The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1)

by Georges Le Faure; Henri de Graffigny

  The Extraordinary Adventures

  of a Russian Scientist

  (Volume 1)

  by

  Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  The first of four volumes of Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant russe, signed “G. Le Faure and H. de Graffigny” was published by Guillaume Edinger in 1888.1 That first volume was an unusually lavish book illustrated with astronomical photographs, maps and drawings by various hands, and a preface by France’s best-known popularizer of science, Camille Flammarion, who is also the novel’s dedicatee. The second and third volumes of the original version appeared in a slightly less lavish format in 1889 and 1890, but Edinger appears to have ceased trading as a publisher thereafter, either because his enthusiastic political activities proved too much of a distraction, or because his recently-established and highly ambitious publishing program had stretched his finances to breaking point; at any rate, the assets of his firm were acquired by Arthème Fayard. After a long delay, Fayard issued the fourth and concluding volume of the Aventures extraordinaires in 1896, with illustrations distinctly inferior to those in the earlier volumes. The story told in the four volumes is a single continuous narrative whose subdivision was entirely arbitrary; it is here translated in two volumes as The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist.

  All four volumes of the original edition are now rare; the third and fourth are exceedingly difficult to find, thus making it very difficult for any modern reader to peruse the work in its entirety—even contemporary readers must have had difficulty, given the interruption of its publication. The historical importance of the work as an unprecedentedly ambitious scientific romance and a significant precursor of modern science fiction has, however, long been recognized, and a considerable effort has recently been made to make the whole text available in electronic form.

  The version I have translated was obtained from ebooksgratuits.com, although the first two volumes are also available from other suppliers.

  The two authors of Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant russe were both at the beginning of their careers in 1888, having published relatively little before that year, at least in book form. Whether they formed their partnership spontaneously or were brought together by Edinger to execute a plan formed by the publisher, it appears that theirs was a literary marriage of convenience; the evidence of their separate careers strongly suggests that Le Faure was appointed to be the provider of the action/adventure component of the work, while de Graffigny was to supply the science content. There is no way to be certain, but de Graffigny might well have provided a rough draft that was then given to Le Faure for expansion and melodramatic enhancement—a pattern of production employed in other notable partnerships in French scientific romance, including three collaborative works by between Paschal Grousset (alias André Laurie) and Jules Verne and the two-volume “Martian Epic” credited to Octave Joncquel and Théo Varlet.2

  The senior writer of the present partnership, Georges Le Faure (1858-1953), went on to become a prolific writer of popular fiction, especially for younger readers. Much of his work was in a vaguely Vernian vein, although he never did anything else as ambitious as the Aventures extraordinaires, and he became conspicuously more modest in his imaginative reach once the four-volume novel was complete. While the early volumes of the Aventures extraordinaires were in progress, however, he was extremely enthusiastic in his production of scientific romances—so much so that when Fayard took over Edinger’s assets, he was able to reissue a three-volume omnibus of Le Faure’s other Voyages scientifiques extraordinaires in 1892-94, containing nine novels originally issued in 14 volumes. Le Faure became a regular contributor to the Vernian Journal des Voyages thereafter, sometimes using the pseudonym Georges Faber, but most of his contributions were non-speculative adventure stories. He wrote a good deal of popular fiction in that vein, his most successful single work being Les Aventures de Sidi-Froussard (1891), a comic “patriotic novel” about French colonial adventures in the Middle East. He also wrote feuilleton fiction in the “cape et épée” swashbuckling vein pioneered by Paul Féval, including a gargantuan 225-episode serial featuring one of the stock characters of French picaresque fiction, Robert Macaire (1896-98).

  The most successful of Le Faure’s scientific romances was probably La Guerre sous l’eau (1890; tr. as War Under Water), an English translation of which was issued in the USA by Cassell in 1892. It features the construction of a submarine powered by electricity and armed with powerful torpedoes by an international secret society dedicated to the destruction of the German Empire. Les Robinsons lunaires [The Lunar Castaways] (1892) was more ambitious, and more handsomely-illustrated, but once he had completed the nine novels reprinted in the Fayard omnibus, and had belatedly put an end to Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant russe, Le Faure seems to have decided that speculative work was not worth the necessary imaginative effort and abandoned it, although modest speculative technologies are featured in peripheral roles in some of the adventure stories he produced in the 1920s. Very little is known about his life, the only biographical details on record being the dates of his birth and death.

  “Henry de Graffigny” was the pseudonym of Raoul Marquis (1863-1942), an engineer by training and a popularizer of science by vocation. The idea of writing the Aventures extraordinaires is likely to have been his, if it was not Edinger’s. De Graffigny had made his first tentative foray into the subgenre of Vernian romance in 1887, with Voyages fantastiques [Fantastic Voyages], which he followed up with De la Terre aux étoiles [From the Earth to the Stars] (1888)—a work that is not as extravagant as its title promises, only taking in the Moon, Venus and a ride on a comet, although it might be regarded as a preliminary prospectus for Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant russe, whose early phases follow the same route.

  Both these works, aimed at a juvenile audience, were awkwardly didactic, and a third, Contes d’un vieux savant [An Old Scientist’s Tales] (1888), used a fictional frame simply to dress up a series of scientific lectures; it is unsurprising that Edinger thought that de Graffigny was in urgent need of a collaborator skilled in melodrama if he were ever to produce something that aficionados of Vernian fiction might actually enjoy. More typical of de Graffigny’s contemporary endeavors were Le jeune electrician amateur (1888) and a multivolume Petite Encyclopédie Electro-Mécanique (1889), both of which were reprinted several times.

  Although he worked for much of his life as a scientific journalist before “retiring” in 1920, ostensibly to dedicate his life to “electroculture”—the application of electricity to agricultural endeavor—de Graffigny did make further excursions into Vernian romance following the conclusion of the Aventures extraordinaires. Like Le Faure, however, he stuck to inventions that were, by comparison, conspicuous by their modesty. In A travers l’espace—aventures d’un aéronaute [Across the Sky—Adventures of an Aeronaut] (1908), the North Pole is reached by balloon; La ville aérienne [The Aerial City] (1910) is another account of an advanced aerostat. Considering that de Graffigny knew by the time he wrote these two novels that his advocacy of heavier-than-air craft in the Aventures extraordinaires had been justified, their production may seem deliberately retrograde—and, indeed, probably was. He seems to have become an enthusiastic balloonist himself by the time he wrote them, and his journalistic ende
avors championed lighter-than-air craft against their upstart kin.

  The most imaginative work of the latter part of de Graffigny’s career, Voyage de cinq Américains dans les planets [A Voyage to the Planets by Five Americans] (1925), appears to have been directly inspired by André Mas’ Les Allemands sur Venus (1913)3 and he maintained a steady flow of non-fictional publications on the possibility of interplanetary travel, culminating in the speculative enquiry Irons-nous dans la lune? [Shall we go to the Moon?] (1932). This was one of the first full-length works advertising the possibility of building a rocket capable of flying to the Moon, and it includes a bibliography of relevant imaginary voyages, although it had been long anticipated in France by Mas’ popularizing efforts—Mas had also included such a bibliography in Les Allemands sur Venus.

  De Graffigny’s last scientific romances in book form were Electropolis, roman scientifique [Electropolis, a Scientific Romance] (1933), Les Martyres du Pôle [The Polar Martyrs] (1934) and Au fond des Abîmes [The Abyssal Depths] (1934). The plot of the first-named, in which a rich Englishman, intent on regenerating the Mesopotamian desert, recruits a French engineer who has invented a technology for producing electricity directly from solar energy, seems to have been a fairly slavish copy of Otfrid von Hanstein’s Elektropolis, Die Stadt der technisen Wunder [Electropolis, the Technological Wonder State] (1928; tr. as “Electropolis” in Science Wonder Stories, 1930), while the others are thematically similar to Le Faure’s Un drame sous le banquise [Drama Under the Ice-Cap] (1926), so it seems that de Graffigny was still having difficulty designing appropriate fictional vehicles for his technological speculations. Unsurprisingly, Pierre Versins’ Encyclopédie de l'utopie et de la science-fiction is dismissive of de Graffigny's talents as a fiction writer, considering him distinctly inferior to the admittedly-slapdash Le Faure, but Versins readily admits his significance as a popularizer of science.

  Although Le Faure and de Graffigny are both almost entirely forgotten today, Raoul Marquis left one curious literary legacy. His work as a scientific journalist included editing the periodical Euréka, for which Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, alias Céline, worked in 1916-19. Céline produced an unusually detailed and affectionate depiction of his employer in the flamboyant character of “Courtial Roger-Marin des Pereires,” editor of “the favorite periodical of the petty artisan inventors of Paris,” Génie [Genius], in Chapters 109-119 of his autobiographical novel Mort à crédit (1936; tr. as Death on the Instalment Plan). This pen-portrait of “Courtial” is now Marquis’ main claim to modern fame.

  “Courtial des Pereires, it must be stated,” Céline wrote, “was absolutely distinct from the general run of petty inventors; he dominated the entire crawling swarm of subscribers to the magazine from a great height… His self-possession, his absolute competence and his irresistible optimism rendered him invulnerable to the direst assaults of the most extreme stupidity… He never stopped producing, planning, devising, asserting… He had to shield himself against an onslaught of ideas and tread warily… He was pursued by wild notions, went careering off on the track of some fascinating whimsy… Holding his brilliance in check had put him to greater trouble and required more superhuman effort than all the rest of his work. He told me so.”

  There is undoubtedly an element of parody in this description, and its flattery is undoubtedly exaggerated. “He had an X-ray mind,” Céline alleges. “He needed only an hour’s concentrated effort and furious application to knock the weightiest idiocies into shape for good and all, to reduce the most pretentious claptrap to the level of the Génie in terms comprehensible to the most recalcitrant blockheads among its slowest-witted readers… To Courtial, nothing was obscure.”

  This is not, alas, the man we meet in reading between the lines of the Aventures extraordinaires—but that was, we must recall, a much younger man, whose enthusiasm still far outweighed his achievements. In one respect, however, the editor described by Céline is still very definitely, and quintessentially, the co-author of the Aventures extraordinaires: “At Courtial’s, we worked under the aegis of the great Flammarion; his signed portrait occupied the center of the window; his name was invoked as that of the Almighty Himself whenever there was the slightest argument, for a mere trifle. He was the touchstone, Providence, the real McCoy; we swore by him and him alone…”

  The historical importance of the Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant russe is primarily derived from the fact that it was a determined and highly ambitious attempt to hybridize action-adventure fiction and the popularization of science to produce a new kind of fiction: one that had much in common with the “hard science fiction” that aficionados of the American-born science fiction genre distinguished when they thought it politic to discriminate between stories that were fundamentally faithful to known science and those which merely used a lexicon of imaginary entities—spaceships, aliens, robots and so on—as standard props of futuristic costume drama or as metaphorical and symbolic devices.

  Authentic hard science fiction is very difficult to write, for a variety of reasons, and de Graffigny and Le Faure encountered all those reasons. They failed to solve any of the resultant problems, but that is not surprising; it is, in fact, arguable, that all the writers who have addressed them since have also failed, albeit less conspicuously, but in a remarkably similar fashion. This first attempt, like all pioneering exercises, seems ham-fisted in retrospect, but the Aventures extraordinaires certainly cannot be faulted for its boldness, and even if the difficulties its authors experienced in writing it proved so taxing that neither of them ever attempted anything remotely similar again, the novel remains a monument of sorts. It is the longest scientific romance ever written, and it was not until the final years of the 20th century that the science fiction genre produced a handful of longer works. It was the first scientific romance to attempt a tour of the entire Solar System, and the first to venture outside by means of faster-than-light travel. Only a handful of subsequent scientific romances made similar attempts, and the fact that writers active in the American science fiction genre eventually grasped the nettle of interstellar navigation more firmly and more securely is largely responsible for the eventual triumph of that genre over its European rivals—which entitles Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant russe to be one of the most important proto-science fiction novels produced by the earlier genre.

  In setting out to write a pioneering analogue of a hard science fiction story, de Graffigny and Le Faure were not entirely lacking in earlier models. The most important of these were a handful of works by Jules Verne, who had written several moderately daring but ostensibly “hard” scientific romances before being reined in by his publisher, P.-J. Hetzel and constrained to exercise greater modesty in his inventions. One of them in particular, Autour de la Lune (1870; tr. as Around the Moon), provided a cardinal example which de Graffigny and Le Faure plundered in a wholesale fashion, and they also borrowed extravagantly from a more problematic model in Hector Servadac (1877), in which Verne had attempted to dabble in interplanetary tourism, but had eventually been let down by his own lack of conviction.

  Despite the carefully-researched technical detail that he put into his novels, in order to follow Hetzel’s explicitly didactic agenda, Verne was not particularly knowledgeable about science, nor even particularly sympathetic to technological progress. The one futuristic novel he wrote, which Hetzel advised him never to publish lest it ruin his reputation—Paris au XXe siècle (tr. as Paris in the Twentieth Century), which was eventually rediscovered and published in 1994—was markedly hostile to the prospects of a society that has wholeheartedly embraced the rewards of technological sophistication. Although he was always under pressure to maintain the rational plausibility of his work, Verne was not above the use of casual imaginative flourishes with no logical basis, nor was he unwilling simply to throw up his hands and decline to rationalize inventions for which there could be no logical basis, as he did at the end of Hector Servadac. He was, in consequence, not an ideal mo
del for late 19th century would-be writers of hard science fiction—but he was, nevertheless, the only one who possessed the least vestige of credibility, and the only one who has set any kind of standard for reference.

  The other models of scientifically-sophisticated speculative fiction that immediately recommended itself to the attention of de Graffigny and Le Faure were a handful of experimental works by their own novel’s dedicatee and Raoul Marquis’ ultimate hero, Camille Flammarion—the leading popularizer of science in France, at least in terms of his literary fecundity and his popularity. Like de Graffigny, Flammarion was infinitely more comfortable writing non-fiction than fiction, and had no obvious talent for the narrative techniques that were becoming standardized as the method and apparatus of the novel, but he was well aware that speculative non-fiction, playing with the imaginative possibilities opened up by scientific discovery, was itself a kind of fantasizing, which might potentially benefit from the adoption of various kinds of narrative devices.

  Early in his career, Flammarion had experimented with several such devices, especially the items collected in Récits de l’infini (1872; tr. as Stories of Infinity), and most spectacularly of all in the longest of those items, Lumen (1866-69; expanded for separate publication 1887). Lumen is cast as a series of philosophical dialogues, but the latter ones—taking some inspiration from Sir Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel (1830), which Flammarion translated into French while his own work was in progress—describe a cosmic tour in which the eponymous post-human spirit, who is able to travel faster than light and also to seek reincarnation on other worlds, offers an account of the universe embodying contemporary discoveries in astronomy and contemporary theories of biological evolution.

  There was already a long literary tradition of such visionary cosmic tours, initially inspired by the theological debate regarding the plurality of worlds, and the key works in the tradition had often tried to take advantage of advances in astronomical science. Bernard de Fontenelle’s clever, witty and enormously popular Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1696; tr. as Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) had established a particularly significant landmark in France. Christian Huygens’ Kosmotheoros (1698), by one of the most important early pioneers of astronomy, was rapidly translated into French, as was Emanuel Swedenborg’s monumental Arcana coelestia (1749-1756), which represented itself as an authentic divinely-inspired revelation of the cosmic schema but drew heavily on the legacy of the mystic’s former career as a scientist.