Ever Smaller
by
Albert Bleunard
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
Albert Bleunard was born in 1852, but the date of his death is not recorded in any easily-available source. He seems to have spent his entire career, and perhaps his entire life—save for vacations—in Angers, a town on the river Loire, where he was the professor of physical sciences at the Lycée d’Angers and a leading member of the local philosophical society. He carried out extensive scientific research himself, on an amateur basis, but never achieved the discovery that might have made his name; the fact that he never settled into any particular specialism probably did not help in that quest. His first publication was an account of Recherches sur les matières albuminoïdes [Research on Albuminoidal substances] (1881). He followed it up with the more theoretical Le Mouvement de la matière [Matter in motion] (1883) and then with his announcement of his discovery of a new explosive formula, Une Nouvelle poudre [A New Gunpowder] (1885). His first book to obtain any conspicuous success was, however, the Vernian scientific romance La Babylone électrique (1888; tr. in 1889 as Babylon Electrified).
La Babylone électrique extrapolates the potential applications of a hypothetical device that converts solar energy into electricity with a high level of efficiency, in combination with hydroelectric technology, wind farms and wave energy (thus completing the full set of modern “renewable” power sources). The technologies in question are deployed in the building and equipment of a new city on the site of ancient Babylon, named Liberty. Unfortunately, the indigenes of the region do not take kindly to the development, which some of them suspect to be diabolical, while others simply fear being driven out of their homeland by an influx of Europeans. This opposition eventually proves intractable, and the project fails. Although Bleunard was no great literary stylist, the novel is remarkable for its anticipation of contemporary cultural and ecological concerns, and deserves more recognition on that account than it has so far received, although Everett Bleiler discusses it in complimentary terms in his magisterial study of Science Fiction: The Early Years (1990), and the English version has recently been reprinted as a print-on-demand book. Oddly enough, Pierre Versins’ Encyclopédie de l’utopie et de la science-fiction (1972) not only passes over the novel in one brief sentence but misrenders the author’s forename and omits any mention of three of his five subsequent romans scientifiques.
Bleunard’s second scientific romance, Le Spirite malgré lui (translated herein as “The Reluctant Spiritualist”) was eventually reprinted in book form in 1895, but its first appearance was as a feuilleton in Louis Figuier’s popular science magazine La Science Illustrée, where it was serialized in nine episodes in 1889. The great majority of the works that Figuier serialized under the heading of romans scientifiques—a regular feature of the magazine from 1888 to 1905, which helped to define and delimit the genre—were reprints of works previously published in book form or in general periodicals, but Bleunard’s four contributions were all original, Le Spirite malgré lui being the only one to be subsequently reprinted.
The longest and most interesting of the others was “Toujours plus petit” (1893; tr. herein as “Ever Smaller”), a pioneering enterprise in what was subsequently to become a curious subgenre of “shrinking man” stories, which is therefore of considerable interest within the history of scientific romance.
Bleunard’s third scientific romance appeared in the same series of novellas in volume form as Le Spirite malgré lui; entitled Vengeance d’un savant [A Scientist’s Revenge] (1895), it features an advanced form of wireless telegraphy. Two further novellas subsequently appeared in La Science illustrée: “L’Eau de jouvence” [The Elixir of Youth] (1899-1900) and “La Pierre philosophale” [The Philosopher’s Stone] (1903); their themes are encapsulated in their titles.
Alongside these further ventures in fiction, Bleunard continued to publish non-fiction books, including one intended for use in school as a handbook of illustrative classroom experiments and a three-volume Histoire générale de l’Industrie [A Universal History of Industry] (1894), which he undoubtedly intended to be his masterpiece, and probably was, although it was soon outdated by the furious pace of progress. He also continued his scientific research, still flitting from one subject to another. His final work was L’Art de prédire le temps [The Art of Weather-Forecasting] (1903). If one can read between the lines of his fiction accurately—and he was no expert in dissimulation—he was probably disappointed by the fact that he never managed to make an impact as a scientist, and never managed to get a job in industry that would save him from the routines of secondary school-teaching. Apart from his publications, his life remains largely unrecorded, although a scrupulous search of data currently archived by Google Books reveals that his wife won prizes in provincial horticultural shows.
The two stories translated here are, like La Babylone électrique, far more interesting for the ideas they contain than the quality of their writing; like many writers of speculative fiction, Bleunard was infinitely more artful and enterprising in the speculative component of his work than their literary aspect. Le Spirite malgré lui, in particular, illustrates the perils of making plots up as one goes along; having written himself into an impasse half way through, the author then flounders while trying (and ultimately failing) to get out of it. As with the earlier novel, however, the story turned out to be oddly—perhaps perversely—prophetic, as the protagonist’s final speech readily reveals. I shall not say more at this stage, lest it spoil the story, but the reader will not be surprised, once having finished it, that when Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895, Albert Bleunard threw himself into X-ray research with great alacrity and determination; although the experiments he carried out won him little or no renown at the time, they helped lay the foundations of what subsequently became X-ray diffraction—the technique that played a crucial role in revealing the structure of DNA. Although the story is included here primarily as a makeweight, to compensate for the relative shortness of the title-piece, it is by no means devoid of interest, not only by virtue of its intriguing premise, but in its description of the methodical manner in which the investigating scientists initially set out to solve the problem.
“Toujours plus petit” was not the first ever “microcosmic romance,” but it did attempt to incorporate recent scientific revelations into its account of what might be seen from a series of exceedingly tiny viewpoints, in a wide-ranging and methodical fashion. The first significant microcosmic romance written in French, Emerich de Vattel’s “Voyages dans le micocosme” (1757) owes its allegiance to the traditional mystical notion of the microcosm, which imagined a significant analogy between the universe (the macrocosm) and the human body (the microcosm), and the journey it features is in consequence, a bizarre odyssey in the “inner space” of human being. The most significant early work in English of a similar ilk, Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1858), employs a new kind of microscope as a facilitating device, but the microcosm thus revealed to the eye of distant observer is a surreal amalgam of actual microscopic revelations and dream-imagery. There is considerably more scientific detail, but a great deal more hallucinatory imagery, in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863), whose central character is shrunk by frankly supernatural means, but that story too is blithely surreal. Bleunard’s novella was the first literary exercise to tackle the notion within the framework of a genre of speculative fiction—appropriately enough, in the periodical that first attempted to define the genre in question and exemplify its scope.
Unsurprisingly, Bleunard’s attempt to write a full-blown scientifically-informed microcosmic
romance is rather tentative, and it addresses itself primarily—though not entirely—to obvious possibilities that later writers were to develop with greater sophistication. Its description of the “insect microcosm” features the inevitable encounter with a giant spider, but devotes most of its attention to the study of ants, that being a hot topic of the day, encouraged by the prolific endeavors of the amateur entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1919). Interestingly, Emerich de Vattel had also written a brief moralistic fable set in ant society, and it is not impossible that Bleunard had taken some inspiration from his work.
Fabre’s idiosyncratic reportage, which routinely employed narrative devices more commonly associated with fiction, offended as many scientists as it inspired, but similar strategies were widely adopted by French popularizers of science as a means of making science more dramatic and engaging. Bleunard would undoubtedly have been familiar with the fictional popularizations of entomology published by S. Henry Berthoud as well as Fabre’s books, and he is clearly following in their footsteps in that part of his narrative. It is worth noting, however, that “Toujours plus petit” appeared three years before the first of Maurice Maeterlinck’s far more stylish endeavors in intimate entomology and a decade in advance of Remy de Gourmont’s flamboyant Physique d’amour (1903; tr. as The Natural History of Love).
Bleunard’s subsequent shift to the “microbial microcosm” will inevitably seem primitive to readers acquainted with the full range of wonders revealed by modern optical and electron microscopes, but it was by no means unsophisticated by the standards of its day, and is far more conscientious in its scope and treatment than such subsequent lurid exercises as Morgan Robertson’s “The Battle of the Monsters” (1899), Theodore Waters’ “the Autobiography of a Malaria Germ” (1900) and Charles Fort’s “A Radical Corpuscle” (1905). Mark Twain’s “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” might have put it firmly in the shade had the author ever finished the story he began in 1905, but he gave up in despair, as he often did when tackling imaginatively ambitious themes.
The modern reader familiar with subsequent developments in microcosmic romance might also be disappointed that Bleunard hesitates and prevaricates over the question of whether humans could plausibly be reduced to the size of atoms, in order to investigate what he considered to be the ultimate level of material organization, but it must be remembered that he did not have the tempting lure of the model of the atomic “solar system” proposed by Lord Rutherford in 1911 to seduce speculation, nor even the earlier atomic model proposed by J. J. Thomson, which placed electrons inside a hollow sphere. The identification of the electron as a subatomic particle was still four years away when Bleunard wrote “Toujours plus petit,” so his notion of atoms was still devoid of any internal structure at all.
Another aspect of modern though conspicuous by its absence from “Toujours plus petit”—as well as the great majority of its subgeneric successors—is the posing of questions relative to the logic of the shrinking process: the issue of what happens to the mass of the shrinking individual; the issue of how exceedingly tiny people would be able to breathe when the molecules of the ambient air are, relatively speaking, thousands or millions of times larger than usual, etc. etc. Even though the three amateur scientists who take part in the featured experiment are unusually innocent, one might have expected at least one of them to pose some of these enigmas to his colleagues—but Bleunard was probably only too well aware of his inability to come up with convincing hypotheses to counter them.
In spite of all these observations, however, there is no doubt that “Toujours plus petit” is a significant landmark in the history of scientific romance, and that it has considerable virtues as well as faults. Not only does it go where no writer had gone before, in extending its thought-experiments beyond those of Fabre and Berthoud, but it does so boldly. In purely literary terms, it is an exercise in crude pulp fiction, but it helps to demonstrate and illustrate the reasons why writers of crude pulp fiction were able to open up vast new frontiers in imaginative territories where more sophisticated writers dared not tread at all, or only ventured to contemplate from a safe intellectual distance in a spirit of symbolic surrealism. In spite of its manifest flaws, it is a classic of sorts, and certainly deserves to be made available in English translation, for the benefit of historians of imaginative fiction and connoisseurs of antique romance.
The text of “Toujours plus petit” used for the translation was the feuilleton in La Science Illustrée, which ran from May 27, 1893 to November 25, 1893, as reproduced in the electronic version placed on line by the Bibliothèque Nationale on its gallica website. That version is, however, missing one page, on which a small part of one of the feuilleton’s episodes appeared, and I am extremely grateful to Guy Costes for supplying the missing text from his own copy of the periodical. The text of Le Spirite malgré lui used for translation was that of the Boulanger edition of 1895, also in the electronic version reproduced on gallica.
Brian Stableford
EVER SMALLER
I. A Session of the Hyperpsychical Society
of Perpignan
You are certainly not unaware that the pretty little city of Perpignan possesses a scientific society whose renown is now universal. It was founded a few years ago by the illustrious Doctor Paradou, one of the leading lights of medicine in the south of France.
The purpose of the hyperpsychical society is the study, by exclusively scientific methods, of all questions connected with the soul. Doctor Paradou thought, rightly, that this new science, abundantly documented in the phenomena of spiritualism, the suggestion of thoughts at a distance, presentiments and apparitions, might develop rapidly into the supreme science in the hands of clever men. He thought, in consequence, of creating the hyperpsychical society, which soon astonished the entire world with its marvelous findings.
Unfortunately, the society was not very numerous, but the lack of quantity was largely compensated by the eminent quality of its members. One can say that its meetings included the finest of everything that Perpignan possessed, composed of learned and intelligent men.
The meetings took place on the first Monday of every month. Their location was a spacious room situated in an old building that the municipality put at the disposition of all the city’s societies. It is the general rule in France that all municipalities reserve their oldest and most dilapidated accommodation to lodge scientific societies. Science has the habit of contenting itself with very little. Theaters, markets, barracks and prisons are what require sumptuous buildings.
One Monday evening, the first in the month of February, the Hyperpsychical Society of Perpignan’s room was, contrary to habit, full of people. All the members of the society and a considerable number of strangers were crowded around the large table covered with green baize and the president’s handbell. This extraordinary influx had been caused by the announcement of a communication to be made by one of the society’s members, the scientist Professor Collioure.
What would this communication comprise?
No one could answer that question except the professor, who wanted to keep the secret until the last moment—and God knows how adroitly he had been interrogated for a week by his colleagues, and especially their wives. The emotion generated by this future communication had, in fact, almost revolutionized the peaceful city of Perpignan. The women especially, curious by nature, were madly enthusiastic to know Collioure’s secret.
To begin the session they were only waiting for the presence of the president, the illustrious Dr. Paradou, who had the habit of always arriving late. Today, his lateness had the effect of irritating the assembly, who were beginning to murmur. Someone even proposed opening the session without him. Then the doctor made his majestic entrance, shook the hand of everyone who was in his path, and came to take his place in the presidential armchair.
“The session is open,” he said, following the formula customary in such circumstances. “The secretary has the floor, for the reading of
the minutes of the last session.”
While the secretary reads the minutes, we shall cast an eye over the principal characters that we shall have occasion to rediscover in the course of his story.
Let us begin with the president, Dr. Paradou. The doctor was a man already old, certainly past 50. His ruddy face, his indecisive eyes—much afflicted by myopia—and his curly grey hair all tended to give him a rather strange physiognomy. Of above-average intelligence, he had acquired great celebrity not only in Perpignan but in all the neighboring départements too. People traveled long distances to consult him in serious cases. His medical science was real. The only point on which he was open to criticism was his excessive credulity with regard to the supernatural. That might appear extraordinary on the part of a physician, members of that profession being more often inclined to materialism and the denial of anything touching the soul. Paradou was an exception; he had a firmer belief in mind than matter, and willingly accepted in good faith everything that tended to confirm his convictions.
That was not the case with the vice-president of the Hyperpsychical Society of Perpignan, Monsieur Soleihas, an optician by profession. Of small stature, with a narrow head, jet black hair and beard, eyes sparkling with malice, a turned-up nose, a pinched mouth and staccato gestures, the man offered a striking contrast with the doctor, whose tall stature and invariably grave bearing were imposing. Soleihas, whose education was solid enough, was rather skeptical with respect to the ideas so dear to the doctor.
The third individual who remains to be described is the secretary himself, Camaret, absorbed in reading his minutes. A dentist by profession, a photographer when opportunities arose, and a painter and musician in his spare time, Camaret was the most cheerful of the members of the Hyperpsychical Society of Perpignan. Invariably good-humored, he was neither credulous nor incredulous. He was nothing, contenting himself with taking life as it comes, joyful or sad according to circumstances. Like his colleague Soleihas, Camaret was in the prime of life; they were both approaching 40.
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