Caresco, Superman
Page 36
Oddly enough, in spite of his idiotic optimism, Choumaque seems to agree with that prescription, and would probably follow it himself if he had adequate mental equipment—which, alas, he does not. Perhaps, though, even a lousy idea is better than no idea at all; that would hold for Caresco too. As for André Couvreur the literary physician, where Caresco left off, Professor Tornada eventually took over, absorbing not merely the key elements of Caresco’s skill and inventive genius, but also the key elements of a philosophy considerably less optimistic than Choumaque’s, and far more scathing in its contempt for the woeful inability of the vast human majority to transcend the irrationally dire and vicious effects of the Will in order to get the slightest intellectual purchase on an Idea. That made Professor Tornada as disquieting a presence in the literary firmament as Caresco, and every bit as valuable as an enlightening idea.
Notes
1 translated as The Necessary Evil, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-253-5.
2 translated as Dr. Lerne, Sub-God, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-935558-15-6.
3 translated as Love in Five Thousand Years, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-155-2.
4 translated as Journey to the Inverted World, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-039-5.
5 Paul Adam (1862-1920) is nowadays best remembered for his historical novels set during the Napoleonic wars, but he was more celebrated in his own day for attempting to fuse the concerns and methods of the Naturalist and Symbolist Movement, which we often considered to be opposed. He only wrote one futuristic fantasy, the novella Le Conte futur (1893; tr. as “A Tale of the Future”), but he routinely introduced passages of utopian and futuristic speculation into his naturalistic works, and in his essays—notably the introduction to a collection by Fédéric Boutet published in 1903—he appealed for the development of a new literary school dedicated to examining the possible ways in which the evolution of science and technology might transform social life. (The introduction in question is translated in the Boutet collection The Antisocial Man and Other Strange Stories). Caresco, surhomme can be seen one response to that appeal.
6 The term vibrion is nowadays attributed, even by dictionaries that admit its obsolescence, to bacteria, but at the beginning of the twentieth century it was a common euphemism for a sperm-cell, as viewed through a microscope. That is its meaning throughout the present work, although ovules are occasionally gathered under the same heading.
7 The improvisation acanthoptère [acanthopteran] is derived from the name of an order of fish—but not, perhaps mistakenly, that of the order Agnatha, the “jawless fishes” that the captain seems to resemble in this regard.
8 This phrase, which I have retained when it is used as a proper noun, is also used as a common noun to refer to the captain, but in those circumstances I have preferred the designation “half-man,” because the literal translation of “trunk-in-a-box” sounds so awkward in English.
9 This term is derived from the name of Gito, a young homosexual featured in the Satyricon of Petronius; it was introduced into French by Voltaire in his early verse satire L’Anti-Giton, whence it acquired a meaning akin to “catamite.” It was taken up by the Marquis de Sade in La Nouvelle Justine (1797), which secured its shady significance. First penned in 1714 or thereabouts, Voltaire’s poem was rewritten in 1739, that version acquiring the title; he rewrote it again in 1754, adding the dedication “À Mademoiselle Lecouvreur,” which doubtless helped to attract the present author’s attention to it.
10 The nickname is initially given as “môme Panade,” the former term implying “kid” or “little girl,” but is often extended to “petite môme Panade.” The implication is that she began her career as a child prostitute.
11 Eucrasia is an obsolete medical term for physical wellbeing, the hypothetical state of perfect health, derived from the Greek eu [good] and krasis [combination], derived from the long-maintained hypothesis that illness is caused by a disproportion—a dyscrasia—in admixture of the four bodily humors.
12 I have retained Môme here, because it is used as a proper name rather than a description. Its coupling with “Madame” echoes the fact that those child prostitutes who survived childhood in the early 1900s—many did not—often became procuresses of children, that being their only area of expertise.
13 De Brevitate Vitae—his most famous work.
14 No more is said about this project in Caresco, surhomme, but it is the subject of a subsequent work, L’Androgyne (tr. as “The Androgyne” in vol. I of The Exploits of Professor Tornada).
15 The royal banner of England displays three heraldic “leopards,” but the heraldic leopard is a lion in a particular posture, quite distinct from the natural species nowadays called by that name. Given the artificiality of Eucrasia’s ecology, however, it is quite possible that the creature mentioned here is similarly emblematic—at any rate, no mention is made of spots, changeable or otherwise.
16 In spite of being rather sententious, this oft-quoted sentiment seems to have entered French proverbial parlance before being taken up by philosophers as a theme for discussion; one of its early British employers, Thomas Carlyle, credited the observation to Montesquieu, but the latter did not employ such a succinct formulation.
17 The quotation, which employs “nous” [we] rather than “moi” [me], was actually attributed to Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who was a good deal cleverer than the king and, as a sideline to her career as a courtesan, supported and sponsored the philosophers of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire. Choumaque’s remark about Leibnizian optimism, understandable in the context of a work in which he is playing a role approximately parallel to that of Dr. Pangloss in Candide, is presumably not intended as an insult, as he has previously listed Leibniz among his favorite philosophers, and his own “solution” to the problem of evil is also a form of optimism.
18 The reference is obviously to the “blister beetle” commonly known as “Spanish fly,” from which the substance cantharidin is obtained. Cantharidin has a powerful effect on the ureter, generating a forceful but painful erection in males, which resulted in its acquisition of a much-inflated reputation as an aphrodisiac. The beetle is nowadays classified as Lytta vesicatoria and no longer attributed to the family Cantharidae.
19 Considering the license adopted in the remainder of the text, this seems a trifle vague. Oblique comments made elsewhere, however, especially viewed in juxtaposition with the description of Professor Tornada’s more limited surgical fetish in “Les Mémoires d’un immortel” (tr. as “Memoirs of an Immortal” in Volume II of The Exploits of Professor Tornada) strongly suggest that the operation that Caresco is performing is a hysterectomy.
20 Jabotière is the name given in French to a particular bird species known in English as the swan goose (Anser cygnoides) but the word is also used in a more general sense, with a meaning roughly equivalent to the English “chatterbox.”
21 A dish recorded in the Almanach des gourmands (1803) and many subsequent French cook-books, concocted with goose liver and other offal, mixed with vegetables in a sauce; it appears to be unknown outside France and has fallen into neglect there.
22 “Cheville ouvrière,” can be translated as “kingpin,” but carries other implications that sustain Choumaque’s pun; ouvrière, construed as a noun rather than an adjective, means “working girl”—a euphemism that carries the same implication of prostitution as it does in English—while cheville means “ankle,” and in 1904, the display of a young woman’s ankle was still considered daring, and marginally indecent.
23 Seneca was ordered by the emperor Nero, to commit suicide after being caught up in the aftermath of an assassination plot; he used the traditional method of opening his veins in order to bleed to death. According to Tacitus, it took a long time, and he was finally placed in a hot bath intended to speed the process and ease his agony, where he suffocated in the steam.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION
105 Adolphe Ahaiza. Cybe
le
102 Alphonse Allais. The Adventures of Captain Cap
02 Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
14 G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
61 Charles Asselineau. The Double Life
118 Henri Austruy. The Eupantophone
119 Henri Austry. The Petitpaon Era
120 Henri Austry. The Olotelepan
103 S. Henry Berthoud. Martyrs of Science
23 Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
26 Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
06 Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
92 Louis Boussenard. Monsieur Synthesis
39 Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
89. Alphonse Brown. The Conquest of the Air
98. Emile Calvet. In A Thousand Years
40 Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
81 Félicien Champsaur. Ouha, King of the Apes
91. Félicien Champsaur. The Pharaoh’s Wife
03 Didier de Chousy. Ignis
97 Michel Corday. The Eternal Flame
113 André Couvreur. The Necessary Evil
114 André Couvreur. Caresco, Superman
115 André Couvreur. The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 1)
116 André Couvreur. The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2)
117 André Couvreur. The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3)
67 Captain Danrit. Undersea Odyssey
17 C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
05 Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
68 Georges T. Dodds. The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men
49 Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
-- J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid;
-- J.-C. Dunyach. The Thieves of Silence
10 Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
08 Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
01 Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
51 Charles de Fieux. Lamékis]
108 Louis Forest. Someone Is Stealing Children In Paris
31 Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
70 Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega & The Shadowmen
112 H. Gayar. The Marvelous Adventures of Serge Myrandhal on Mars
88 Judith Gautier. Isoline and the Serpent-Flower
57 Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
24 Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
107 Jules Janin. The Magnetized Corpse
29 Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
55 Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
30 Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
90 Fernand Kolney. Love in 5000 Years
87 Louis-Guillaume de La Follie. The Unpretentious Philosopher
101 Jean de La Hire. The Fiery Wheel
50 André Laurie. Spiridon
52 Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
82 Alain Le Drimeur. The Future City
27-28 Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
07 Jules Lermina. Mysteryville
25 Jules Lermina. Panic in Paris
32 Jules Lermina. The Secret of Zippelius
66 Jules Lermina. To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers
15 Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
73 Gustave Le Rouge. The Plutocratic Plot
74 Gustave Le Rouge. The Transatlantic Threat
75 Gustave Le Rouge. The Psychic Spies
76 Gustave Le Rouge. The Victims Victorious
109-110-111 Gustave Le Rouge. The Mysterious Doctor Cornelius
96. André Lichtenberger. The Centaurs
99. André Lichtenberger. The Children of the Crab
72 Xavier Mauméjean. The League of Heroes
78 Joseph Méry. The Tower of Destiny
77 Hippolyte Mettais. The Year 5865
83 Louise Michel. The Human Microbes
84 Louise Michel. The New World
93. Tony Moilin. Paris in the Year 2000
11 José Moselli. Illa’s End
38 John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
04 Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
21 Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
56 Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
79 Pierre Pelot. The Child Who Walked On The Sky
85 Ernest Perochon. The Frenetic People
100. Edgar Quinet. Ahasuerus
60 Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
33 Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril
34 Maurice Renard. Doctor Lerne
35 Maurice Renard. The Doctored Man
36 Maurice Renard. A Man Among the Microbes
37 Maurice Renard. The Master of Light
41 Jean Richepin. The Wing
12 Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries
62 Albert Robida. Chalet in the Sky
69 Albert Robida. The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul
95 Albert Robida. The Electric Life
46 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Givreuse Enigma
45 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Mysterious Force
43 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Navigators of Space
48 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Vamireh
44 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The World of the Variants
47 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Young Vampire
71 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River
24 Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
09 Han Ryner. The Superhumans
106 Brian Stableford. The Conqueror of Death
20 Brian Stableford. The Germans on Venus
19 Brian Stableford. News from the Moon
63 Brian Stableford. The Supreme Progress
64 Brian Stableford. The World Above the World
65 Brian Stableford. Nemoville
80 Brian Stableford. Investigations of the Future
42 Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
13 Kurt Steiner. Ortog
18 Eugène Thébault. Radio-Terror
58 C.-F. Tiphaigne de La Roche. Amilec
104 Louis Ulbach. Prince Bonifacio
53 Théo Varlet. The Xenobiotic Invasion (w/Octave Joncquel)
16 Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic; (w/André Blandin)
59 Théo Varlet. Timeslip Troopers
86 Théo Varlet. The Golden Rock
94 Théo Varlet. The Castaways of Eros
54 Paul Vibert. The Mysterious Fluid
English adaptation and introduction Copyright 2014 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2014 Mandy.
Visit our website at www.blackcoatpress.com
ISBN 978-1-61227-254-2. First Printing. April 2014. Published by Black Coat Press, an imprint of Hollywood Comics.com, LLC, P.O. Box 17270, Encino, CA 91416. All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The stories and characters depicted in this novel are entirely fictional. Printed in the United States of America.