The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  4 There is a series of doubles entendres here, whose key item is untranslatable; chant, which can mean “placed edgewise” with reference to a coin and is used in that sense here to refer to the disk of the Sun, usually means “song;” the supplementary references retain both the mundane implication and the musical metaphor.

  5 Ecbatana, at the foot of Mount Alvand, was the capital of the Astyages before being integrated into the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great. Rosny might have chosen it as a location because the name meant “place of gathering.”

  6 Rosny’s earlier reference to “Ecbatana of the mages” suggests that he is associating the region where his story is set with the origins of the religion renewed and reformed about 600 years B.C. by the Zend-Avestra, a sacred text credited to Zarathustra. The religion in question was fundamentally dualistic, setting human existence in the context of the essential power of good, Ahura-Mazda or Ormazd, against the ultimate power of evil, Anra Mainyu or Ahriman. This passage sets up Rosny’s story as an “explanation” of sorts for the origins of the religion in question.

  7 Rosny inserts a footnote here: “The Precursors of Nineveh by B. Dessault, octavo edition, published by Calmann-Lévy. For the benefit of the reader I have converted the following extracts from Bakhoun’s book into modern scientific language.”

  8 Rosny inserts a footnote: “Kensington Museum in London and Monsieur Dessault himself possess several items of mineral debris similar in all respects to those described by Bakhoun, which chemical analysis has been powerless to decompose or to combine with other substances, and which cannot, in consequence, be entered in any classification of known substances.”

  9 Rosny inserts a footnote: “In the following chapters, which are mostly in the narrative mode, I shall stick close to Monsieur Dessault’s translation, but without feeling obliged to reproduce the tiresome division into verses or unnecessary repetitions.”

  10 The arithmetic of this calculation does not correspond to the number of surviving Xipehuz calculated at the end of the previous chapter, but the figures may be approximate.

  11 I have preserved this neologism rather than attempt a substitution that would not quite do justice to the notion. The piece contains several other innovative variations of more-or-less familiar terms, most of which I have reproduced straightforwardly and without further comment, considering their intended meaning to be transparent. In some passages of this work Rosny gives free rein to the spontaneous excesses of his “poetic passion for science,” thus exaggerating his occasional tendency—noted by his friends and critics alike—to lose contact with normal expression and ordinary meaning.

  12 Rosny remarks in Torches et lumignons that he once had a habit of watching the sky for hours on end, and suggested that, in all probability, no one else had ever spent as much time in such rapt contemplation—although it might be worth noting that the Chevalier de Lamarck would have provided stiff competition.

  13 The quotation is from Book VIII of Pliny’s Natural History; the English equivalent is “In Egypt, an ox is worshipped as a god.”

  14 Most organic molecules can exist in two different three-dimensional forms, which are mirror-images of one another. Earthly life is “laevo-rotatory” in its polarization, and Earthly organisms could not metabolize “dextro-rotatory” molecules produced in a laboratory—a situation dramatized in several 20th century science fiction stories, most notably David Lake’s The Right Hand of Dextra (1977).

  15 “Transformism” is a kind of evolution in which species are engaged in an eternal process of transformation into new species—a cornerstone of Lamarck’s theory of evolution. The idea of a future evolution of humankind according to this pattern is extrapolated in numerous scientific romances, most spectacularly Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, but Rosny used the notion primarily in association with his prehistoric romances and lost land stories, imagining dozens of alternative humankinds produced alongside our own in the past but eliminated—save, perhaps, for fugitive remnants—by natural selection. His futuristic fantasies, as this passage suggests, follow the course of the deflection identified and sketched out here, in which humankinds and their equivalent species are seen as exemplary of a transitory phase in the development of planetary life, fated to be superseded by life forms entirely alien to the spectrum of the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

  16 Gaston Planté (1834-1889) was the French physicist and pioneer of electrical technology credited with the construction of the first accumulator.

  17 Emile Alphonse Faure (1840-1898) improved Planté’s accumulator in 1881 by coating the lead plates to increase their efficiency, making the large-scale commercial production of batteries feasible.

  18 Rosny’s substitution of “bipolar” for “double” is bound to seem slightly confusing to modern readers familiar with the conventional usage that has redefined “manic depression” as “bipolar disorder,” so it may be as well to specify that the two “poles” he has in mind are consciousness and sleep—but the notion becomes more complicated as it is extrapolated.

  19 An anastomosis is a link between two different organs or other biological systems; what Rosny is hypothesizing is that the physical linkage of gravity is supplemented by some further link, which binds heavenly bodies into some kind of greater organism. It is not entirely clear from what he says, but he appears to have a vitalistic theory of life, which imagines life as a kind of force binding molecules and cells together; he appears to consider the laevo-rotatory preference of Earthly organic chemistry to be a manifestation of this force.

  20 Auscultation is what a doctor does with a stethoscope, listening to the beating of the heart and the sounds made in the pleural cavity by the action of the lungs. Rosny’s concept of “virtuality” is not the same as the modern notion of “virtual reality,” but it stems from the same source: the distinction made in optics between a “real” image, which can be brought into clear focus by being cast on a screen, and a “virtual” one, which remains essentially vague and thus, seemingly, somehow external to, although interwoven with, reality. His notion of a “fourth kingdom” additional to the animal, vegetable and mineral “kingdoms” obviously partakes of a certain “virtuality,” which he identifies as something already present in the mysteries of the electromagnetic spectrum, and already active in the evolution of Earthly life. The notion of a future evolution of life to embrace the inorganic was not original to this essay, but the version set out here is much more subtle and sophisticated than the cruder ones satirically explored in such contemporary texts as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and Didier de Chousy’s Ignis.

  21 Rosny made much in his prehistoric romances of the effect of westward migrations of early humans, based on fanciful accounts he found in contemporary paleoanthropology, but he refrained from citing this hypothesis that such migrations were guided by the Earth’s magnetic field.

  22 Rosny inserts a brief footnote to this paragraph: “The preponderance of sight seems proven in cases of fascination, but not for other instances of hypnotism.” “Braidism” (after James Braid, who attempted to liberate hypnotic techniques from the theoretical residue of “animal magnetism”) was normally used as a straightforward synonym for hypnotism, but Rosny appears to be using it in a narrower sense, implying entrancement by means of visual stimuli rather than aural ones. The mythology of the hypnotic power of spinning or swinging pendants was as firmly entrenched in the late 19th century imagination as the equally-suspect myth that snakes are capable of hypnotizing birds.

  23 The precession of the Earth’s equinoxes completes a full rotation of the planet’s orbit in 25,765 years, so 50 precessions would be 1,288,250 years.

  24 Rosny adds a footnote to this paragraph: “For want of precise terms, and to avoid tiresome circumlocutions, in this chapter I employ the words light, heat and their derivatives, as well as the words acoustic, phonic, sound and their derivatives, in much broader meanings, the former as characteristic of transversal vibrations, the latter of longitudinal vibration
s, an abstraction derived from the impression produced on our present-day senses by these phenomena.” The terms in which the fundamental distinction is made are now obsolete, but the general point still holds. The subsequent analogy that Rosny draws between electricity and sound-waves seems rather ridiculous nowadays, when the much closer analogy between electrons and photons is solidly established, but that was far from obvious in 1889, when subatomic physics was still in an embryonic state. The amazing thing is that he ventured into such deep and murky intellectual waters at all.

  25 This reference is not to Henri Becquerel, who discovered radioactivity some years after Rosny published “La Légende sceptique,” but to his father Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel, who was intensely interested in the chemical effects of light and electricity, especially those leading to decomposition.

  26 The term “telepathy” had not yet become the common currency of discussions of this sort, “psychic research” still being in its infancy in 1889.

  27 Mylitta was a Sumerian fertility goddess, the equivalent of Ishtar and Astarte.

  28 Rosny’s use of the term “nebula” is consistently odd; rather than using it to describe star-clusters or clouds of gas, he uses it to mean the entire observable cosmos—which is, in his view, merely an exceedingly tiny fraction of the vastly greater collectivity that he was ultimately to call “the fourth universe.”

  29 Strictly speaking, the French word plantule, and its English equivalent, refer to a plant embryo, but Rosny subsequently couples the term with “animalcule” in a fashion that makes it clear that he is using it to refer to primitive plants, and I have taken the liberty of importing his improvised second meaning into English.

  30 These are all species of coral, although the names contain mythological echoes of which Rosny was doubtless conscious. I have generally followed a policy of using common names for the various creatures named in the prose-poem rather than Latin ones—although there is a much greater overlap between the two systems of nomenclature in French, because it is a Latin-derived language (which makes it much easier to distinguish different kinds of weevil, coral, and so on)—but I had no alternative but to retain Isidae.

  31 The original purpose of modern botanical and zoological gardens—as opposed to mere menageries—was to investigate the practicalities of transplantation of crops and domestic animals for the purposes of colonization; several such projects were labelled Jardins d’Acclimatation [Acclimatization Gardens] in France. Cloaques d’Acclimatation [Sewers of Acclimatization] is, therefore, Rosny’s unsympathetic characterization of zoos.

  32 The reference is to a microscope slide, on which preparations for examination were often contained within a drop of oil in the late 19th century.

  33 Tipula is a genus of water-spiders. The term trichocere is normally applied to a kind of cactus with hairy spines, which might seem somewhat reminiscent of a spider to a confused individual, but it is compounded out of Greek terms for “hair” and “wax” and Luc may well be using the term more generally.

  34 The Sicambri (Sicambres in French) were a Germanic tribe; they have a particular relevance in French history because St. Remy, in baptizing Clovis, the first of the Merovingian kings of the Franks, designated him as a member of that tribe.

  35 Rosny’s narrator inserts a footnote: “And that composite color, of course, does not include green, since green is darkness to me.”

  36 Rosny’s narrator inserts a footnote: “This is the name that I gave them, spontaneously, during my childhood, and which they have retained, although it does not correspond to any attribute or form of the creatures in question.” Moedigen is the plural of moedig, which signifies “brave” in Dutch.

  37 Vuren is the plural of vuur, which signifies “fire” in Dutch.

  38 The narrator inserts a footnote: “Quartz gives me a spectrum of about eight colors: extreme violet and the seven colors following in the ultra-violet—but there still remain some eight colors that quartz does not separate, which other substances separate to a greater or lesser degree.”

  39 This story was written at the very dawn of wireless communication and aviation, so Rosny improvises terms for numerous devices that have since come into being, albeit in somewhat different forms, and have thus acquired their own terminology. I have attempted to conserve the spirit of his improvisations by transcribing some terms—including planétaire [planetary]—directly, and translating others, such as planeur [glider] “literally,” even though the meanings of the words have changed in the interim (planeur is used here to refer to powered aircraft). In a few cases, however, I have preferred more informative translations of words to which Rosny has attributed new meanings—thus, for instance, substituting “dish” for conque [shell, as of the ear] with respect to the receivers built into the radio-transmitting “planetaries”—and have made similar compromises with respect to some neologisms, notably ondifère, which I have rendered as “radiolink.”

  40 Rosny’s narrative voice adds a footnote here: “In the upper atmospheric regions, water vapor was perpetually being decomposed by ultra-violet radiation into oxygen and hydrogen; the hydrogen escaped into interstellar space.” At this point in the text the narrative voice’s frequent use of the collective personal pronoun implies that it is the voice of one of the Last Men, but the story’s final passages are incompatible with that pose.

  41 Rosny is presumably thinking of steel, but the chemical composition of “human iron” is probably irrelevant; what he has in mind is probably a process analogous to the one he imagined operating in “The Skeptical Legend,” whereby their incorporation into living flesh causes molecules to undergo a subtle and permanent metamorphosis, which is a component of the evolution of the planet.

  42 Binet-Valmer was the signature used by Jean Gustave Binet (1875-1940), a prolific novelist and journalist nowadays most famous for his correspondence with Marcel Proust.

  43 Rosny’s reference is to “l’Éleate” (the Eleatic); I have assumed that the reference is to Zeno (the famous paradox-monger), who was often called Zeno of Elea to distinguish him from a namesake, rather than Parmenides or Xenophanes.

  44 This term (Arénaut in the original) appears to be derived from Ares—the Greek equivalent of Mars—and presumably refers to a scientist who made the voyage that the three adventurers are undertaking practicable.

  45 This reference is presumably to the 14th century Charlemagnian romance “The Siege of Milan,” but I cannot trace the specific quotation.

  46 When Rosny wrote this story it was not yet known why “atomic weights” varied from round numbers, usually slightly (the atomic weight of carbon having been calculated at 12.01, that of nitrogen at 14.01). We now know that it is because of the presence in natural samples of minute traces of isotopes containing one or two extra neutrons—C-13 and C-14 in the case of carbon—but the existence of the neutron was not confirmed until 1932, so Rosny’s assumption that there might be different forms of elements, with slightly different atomic weights, remains a trifle vague; his subsequent reference to carbon’s “loyalty to helium,” in association with a notion of “isotopes” that had not yet been precisely refined, reflects the notion that a carbon atom (AW 12) was essentially equivalent to a “compound” of three helium atoms (AW 4).

  47 The electromagnetic spectrum had not been completely “mapped” when Rosny wrote this story, and X-rays were still sometimes called “Röntgen rays” after their discoverer; the idea that new varieties of radiation might be discovered, and named after their discoverers, thus seemed very plausible.

  48 The surface area of Lake Annecy is about 27.6 sq. km.

  49 Rosny inserts a footnote: “It is well-known that the Martian year—and, in consequence, its seasons—is twice as long as ours.”

  50 The quoted lines are from Victor Hugo’s Les Contemplations (1856).

  51 Rosny inserts a footnote: “Editor’s Note: A detailed study of Zoomorphs and a complete account of hypotheses regarding their organization will be published subsequen
tly, by our hands.”

  52 Rosny inserts a footnote: “The Morse system, which can be addressed to sight, hearing, touch, and even to smell and taste, and can utilize all our movements and employ almost all perceptible energies.”

  53 This note was probably optimistically deceptive in its claim that the sequel had been completed. It is worth noting that it cannot be referring to a completed version of “Les Astronautes,” since the latter text makes no pretence to being “transmitted from Mars itself.”

  54 The quotation is from “The Navigators of Space.”

  55 The author inserts a footnote: “It is necessary not to lose sight of the fact that the present surface of Mars no longer has any seas, but only lakes; because of that, the area potentially available to the Tripeds could be compared, in extent, to our continental lands—but the Zoomorphs already held about four-fifths of it.”

  56 The author inserts a footnote here to remind readers not to forget that conversations with Martians are carried out by means of signs.

  57 Spiritualist mediums sometimes engaged in “automatic drawing” as well as “automatic writing,” sometimes producing images of other worlds. The supposed images of Mars by “Helen Smith” reproduced in the best-selling From India to Mars (1899) by Theodore Flournoy are anodyne, but the actor Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) produced some highly imaginative depictions of life on Jupiter while he was a member of Camille Flammarion’s circle; it is presumably these that the narrator has in mind.

  58 The author inserts a footnote: “Triped females can conceive without intercourse with the male. It is sufficient that both of them desire it for some time, intensely.”

  59 It is not obvious why the astronauts think it appropriate to open communication with a Latin word rather than a French one, especially as they switch to French thereafter.