On Venus, the human race spread out amid a powerful and terrible nature, hostile and favorable by turns. It would be a refuge when our Earth died, in a future still countless millennia distant, devoid of its fluid mantle of sea and air.
Interplanetary crossings to Venus, Mars and the Moon became rapid and continuous, easy to make by the middle of the 20th century. An ambitious, energetic and hard-working humankind had the immense and joyful task before it of fitting out three worlds to its needs and desires. And it found no enemy, no other humankind, for on Venus no such race had yet come into existence, on the Moon it no longer existed, and on Mars it was extinct.
Our readers have all read Jorge Raubier-Brown’s poignant book The Brains that Died: A Humankind Departing—an immortal work dedicated to the dying Martians. The time was ripe, propitiously, for the Humankind of Earth. The Divinity had determined that in His gigantic plan.
Before the poet Mayer, whose famous song excited the generations that preceded the era of Venusian control, this formidable tableau slowly unfolded. Under his very eyes, the City of Stars extended, an immense buzzing multitude of active and happy men. His giant statue confronted it, pointing at the heavens. He gazed upon that new beauty, made of order, youth and ceaseless energy, a beauty that the Ancients would have admired. And with his already-failing hand he wrote the final words of the Imperial Hymn, his last work, which had the most colossal success everywhere his language resonated, for it encapsulated, better than anything sung before, the limitless ambition of Germany, her self-confidence and her immense pride:
We are the race of the sons of the god of the Hammer,
And we have the will to conquer the Empire of Stars
And to become the people of the Lords of Infinity.
THE END
Selected Bibliography
LITERATURE
Latin:
Cicero, De natura deorum (Voyage in spirit)
Greek:
Lucian, Voyage to the Moon (A storm)
German:
Kepler, Somnium (Voyage in spirit)
Swedish:
Swedenborg Voyage to the Celestial Earths (Voyage in spirit)
Italian:
Dante, Divine Comedy (Voyage in spirit)
French:
P. G. Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes (Voyage in spirit)
Cyrano de Bergerac, Histoire comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil (Magnetism, rockets, expansion of fluids by heat)
Jules Verne, De la Terre à la Lune (Giant cannon)
--- Autour de la Lune (ditto)
--- Hector Servadac (Collision with a comet)
Voltaire, Micromégas (Knowledge of the laws of the universe)
Pierre Boitard, Voyage dans les planètes (Assistance of a spirit)
Arnould Galopin, Le Docteur Oméga (Cavorite, common term for substances impervious to gravitation)
Henri de Graffigny & George Le Faure, Les Aventures extraordionaires d’un savant russe (Atomic bombardment, comet, giant cannon)
George Le Faure, Les Robinsons lunaire (Hypothesis of a very extensive terrestrial atmosphere.)
Gustave Le Rouge, Le Prisonnier de la planète Mars (Levitation)
--- La Guerre des vampires (Volcanic eruption on Mars)
Jean de La Hire, Le Mystère des XV (Radioplanes)
André Laurie, Séléné Co. Ltd. (Augmentation of the attractive force of the Earth, bringing the Moon closer)
--- Les naufragés de l’Espace
Lectures pour tous (1912), “Au XXe siècle” (Radioplanes)
Auguste Blanqui, L’Eternité par les astres (Nature is repetitive; the Earth is multiplied in time and space by the million)
English:
George Griffith, Stories of Other Worlds (Antigravitational force)87
John Jacob Astor, A Journey in Other Worlds (ditto)
Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka (Origin and end of worlds, God)
--- “Hans Pfaal” (Gas lighter than hydrogen and greatly extended atmosphere)
H.-G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Martian giant cannon)
--- The First Men in the Moon (Cavorite)
--- “The Crystal Egg” (Communication between two similar crystals and intervision)
Roy Norton, The Vanishing Fleets (Cavorite)
Mortimer Collins, The King (Incarnation)88
George Du Maurier, The Martian (Incarnation)
SCIENCE
Camille Flammarion, Astronomie populaire (The Principle of Limiting Velocity in “Les Aérolithes”)
Théophile Moreux, Quelques heures dans le ciel (Mention of limiting velocity. Impossibility of giant cannon)
--- Les Phénomènes de l’Atmosphère (Air and atmospheric layers)
S. Herrera, Etudes comparatives des moyens employés pour aller dans les planètes (The author concludes in favor of Cavorite)
Sciencia (1904), “À Mexico”
A. Perrett, Les Explosifs (Panclastite)
L’Année Scientifique (1884) (ditto)
Thèse d’Esnault-Pelterie in Revue de Physique (On reaction and the reaction motor)
A. Le Mée, Revue des Revues (1903-1905), “Communications avec les planètes” (Theoretical possibility)
Charles Cros, “Communicatons avec les planètes” in Excursions dans le ciel (Luminous signals)
Edmond Perrier. La Vie dans les planets: Vénus (Editions de la Revue des Revues)
Camille Flammarion, Les Terres du Ciel (Venus)
L’Année Scientifique (1887) (The reaction motor. The principle of reaction. Accident to the Buisson-Ciurcu motor.)
La Nature (1887) (ditto)
L’Année Industrielle (1897) (Undetailed mention of Thayer balloon moved by the reaction of compressed air. Dickinson centrifugal force cannon)
Revue Scientifique (1889) (Use of centrifugal force to launch projectiles (Hicks). Mention.)
Emile Gautier, Les Étapes de la Science (Undetailed menton of an American ship powered by reaction of dynamite)
Félix Bernard, Précis de Paléontologie
Von Zittel, Grundzuge der Paleontologie
H.F. Osborne, Outline of Paleontology
L’Année Scientifique (1886) (Ship moved by the explosion of a gaseous mixture and its reaction against the water)
--- (1891) (Motor for aerial navigation using both explosion and reaction)
René Lorin, “Le moteur à reaction” in L’Aérophile (1908-09)
A Bill of Lading for Venus:
Mars-Venus-Mail Planetship Company
Herbert Line Venustadt
Direct Service from the Earth
to Mars and Venus via the Moon
Routh & Co Bank, Agents.
Loaded in good order and condition by ……………… of Venustadt on ………………… and on the good Planetship called …………………. of which ……………. is commander for the present voyage, or (whoever else might be commander) lodged in the port of Venustadt, destination Venus. The merchandise will be delivered in good order and condition, as will the passengers, to the abovementioned port of Venus (excepting Acts of God, the enemies of the Emperor, planetary or interplanetary pirates, theft, barratry, acts of terrestrial or other populations or princes, insufficiency of packaging or of the Wheel, gyroscopes or any other machinery, impacts, rains of bolides or other objects occurring in space or worlds, the cold of space, the heat of the Sun, errors committed by the captain, the crew or the engineers of the Wheel, breakage, explosion, fire, collision on arrival on any world, planetoid or bolide, and any other hazard of space, planet or intermondial navigation of any nature or sort whatsoever, or any other peril that might develop if the said Planetship returns to Venusdtadt or any other port and is obliged by any cause to end its voyage and transfer the goods and persons to any other Planetship in space, with the liberty to go with or without pilots, to guide and assist the Planetship in any situation).
In consequence, the Mars-Venus-Mail Planetship Co. engages to deliver the said passengers and cargo (un
der these terms and conditions, at the risk of the sender and at the expense of the owner of the Planetship) to the abovementioned port of Venus. In respect of which the freight is payable in advance, at the current rate of exchange applicable to the Earth and Venus, in bank-notes presentable on the day of the Planetship’s arrival.
Any damage for which the ship-owner will be responsible must be reclaimed by the party in possession of the goods when the damage occurred. Customs duties (planetary or otherwise) are the responsibility of the sender. The owner of the Planetship is not responsible for money, gold, documents, coins, jewelry, paintings, statuary and other goods of value, except by special arrangement. The passengers are responsible for damage caused by them to the Wheel, the gyroscope and any other item of equipment throughout the planetary transit from port to port.
In the case of blockage or interdiction of the port of destination (or for any other cause if it is deemed that safe arrival cannot be guaranteed) the captain can disembark elsewhere,
The responsibility of the ship-owner is limited to 50 francs a ton in payments, saving any contrary agreement.
Any claim against the captain or the ship-owners, for any cause whatsoever, must be made at the port of destination on Venus.
Venustadt, on ……………………..
By:
The Agent
Théo Varlet: Telepathy
(1921)
Théo Varlet (1878-1938) was the son of a lawyer based in Lille, but his family was unusually well-off, having property and business interests in Russia. He grew up feeling that there was no need for him to make a living and decided to dedicate himself to a literary vocation. He contributed poetry and criticism to a wide range of literary periodicals, and published four collections of poetry before the outbreak of the Great War, beginning with Heures et rêves in 1898. Although he arrived on the scene too late to participate in the Decadent Movement, Charles Baudelaire was one of the more obvious influences on his work. He claimed to have attempted to follow up Baudelaire’s “research” in the use of drugs to attain “artificial paradises,” reporting extensively on his own supposed experiments with hashish, opium and—most dangerously—ether, although it is not clear how seriously those reports ought to be taken. In Au paradis du haschisch; suite à Baudelaire (1930) he catalogued more than 100 such experiments allegedly conducted between 1908 and 1914, including illusory out-of-body experiences that took him into remote regions of outer space and illusions of existing in another person’s body, but it is impossible to be certain whether such short stories as “Télépathie” are based on actual experience, or whether the ostensible documentary is actually a fictional endeavor in disguise.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 wiped out the family fortune that had provided Varlet’s living expenses while he made little or no money as a writer; like many other initially-vocational writers before him, he was abruptly confronted by the necessity of making a living from his pen. His primary source of income thereafter was translation; he translated most of Robert Louis Stevenson’s works, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, among many others. He became a writer of scientific romance almost by accident, when his publisher, Edgar Malfère, hired him to revise some highly imaginative, but somewhat rough-hewn, works by Octave Joncquel, two of which were published the two halves of L’Epopée martienne (1921-22; tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as The Martian Epic 89).
The only volume of prose fiction that Varlet had published in advance of the Martian epic was a collection of short stories, La Bella Venere (1920) [the tile is the name of a boat], some of whose contents were recycled in Le Dernier satyre [The Last Satyr] (1922). He went on to collaborate with André Blandin on the timeslip romance, La belle Valence [Valencia the Beautiful] (1923) and subsequently published three solo novels, including two scientific romances: the Vernian Le Roc d’or [The Golden Rock] (1927) and the disaster story La Grande panne [The Great Breakdown] (1930). A further scientific romance, Aurore Lescure, pilote d’astronef [Aurore Lescure, Spaceship Pilot] was issued posthumously in 1940. At least some of these will hopefully be featured in future Black Coat Press publications.
“Télépathie” was one of the items added to Le Dernier satyre, although that does not necessarily mean that it was written in 1921. It is followed in that collection by “Autres notes de Haschisch” [Further Notes on Hashish], which is similar in its style and visionary content. Although it is on the very margins of scientific romance, it is interesting in the context of that genre’s evolution and eventual supersession by science fiction because of its conscientious attempt to imagine what the experience of telepathy (a term then in its literary infancy, although it had been bandied about for some time in the field of “psychical research”) might actually feel like, and what its existential consequences might be. Previous literary representations of “thought reading” had been decidedly primitive, and Varlet’s attempt to sophisticate the notion was several years ahead of Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses (1927), the first British scientific romance to undertake such a project; it is also much neater in its deployment of conte cruel irony.
Hashish—I never take it.
Not that I affect a naïve magnanimity of a Balzacian stripe and refuse to “think involuntarily.” On the contrary, I envisage such poisonings as a kind of sport, and I find the new glimpses that they offer into the world of the mind seductive, in the same fashion as a trip in an automobile, a voyage in a balloon or a submarine dive.
I discovered my path too soon. It was only at the beginning of my research that I could have hesitated, eclectically, between various “artificial paradises.” I certainly had a passing curiosity with regard to hashish then, but that oriental drug seemed so difficult to obtain that I kept putting the matter off, and eventually no longer thought about it. An old initiate of the good poison, I acquired a touch of the exclusivism that makes toxicomanes like us as sectarian as priests of different religions. The morphinist treats the opium smoker like a Moorish Turk and brutes drunk on alcohol have only insults for drinkers of ether like us—and we give them as good as we get. For myself, without going so far as to suspect Baudelaire, I’ve always held his hashish in very scant regard.
Now, I know; it’s worse than I suspected, and I won’t be taking it again.
With ether, at least one knows what to expect. One can establish the formula of one’s folly, the percentage of its dreams. Given a particular dosage in decigrams, I know in advance the result of each etherization.
Taking opium is still possible, despite the sinful sophistication of apothecaries and the tiresome lacunae of its efficacy, but if you have a mind with a somewhat mathematical bent, if you want to conserve in dementia that lucidity of analysis which produces the finest sensuality for aestheticians—to observe one’s own intoxication—if you delight in launching your dream like an obedient airplane into the sky of pure madness, beware of hashish, tenebrous and perfidious hashish.
When you’ve absorbed hashish, that’s it—nothing more to be done. You’ve embarked, with your hands and feet bound, on an uncontrollable machine, which has taken off for an unknown flight.
I had no suspicion of that when, one afternoon, I accepted Albert Chaylas’ offer. He was astonished to find out that I, fervent for artificial paradises as I am, was unfamiliar with it. How to obtain it? Quite simple: any druggist will furnish anyone with indeterminate quantities of Cannabis indica. Pharmacists use it themselves, albeit for rather grotesque purposes, such as soothing corns and calluses.
Having, like many an habitué of a single poison, an enthusiasm to recruit acolytes, Chaylas was happy to initiate me in the use of his favorite drug, perhaps cherishing the hope of making me abjure ether.
According to his scrupulous rites, he made some very strong and very hot coffee, took two unequal measures of hashish from a little Delft pot, dissolved the larger in his own cup and offered me the other on a spoon. It was a sort of dark green glue, with a penetrat
ing odor of marsh-grass and a bitter taste like that of excessively-concentrated souchong tea. Mixed with coffee, the stuff was drinkable, and a second cup took the taste away temporarily.
To pass the preliminary hour of waiting, when no effect is manifest, I proposed that we re-read Les paradis artificiels, as a tourist guide to the marvelous land in which I was about to venture. Chaylas dissuaded me. To suggest impressions thus was contrary to spontaneity; one ought to let the effects emerge as they will. And, well used to hashish, he began to talk about trivial things, without the slightest allusion to the drug.
Despite my efforts, I was distracted. The enigmatic result disturbed me. That provisional inefficacy, the poison’s silence, threw my experiment off course. What would happen next? Would there be, as with ether, an ineffable beatitude leading up to the sequence of dreams? Or opium’s ocean of images, iridescent and agile ideas?
Sprawling in an armchair, next to the fire, I examined the large room, lit from above by a single electric lamp, attentively. I peered into the dark corners that the phantoms of hashish must haunt every evening—in vain. Chaylas, stretched out on the other side of the table—where I could only see his head, among the books and knick-knacks—nonchalantly smoked his long Dutch pipe and chatted with a placidity that redoubled my impatience.
In the intervals of the conversation, I held my breath to assure myself that the clock was still ticking.
I observed myself minutely. The annoying taste of marsh-grass was prowling under my palate again. My throat was dry, but I had no desire to stretch out my arm towards my coffee-cup to drain the last remaining drops. The heat of the coke fire filled me with an irresistible somnolence that was not at all disagreeable. My legs became heavy, as at the commencement of opium’s effect…but nothing else. It was very little, 45 minutes after the absorption!
The high bookshelves stuffed with volumes, the paintings with gilded frames, a panoply of daggers and arrows, rifles and revolvers mounted on the walls—all loaded, in accordance with Chalyas’ eccentricity—remained close at hand and stable, quite real and tangible, without the slightest appearance of the fluctuation that, after a few sips of ether, transfigures the external world into a décor devoid of relief or perspective, slack and vacillating.
The Germans on Venus Page 26