The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “We shall return to Mars!”

  A thrumming sound made us turn our heads, and Antoine’s vortex settled on the terrace.

  He looked at the Martian child welcomingly, then murmured: “If he has a wife one day, that might be the beginning of a Martian colony.”

  “When we take him back to Mars,” Jean said, “we’ll find a wife for him…”

  “Perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm,” said Antoine, “but it might, after all, be perilous. The Earth has reanimated Grace and the Implicit Chief singularly.”

  These words could do nothing to combat our complacency. An atmosphere of gentleness enveloped us. The landscapes of Mars mingled with the locations of the summery mountain—the conclave of silvered summits, and the pine-forests rising up from the depths, creeping up the slopes, having exterminated the oaks and the beech trees…

  Afterword

  “The Xipehuz” must have seemed a deeply enigmatic text to its original readers, many of whom would surely have asked at least some of the questions that the text stubbornly refused to answer. What were the Xipehuz? Where had they come from? What was their purpose? Why did they kill humans and animals, since they did not use them as nutrition?

  The probability is that Rosny did not provide answers to these questions because he had no idea what the answers were. Indeed, he seems to have changed his mind about the questions in the course of the story, in which the Xipehuz initially reported as resembling “planes” disappear, leaving only their conical kin. Rosny always appears to have been impulsively spontaneous in his creativity, recording images and ideas that occurred to him without bothering to think them through in advance—and then, whenever his attempts to think them through as he continued his work ran into inevitable difficulties, simply abandoning them to mystery and often refraining from removing inconsistencies and manifest contradictions. Over the course of his entire career, however, he did continue to niggle away at the implications of his ideas. Although it would be stretching the argument too far to suggest that he built an entirely new model of the universe merely to find a means of accommodating the Xipehuz and to provide a possibility that the questions posed above might somehow be answerable, there can be no doubt that the evolution of his metaphysical notions did not precede the imagery of his literary works so much as evolve in concert with it.

  In retrospect, the notion of “the fourth” universe—the “innumerable Coexistence,” as one of the characters in “The Navigators of Space” puts it—allows us to construct certain plausible hypotheses about where the Xipehuz might have originated, and why (if not how) they came to Earth. They probably came from a different component of the fourth universe—one of the many independent worlds contained in the seemingly empty space within the atoms and between the stars of our own. They probably came as would-be colonists, intent on occupying the Earth as other creatures of their kind had presumably occupied some other habitable world, perhaps having cleansed it—after a long evolutionary process—of some native homologue of our organic life. They probably killed Earthly animal life simply in order to clear it out of the way.

  Being impatient, like the Zoomorphs of “The Navigators of Space,” rather than patient, like the ferromagnetals of “The Death of the Earth,” the Xipehuz were probably intent on expanding the scope of their “realm” beyond its original habitat. Perhaps they might have done so by “space travel” within their own native cosmos, but perhaps not, either because of the same impracticability that makes interstellar travel difficult in our cosmos, or because the physical distribution of material substance in their native cosmos was very different from our own. They could not, of course, have arrived in our world by any simple process of transportation, as science fiction writers have sometimes imagined humans and aliens traveling between essentially-similar “parallel worlds,” but must have done so by some mysterious process of transmutation, which allowed them to forsake their original material envelopes—essentially imperceptible to, and incapable of interaction with, the matter making up our component of the fourth universe—in favor of new envelopes, presumably homologous with their own in some exotic fashion, that were capable of such interaction.

  As to what the Xipehuz are, that is eventually made clear by the story: they are living beings that have evolved from the “mineral realm” by a physical and chemical process quite distinct from that which produced the protoplasmic life of plants, animals and protozoa—probably a “dry” process unreliant on water. They are fundamentally similar in kind to Zoomorphs and ferromagnetals—and also to the Moedigen and Vuren of “Another World,” although the unperceived existence on Earth of the latter species raises further problems of hypothetical identification and explanation.

  “Another World” is one of the most frustrating of Rosny’s scientific romances because it demonstrates more clearly than any other the acute problems that he had in developing his ideas once he had set down the substance of their initial inspiration. Having introduced the Xipehuz—probably without the slightest idea of what he was going to do with them—he was at least able to fall back on a ready-made narrative stand-by (the most convenient form of plot leverage is violence), and, for the rest of his career, he was usually careful to keep that stand-by ready to hand. In “Another World,” however, the possibility of a war between humans and Moedigen is virtually out of the question, at least within the restricted scope of the first-person narrative that introduces the story, and the author therefore had to cast around for another stand-by in order to have any prospect of an ending (narrative closure and sexual consummation have a lot in common). That one too, he was careful to keep well in hand throughout his career, although its continual use in scientific romances eventually led him to some rather peculiar extremes, as “The Navigators of Space” readily illustrates. In “Another World,” however, that recourse obliged him virtually to abandon the Moedigen and Vuren, at least as a central concern of the story.

  Perhaps, in retrospect, that abandonment was necessary to the completion of any kind of story at all, because the notion of another aspect of the “innumerable Coexistence” being visible to an exceptional individual is not logically coherent, at least in the form of representation given to it in “Another World.”64 Although the Moedigen and Vuren exist quite independently of animal and vegetable life, intangible as well as invisible thereto, they must interact with the mineral environment in some way, else they could not exist at all, and the results of that interaction must be detectable. The story’s narrator does point this out, but cannot carry the argument forward to any significant extent, leaving the nature of the interaction unspecified as well as unmeasured.

  Presumably, the effects that the Moedigen and Vuren have on the mineral environment are perceived by human beings, but regarded as “weather phenomena” rather than the actions of purposive beings, by virtue of a curious reversal of the “pathetic fallacy” that once prompted superstitious humans mistakenly to perceive intelligence and emotion in the weather. The same train of thought is tacitly present in “The Navigators of Space,” in the suggestion that there must already be an Earthly equivalent of “Ethereal” life that humans have not yet been able to perceive.

  The Ethereals of Mars are particularly interesting because they complete a tripartite division of possible modes of coherent organization, in which animal/vegetable life may be contrasted with both material mineral “life” and a non-material “life” whose organization and transactions are purely energetic. Although the notion that the last-named kind of organization is essentially superior to the alternatives is deliberately challenged in the text of “The Navigators of Space,” it has a certain natural attractiveness because the elimination of material middlemen seems inherently more efficient—or, at any rate, less clumsy.

  Rosny was not the first French writer to imagine “mineral life” or “energetic life;” both had been suggested as possibilities by Camille Flammarion—whose own scientific romances and speculative essays gave voice to the same kind of dis
gust for material processes of life-support that Rosny develops in “The Navigators of Space”—but Rosny developed those ideas much more elaborately than Flammarion ever had, let alone any of the other writers who had briefly touched on such notions. (Restif de la Bretonne and Didier de Chousy are notable examples.) This is, as Rosny pointed out himself, a key respect in which his work differs markedly from that of H.G. Wells, or that of Jules Verne; it was a step beyond the range to which his most important successors, as well as his most important predecessors, were intent on confining themselves.

  It did not take American pulp science fiction writers long to come up with a similar notion of evolutionary hierarchy, in which beings of frail flesh were likely to be superseded by inorganic intelligences, and ultimately by beings of “pure force,” and “The Navigators of Space” was virtually contemporary with George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1921), which similarly represented the “highest” form of evolution in terms of a transcendence of the material, so there was a broad consensus of sorts with respect to this issue at the time. Rosny was, however, unusual not only in the detailed attention he paid to his own constructions, but also in juxtaposing examples of his three fundamental forms of organization, crediting each with an independent evolutionary origin rather than imagining some kind of transformative process by which human minds might eventually become “etherealized.”

  Some of the ideas sketched out in “The Skeptical Legend” were similarly echoed in British scientific romance and American science fiction, most notably Rosny’s discussion of the possibility of the evolution of new senses, including some form of “cerebral penetration.” Indeed, the relative poverty of the human sensorium had been the key theme of the original text of French scientific romance, Voltaire’s “Micromégas” (1745)—but Rosny attempted to bring the insights of then-modern science to bear on the discussion with an intensity that put other contemporary writers, and most of his successors, into the shade. His investigations of chemical asymmetry and the possibilities of a supersession of “bipolar life” in “The Skeptical Legend” are more unusual, but both stop some way short of any genuinely interesting speculations. By far the most unusual idea raised in the essay was, however, that of what he called “planetary physiology”—although it is actually a kind of “cosmic physiology”—and the metaphysical basis with which he supported that idea.65

  With the aid of hindsight, we can now see how the idea of the “fourth universe” came into being as “spinoff” from the notion of planetary physiology. In order to imagine some way of linking together the distantly scattered worlds of space, to which mid-19th century astronomy had finally added an appropriate scale, Rosny had to imagine a mode of connection more immediate than the ones supplied by electromagnetic radiation and gravity. The notion that seemingly empty space was actually full of “alternative” forms of matter and energy imperceptible to our senses did not arise directly from the principle of plenitude, but rather from his antipathetic reaction to the revelation that the remainder of creation was so far removed from the Earth as to be irrevocably separated from it.

  Like Camille Flammarion—and, for that matter, almost everyone else who confronted the issue imaginatively—Rosny was reluctant to accept the degree of isolation to which cosmic distances condemned humankind, but he was not prepared, like Flammarion or the writers of American science fiction, to suppose that the remedy might lie in the simple supposition that the velocity of light was not an absolute or a maximum. If light could not provide a better connection between worlds, Rosny thought, then it was necessary to invent something that would: something that would recreate the Macrocosmic being that neo-Platonist philosophers had once imagined as a Great Man. Always endeavoring to get away from anthropocentrism—perhaps not entirely successfully, but more successfully than any other writer of his or any other generation—Rosny was deliberately tentative in his sketch of a hypothetical cosmic physiology, but that tentativeness was vital to the avoidance of a misleading overspecification of the kind of extra-sensory link he was trying to imagine. It is worth noting here that the same exaggerated tentativeness is painfully obvious in “Companions of the Universe,” which was probably the final work of fiction in which he attempted to convey a fleeting sense of the fourth universe to his readers, although “In the World of the Variants” was not published until a later date.

  Although Rosny devoted a great deal of thought to the corollary idea of the fourth universe in his subsequent fiction and non-fiction, he never returned specifically to the notion of a “planetary physiology” binding the observable cosmos into the single entity, probably because it was an idea that did not lend itself to any sort of literary development, and could not be significantly extrapolated beyond mere suggestion. It is, however, very noticeable in all of his fiction that he did retain some notion of the overall community of intelligence; it is significant that “The Xipehuz” does not end with humankind’s extermination of the alien invaders but with Bakhoun’s regret for the unfortunate necessity of that genocide. Similar regrets are attached in his work not merely to similar incidents, but also to virtually every description he issues of the transactions of earthly life: the necessity that obliges living organisms to consume other organisms, which one of the characters in “The Navigators of Space” describes, bluntly, as “the terrestrial inferno.” As the subsequent volumes of the series will display, over and over again, Rosny’s explorations of alternative patterns of Earthly evolution consistently voice his regretful disgust for “nature red in tooth and claw,” and sometimes search, with a desperate but admittedly hopeless yearning, for patterns of life that might enshrine a far higher level of tolerance and co-operation.

  In “The Xipehuz,” barbarian humans do fight a war of extermination against the alien invaders, which only one of them has sufficient sensitivity to regret, but the war that their civilized counterparts wage against the Zoomorphs of Mars on behalf of the Tripeds in “The Navigators of Space” is a much more modest affair, effectively a mere holding action. This reflects the close thematic connection between “The Navigators of Space” and “The Death of the Earth,” in which the Last Men make no attempt at all to fight the ferromagnetals, even though the ferromagnetals are as eager to extract iron from human blood as from any other source. The Last Men and the Tripeds both recognize that their own existence is entirely dependent on water, that when there is no more water to sustain them, other forms of organization that are not so dependent will replace them, and that the polite thing to do is to wish those replacement species well.

  In all these stories, there is a tacit recognition of the fact that, however different they are—and the differences are extreme, by any standards—there is an essential kinship between humans, animals, plants and Tripeds on the one hand, and Xipehuz, Moedigen, ferromagnetals, Zoomorphs and Ethereals on the other: a larger-than-life kinship whose essence is the “planetary physiology” that bids the entire universe—the fourth universe as well as the perceptible universe—into a single great common enterprise (an enterprise, it might be worth noting, that has no need for any kind of God, let alone the kindly kind who would have laid on the kind of serial interstellar reincarnation in which Camille Flammarion felt obliged to believe). The stories in this volume, therefore, demonstrate the continuity and connection of Rosny’s speculative work as his problematic career progressed. It must also be noted, however, that within that overall continuity, they also demonstrate the extent to which Rosny’s notion of the dimensions of the terrestrial inferno changed as he grew older.

  In “The Xipehuz” and “Another World,” the torments of life are confined to physical violence and emotional isolation, and sexual love is seen as a crucial amelioration of its hellishness. In “The Death of the Earth,” too, the few Last Men who do not give way to despair and euthanasia are maintained in their resistance by the power of fraternal and sexual love. In “The Navigators of Space,” however, a pattern appears that was to be further emphasized in Rosny’s subsequent
works, in which the vulgar aspects of sex are shifted to the other side of the moral account-book, becoming an aspect of the inferno rather than a potential source of amelioration of its ravages. Rarely content with half-measures, Rosny defines the narrator’s love for a Martian Triped not merely as conceivable but as something intrinsically superior to any kind of love available to him on Earth, precisely because of its asexuality. In order to do that, he has to invent an “objective” beauty superior to any mere reflection of physiologically-ordained desire—a “poetic passion” of a higher kind than any merely human reaction.

  A cynic might put this change of heart down to the inevitable effects of aging on human sexual desire and capacity—Rosny was in his 60s when he wrote “The Navigators of Space”—and thus condemn it to triviality. “The Skeptical Legend” and “Another World,” however, both offer eloquent testimony to the extent to which Rosny had always felt alienated from other people, and had always, in consequence sought beauty and solace in perceptions and passions of a different kind: in the “planetary physiology” that modern science might lend to an inquisitive mind, if only one cared enough to make the attempt to grasp its fugitive substance. In the final analysis, the continuity was more important than the changes that took place within it.

  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 Doctor Lerne, A Man Among the Microbes, The Blue Peril, The Doctored Man and The Master of Light, Black Coat Press, 2010.

  3 Léon Hennique (1850-1935) was the co-executor—with Alphonse Daudet—of Edmond de Goncourt’s will, and a founder member of the Goncourt Academy, whose president he became from 1907-12. He had once been a friend of Zola’s, but split with him over the Dreyfus Affair; he was best known as a playwright.