The Martian Epic
Page 44
28 In French, “pyramidal” has a double meaning, being used metaphorically to signify “amazing” or “excessive.”
29 The word “larva” has a double meaning in French, crucial to Varlet’s discourse; as well as referring to an embryonic entity destined for metamorphosis, it also means “ghost.”
30 The capitalized word that I have translated as “WHOLE” is “PAN,” which is the proper name of a Greek God as well as a trivial noun signifying something all of a piece. The theory of general relativity, which reinterpreted gravity as a kind of fourth-dimensional spatial curvature, had been published in 1916, but Varlet ignores other consequences of that theory, as many other armchair cosmic voyagers before and after him found it convenient to do. Camille Flammarion’s Lumen, of which in this passage is strongly reminiscent, also credits disincarnate souls with the ability to travel faster than light, but has a naïve view of the relativity of time and space, as is expectable in a work first published in the 1860s.
31 This was not the first time that the notion of an infinite hierarchy of universes in which the nebulas of one cosmos form the atoms of the superior macrocosmos had been deployed in scientific romance, having been featured in R. A. Kennedy’s The Triuneverse (1912; published as by “the Author of Space and Time”), but it is a striking inclusion in Varlet’s attempt to update and outdo Flammarion.
32 The term “phalanstery” was popularized by the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier, with reference to the communal living-quarters that would accommodate the inhabitants of his hypothetical society.
33 This is an obvious narrative convenience—for much the same reason, most of the aliens in Anglo-American SF speak English—but it gives rise to a lingering confusion with which, as the reader will see, Varlet struggles to cope. The Martian body-thieves seem perfectly well able to communicate with one another, apparently in French, even though—according to this logic—most of them must be pre-adapted to speak different languages, and the Martianized apes presumably have difficulty speaking any language at all.
34 An egregore is a sort of psychic vampire feeding on the “vital energies” of others; the term was popularized in France by Jean Lorrain’s story “L’Egrégore” (1887; tr. as “The Egregore”).
35 What Varlet is describing is a large-scale robotic production-line version of the “lost wax” method of bronze-casting used by sculptors, in which a desired shape is sustained in loose sand by a replica of the statue carved in wax, which is evaporated almost instantaneously when the molten metal is poured in, with no loss of form. As he goes on to explain, the “soul” (âme in French) is the sand the fills up the hollow structure that will be evaporated, thus forming the interior cavity of the bronze statuette—or, in this case, the steel spaceship.
36 “R’rdô” is presumably a phonetic rendering of “Rudeaux” pronounced in a Martian accent. It is hard to understand why the Terromartians would retain their host bodies’ names, even if one accepts that they find it convenient to speak French because that is the language to which their new brains are habituated. Their own names are, apparently, easy to render into human phonetics, as evidenced by the names of the last surviving Magi.
37 This is a popular French nursery rhyme.
38 This quotation is a partial rendering of the most famous aphorism contained in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, “le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas,” traditionally rendered into English as “the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows not.” Pascal probably intended it to mean that human beings have certain innate desires and appetites that are not the products of reason, although modern users often cite it as if it were a compliment to emotional intuition. Varlet cannot really have thought that it referred to seemingly-arbitrary impositions of religious doctrine, and seems to be using it to cover up his inability to think of a plausible explanation for the Magi’s edict.
39 Varlet has been using the term “singes” (monkeys) to describe all the species Martianized as “velus” (shaggies), he found it necessary to use more specific references in his initial description of the specimens glimpsed by the narrator in the Hall of Reincarnation, and will find it necessary henceforth to make others. Maki-mokoko is a Madagascan native term for the ring-tailed lemur, but Varlet seems to use it rather indiscriminately to apply to all lemurs and some other small primates.
40 The Cabiri were a group of minor deities associated with Hephaestus, the metalworker of the Greek pantheon.
41 This remarkable circumstance is never explained, and the narrator does not find it sufficiently puzzling even to require any hypothetical speculation. We are subsequently informed that the solenoids have been put back into use, apparently functioning quite normally, but no attempt is made to reinstitute the examination program. The reader is free to wonder whether there might, indeed, have been more Terrans hiding among the Terromartians, and whether one of them might have been a more adventurous, enterprising and skillful saboteur than the remarkably passive and not-very-ingenious R’rdô. If so, the poor chap gets no reward at all for providing this invaluable deus ex machina.
42 Leopoldo Fregoli (1867-1936) was an Italian actor with a remarkable talent for mimicry and self-transformation, who became the archetypal “quick-change artist,” touring Europe and America to show off his amazing versatility. Although Varlet could not have known it, Fregoli would later give his name to a “Fregoli delusion” identified by psychiatrists. Sufferers from the delusion become convinced that several different people are really a single individual, who keeps changing appearance; it is associated with paranoid feelings of persecution; this episode might qualify as the ultimate example of it.
43 Satan is here adapting an aphorism from Plautus’ Asinaria, “Homo homini lupus,” which suggests that man is a wolf to other men.
44 The reader will doubtless realise, although the narrator does not, that there is a more likely hypothesis. The Martianized Leduc was most certainly killed in the control-booth, but that does not mean, given the story’s central assumptions, that he was then impotent. His disincarnate spirit would surely have attempted to take advantage of the narrator’s exhaustion and near-delirium to influence his subsequent actions vengefully. The face that “Satan” originally wore, as the process of hectic dissimulation began, was, of course, Leduc’s, and the reader will recall that the spirit in question, when previously disincarnate, began to affect the behaviour of the real Sylvain Leduc some time before taking conclusive possession of his body.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION
Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
Didier de Chousy. Ignis
C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid; The Thieves of Silence
Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic
Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
André Laurie. Spiridon
Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
Jules Lermina. Mysteryville; Panic in Paris; To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers; The Secret of Zippelius
José Moselli. Illa’s End
John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril; Doctor
Lerne; The Doctored Man; A Man Among the Microbes; The Master of Light
Jean Richepin. The Wing
Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries; Chalet in the Sky
J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River; The Givreuse Enigma; The Mysterious Force; The Navigators of Space; Vamireh; The World of the Variants; The Young Vampire
Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
Han Ryner. The Superhumans
Brian Stableford (anthologist) The Germans on Venus; News from the Moon; The Supreme Progress; The World Above the World
Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
Kurt Steiner. Ortog
Eugène Thébault. Radio-Terror
C.-F. Tiphaigne de La Roche. Amilec
Théo Varlet. The Xenobiotic Invasion
Paul Vibert. The Mysterious Fluid
English adaptation and introduction Copyright 2008 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2008 by Arnaud Demaegd.
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ISBN 978-1-934543-41-2. First Printing. August 2008. 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.