reflective of his admiration for Baudelaire—the author most frequently quoted by his characters—although their subject-matter is derived from his reading of scientific texts. It also includes a brief advice-manual for anyone desirous of founding a new religion, and a remarkable account of the progression of a disease, among other eccentrically introspective materials, but the heart of the enterprise is a collection of earnest philosophical essays derived from the author’s omnivorous reading of scientific works, which discuss the nature of the universe and the possibilities of human evolution.

  To the contemporary eye, the ideas contained in this set of philosophical speculations must have appeared utterly bizarre, and some of them still seem bizarre to the modern eye, although others have either become manifestly obsolete or much more familiar. There is, however, no doubting the awesome scope of their ambition, nor that there is a component of brilliance contained within them. The manner in which the collective patchwork gropes for suitable literary formats in which to express such ideas, and fails to find any that is satisfactory, is sufficient explanation of the fact that Rosny largely abandoned that quest thereafter, and remained conspicuously tentative in the attempts he did make—but he did not abandon the further development of the ideas he had sketched out in the philosophical essays, and he continually returned to that development in print, in a series of non-fictional endeavors that were ignored at the time and have attracted no attention since.

  The most substantial of these further essays, published as a book by Alcan was Le Pluralisme, essai sur la discontinuité et l’hétérogéneité des phénomènes [Pluralism: An Essay on the Discontinuity and Hetreogeneity of Phenomena] (1909), which appeared with the signature J. H. Boëx-Borel. It was successful enough for Alcan to issue a companion volume updating its argument in 1922, under the signature J.-H. Rosny Aîné, entitled Les Sciences et pluralisme [The Sciences and Pluralism], which sold well enough to be reprinted twice, in 1930 and 1932.

  The most conspicuous of the author’s other essays in this vein appeared in the seemingly-unlikely venue of the Mercure de France, which had begun life as the semi-official organ of the Symbolist Movement and maintained a certain defiant originality long into the 20th century, as that movement faded away. It was in the pages of the Mercure that the notion of Rosny as a significant pioneer of the roman scientifique was most thoroughly developed, primarily by Jean Morel, and where his self-representation as an offbeat natural philosopher was also given space for display and maturation. The periodical’s editor, Alfred Vallette, had been another regular at Maurice Renard’s salon in 1908-1914, and had apparently taken some inspiration therefrom; although he only published one story by Renard he published a number of significant items of speculative fiction by other writers, including Gabriel de Lautrec, Henri Falk and Marcel Rouff.

  In the July 1, 1921 issue of the Mercure Rosny published “Le Temps et l’espace” [Time and Space] a 10,000-word article that elaborated the thesis of the pamphlet in a three-part study, the first discussing the concept of “plural space” in the context of contemporary discussions of “geometric space” and “non-Euclidean space,” the second examining the debate initiated by Henri Bergson as to whether the scientific concept of time and the experience of time can be reconciled, and the notion of time as a “fourth dimension,” and the third discussing relativity theory, with particular reference to the implications of the Michelson-Morley experiment, Albert Einstein’s denial of the ether, and the ideas of Lorentz and Fitzgerald.

  In the August 15, 1925 issue, Rosny supplemented his discussion of the relationship between space and time in “Le Puralisme intégral” [Integral Pluralism], which recruits various items of evidence and argument to oppose the assumption by scientists that the seeming complexity of the observable world is reducible to some kind of underlying simplicity, in which the world of the infinitely small involves the transactions of a few particles making up all kinds of atoms, and the entire universe is imagined as a repetitive sequence of stereotyped stars arranged into sidereal systems. In the February 15, 1931 issue Rosny further elaborated the consequences of his pluralistic thesis in the purely speculative “Vers le Quatrième Univers” [Toward the Fourth Universe] in which he proposes that “pluralism” exists on every conceivable scale—that complexity is, in fact, irreducible to simplicity, that everything is different from everything else—and that what we think of as the “whole” of existence is nothing of the sort, but only one aspect of an infinite number of existences.

  In a sense, this argument is a straightforward extrapolation of the old theological argument about “the plurality of worlds,” which argued that it was an insult to God’s creative power to think that he had only created one world, and had been used in support of the Copernican hypothesis, to justify the assertion that the planets were also worlds, and that other stars must have planets of their own after the fashion of the sun. The plurality of worlds had frequently been coupled with “the principle of plenitude,” which argued that God could not have created all those other worlds only to leave them empty, and that each of them must therefore have its own life, including its own equivalent of the human race—a principle that inevitably had an exceedingly powerful influence on the development of scientific romances dealing with journeys to and the population of other worlds.

  Rosny, however, took this argument a step further in “Vers le quatrième univers” and Compagnons de l’univers, in which he elaborated brief statements made in several of his earlier scientific romances with regard to “innumerable co-existence.” Briefly stated, his fundamental proposition is that the apparent emptiness of the space within atoms and between stars has to be an artifact of our senses rather than an objective reality—like Aristotle, he found the notion of “void” essentially abhorrent—and that, in accordance with the principle of plenitude, space must actually be full. In Rosny’s view, it has to be full not merely of matter that is inapprehensible by our senses but of an infinite series of cosmic aggregations of such matter, each one inapprehensible by all the rest—each one, in fact, in accordance with the principle of pluralism, quite different from all the rest, none of them being a simple variant of any of the others.

  Since Rosny wrote his essays on pluralism, of course, physicists and scientific romances alike have become familiar with the notion of an infinite series of “alternative universes” and with the notions of “dark matter” and “dark energy” that hold the observable universe together while not being directly perceptible. The notion of a “multiverse” containing all possible alternative universes is now commonplace in science as well as science fiction, if not yet entirely respectable. It must be noted, however, that the imaginative reach of Rosny’s thesis remains substantially greater than these subsequent developments.

  The conventional view of alternative universes displaces them in a hypothetical fourth spatial dimension, and allows each of them to retain its component of void as well as its fundamental subatomic simplicity; the extent to which they differ from our own is very often seen in terms of cosmically-trivial variations in Earthly history, and even the bolder versions that imagine alternative universes with different laws of physics are nevertheless still based on the notion of tweaking a fundamental simplicity. Rosny’s version of “the fourth universe” (his version of the multiverse) is much more ambitious, both in its packaging and its range—so much more ambitious, in fact, that it becomes very difficult indeed to package in conventional narrative, or any other literary form.

  The history of Rosny’s dabblings in scientific romance, from the first three examples that reached publication in 1887-1889 all the way through to “Les Compagnons de l’univers” and “Dans le mondes des Variants” half a century later, is that of a
series of attempts to incarnate some fraction of his vision of the universe in literary form, thus to prompt or inspire readers to move beyond their conventional way of thinking. The vision underlying his speculations, although it was not to be fully and explicitly developed for a long time, was already so far ahead of the visions underlying scientific romances and science fiction stories by other hands that no one working in the latter genre has yet got as far. Rosny was quite right to deny that he was some sort of equivalent of H. G. Wells, who only moved beyond theological assumptions about the essential humanity of the inhabitants of other worlds to suggest that the inhabitants of other worlds might be the products of alternative processes of evolution essentially similar to our own.

  From the very beginning, Rosny was only interested in alternative evolutions as trivial variants, although he was certainly prepared to attempt to imagine such variants and find them fascinating; what he was really interested in was imagining beings and forces that defied our conventional classifications system: life forms that were not only not human but not animal or vegetable, being genuinely alien. Nor was he much interested in conventional cataclysms, such as earthquakes or ordinary cosmic collisions; what really interested him was the possibility of cataclysms of a different sort, resulting from the brief and peripheral interaction of alien universes, coexisting in the same unempty space as our universe but normally imperceptible and unknown to one another. In that, he was alone, not only in 1887 but also in 1939—and, for that matter, today. It was an originality that did him no favors, in terms of finding an admiring audience, but it was an originality that was surely worthy of pride, and perhaps even of a pride that seemed to some people, to borrow Lucien Descaves’ epithets, “mad” and “incommensurable.” It was not merely in his relation to Naturalism that Rosny really deserved a category of his own, but also in relation to scientific romance; there was not, and never has been, anyone else like him.

  Nowadays, with the aid of hindsight, we can take the conceptual framework offered in Le Pluralisme and “Vers le quatrième univers,” apply it to much earlier works like “Les Xipéhuz” and “Le Cataclysme,” and see in those stories a kind of sense that was quite inapprehensible to their contemporary readers, and to many readers since. That is the way that they ought to be read—or, at least, that is the way that they can be slotted into the whole fabric of his speculative fiction in such a way as to allow the essential coherency of that work to be seen—a coherency that is sufficient to have prompted the ever-perceptive Pierre Versins to assert that Rosny had “only written one novel, of which ‘La Légende sceptique’ is the preface and Les Compagnons de l’univers the conclusion.” This collection of his works is, in effect, a translation of that sprawling patchwork “novel.”

  I shall not proceed in this general introduction to more detailed analyses of particular stories, leaving that to introductions and afterwords to the individual volumes, but it is within the context of this general introduction that the contents of the whole six-volume project need to be seen and evaluated.

  In planning the contents of this introductory volume it seemed sensible to begin at the beginning, placing “Les Xipéhuz” ahead of “La Légende sceptique,” even though the latter is, as Versins points out, a sort of preface to the whole of Rosny’s work in the genre of scientific romance. “La Légende sceptique” is, I fear, by no means a reader-friendly work, being filled to the brim with all the “defects” of which Anatole France and René Doumic complained, and it might well make considerable demands on the patience and understanding of readers of this volume, but an understanding of its concerns and concepts really is vital to an understanding of what Rosny was trying to do in his scientific romances, and why. Given that he made so little effort to include explanations of the events and entities featured in his imaginative works within the works themselves, some knowledge of the world-view displayed in the piece is invaluable to their comprehension; hopefully, it will compensate readers for their necessary effort with its originality, imaginative audacity and sheer bizarrerie.

  I then thought it appropriate to supplement “Les Xipéhuz” with three further accounts of exotic alien life, for the purposes of comparison. Other accounts can be found in other Rosny works—most notably in La Force mystérieuse and “Dans le monde des Variants”—but these three are the stories in which alien life comes most clearly into focus as a key theme. As a group, “Les Xipéhuz,” “Un Autre Monde,” “La Mort de la Terre” and “Les Navigateurs de l’infini” offer a reasonably comprehensive sketch of Rosny’s ideas in relation to the distribution, evolution and ultimate destiny of life within the “fourth universe.”

  The version of “Les Xipéhuz” translated here is the one contained in the Mercure de France volume of 1896, which appended it to Le Cataclysme. The text of “La Légende Sceptique” that I used for translation is the one reprinted in the Marabout collection Récits de Science-Fiction (1975). The version of “Un Autre Monde” that I translated was taken from the collection bearing the same title, published by Plon in 1898. The version of “La Mort de la Terre” was taken from the eponymous Plon collection first issued in 1912 (although the copy I used was the sixth edition, dated 1914). The version of Les Navigateurs de l’infini that I used was the one issued in volume form in 1927 by La Nouvelle Revue Critique. The version of “Les Astronautes” I used was the one in the 1996 Grama edition of Les Navigateurs de l’infini. (There is no discussion of the last-named text in the afterword because I consider it to be inauthentic.) I have no reason to think that any of these versions differs substantially from the versions reproduced in other collections, although the version of “La Mort de la Terre” contained in the Marabout Récits has a brief prefatory passage that is not in the Plon version.

  Brian Stableford

  THE XIPEHUZ

  To Léon Hennique,3

  His friend and admirer

  J.-H. Rosny Aîné

  Part One

  I. The Forms

  It was a thousand years before the aggregation of civilization from which Nineveh, Babylon and Ecbatana emerged. As evening approached, the nomadic Pjehou tribe was making its way through the wild Forest of Kzour in a sea of oblique sunlight. The setting Sun swelled up, hung in the air and sank into its harmonious bed.4

  Because everyone was tired, they were silent, in quest of a beautiful clearing in which the tribe could light the sacred fire, make the evening meal and go to sleep, protected from wild animals by a double row of red fires.

  The clouds became opaline, polychromatic countries wandering above the four horizons, nocturnal gods breathing a cradle song, and the tribe moved on. A scout returned at a gallop, with news of a clearing and a stream of pure spring water.

  The tribe raised three long cheers; everyone pushed on more rapidly, childish laughter rippling. Even the horses and the donkeys, accustomed to the realization that a halt was imminent when the scouts returned and the nomads cried out, raised their heads proudly. The clearing appeared. The charming spring hollowed out its course between mosses and bushes; and a phantasmagoria was revealed to the nomads.

  To begin with, there was a great circle of bluish translucent cones, points uppermost, each one about half the size of a man. A few bright streaks and dark circles were distributed over their surfaces; near the base, each one had a star, as dazzling as the mid-say sun. Further away, and equally eccentric, planes reminiscent of birch-bark, spotted with multicolored ellipses, were posed vertically. There were also quasi-cylindrical Forms here and there, similarly multicolored; some were thin and tall, others short and stout; all were bronze in color, dotted with green. Like the planes, all of them possessed the same characteristic points of light.

  The tribe stared in amazement. A superstitious dread chilled the bravest, increasing further when the Forms began to undulate in the grey shadows of the clearing.

  All of a sudden, their stars trembling and flickering, the cones became elongated, while the cylinders and the planes made a noise like the hi
ss of water thrown on a fire, and they all came toward the nomads, their velocity accelerating.

  The entire tribe, bewitched by this prodigy, was rooted to the spot, continuing to stare. The Forms reached them. The impact was frightful. Groups of warriors, women and children collapsed on to the forest floor, mysteriously struck down as if by a bolt of lightning. Then dark terror lent strength, and the wings of agile flight, to the survivors—but the Forms, at first massed and organized in ranks, scattered with the tribe, clinging pitilessly to those in flight. The frightful attack was not infallible, however, killing some and stunning others but inflicting no wounds. A few red droplets sprang from the nostrils, eyes and ears of the dying, but the others, intact, soon got up again, resuming their fantastic flight through the wan twilight.

  Whatever the nature of the Forms was, they acted like living beings, not like weather phenomena, having the inconsistency and diversity of movement of living beings, evidently choosing their victims, and not confusing the nomads with plants, or even with animals.

  Soon, the fleetest runners perceived that they were no longer being pursued. Exhausted and anguished, they finally plucked up courage to go back toward the site of the prodigy. In the distance, between the tree-trunks bathed in shadow, the resplendent pursuit was continuing—and the Forms were preferentially running down and slaughtering the warriors, often disdaining the weak, women and children.