Whether such speculations, however cleverly packaged, could ever find a place in the literary marketplace, is another matter. Rosny, at least, felt it more politic to stick to more modest projects with guaranteed reader appeal—which is what he was attempting to do, manifestly half-heartedly, in “Adventure in the Wild.” I have already made some mention in the afterword to vol. 4 of the magnetic effect that its plot formula exerted on Rosny, once he had embarked on an imaginary adventure, and there is no need to add to the observations made there, but some comment on the story’s ending might be appropriate, as it stands in such stark contrast to the ending of the story’s obvious model, “The Boar Men” (in vol. 2). It is doubtful that Rosny had actually experienced a change of mind relative to the propriety of the earlier ending, but it ought to be noted that the ending of “The Boar Men” was atypical of his work.
Rosny was doubtless aware of the strong inclination that other male writers had to end stories of “inappropriate” love with the death of one or other of the protagonists (in contrast with love stories written by female writers, which are far more likely, in strictly statistical terms, to end “happily” in one way or another), and it was a recourse he had tended to resist. It was not simply that he had more relaxed attitudes to “propriety” than many other male writers, but that he seemed to believe that there was an innate attraction operative between people of different race or status—a notion given overt expression in “Vamireh” (in vol. 2) and extrapolated to astonishing lengths in “The Navigators of Space” (in vol. 1). Clearly this attraction can only be effective between moral near-equals, that therefore “ought not” exist with respect to such brutalized species as the Squat Men of “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure” (in vol. 3) or the eponymous Boar Men, but the whole point of “The Boar Men” is that it might; the protagonist’s decision to commit suicide is not a result of her being raped, or her being recaptured, but of her shame at having being “exalted” (i.e., having experienced orgasm) while being raped. It is not the Boar Man who horrifies her but the echo of his bestiality that he arouses in the depths of her own nature.
By the same token, the fact that Corisande, the subsidiary heroine of “Adventure in the Wild,” can be considered undefiled, in spite of being raped by a Carabao Man (apparently—no such incident is explicitly described), is due to the fact that it called forth no such echo, thus becoming a mere act of violence. The situation would of course, have been complicated if she had found herself pregnant—as the Carabao Man hoped and expected—but the authorial dictatorship that masquerades as chance in worlds-within-texts spared her that. Given the improbability of Corisande’s initial capture and subsequent rescue, this does not seem entirely out of place as an act of authorial generosity, but some readers may wonder what the effects might have been of the luckless abductees yielding to their instinct of miscegenation and taking on the job of beginning the evolutionary and cultural redemption of the brutal races into whose hands they had fallen. Given that “Grace” was capable of falling in love with the narrator of “The Navigators of Space,” such an imaginative leap was surely not beyond the scope of Rosny’s imagination—although it was certainly beyond the limits of editorial toleration pertaining to pulp fiction.
Notes
1 Le Félin géant (The Giant Cat a.k.a. Quest of the Dawn Man) and Helgvor du fleuve bleu (Helgvor of the Blue River) will be reprinted in their original English translations in a seventh volume.
2 Rosny gives most of these constellations their common names rather than Latin names, but many of those common names do not translate directly into English, so I have used the Latin names, many of which are familiar to lovers of horoscopes. The reference to “the diamond” of Capricorn is puzzling, as that constellation has no very bright stars; Rosny’s other works often refer to “the diamond of Cygnus” (Deneb) and it is possible that this passage was slightly muddled in the publication process.
3 Rosny refers to Orion’s belt stars as the “Trois-Rois” [Three Kings]; although that designation is not common in French, it had been used—adapted from its German/Dutch equivalents—by Alphonse Daudet in Lettres de Mon Moulin (1866).
4 The Menechmes, or The Twins, is a comedy by Plautus, which served as the model for a play of the same title by Jean-François Regnard. Sosie is the valet of the eponymous protagonist of Amphitryon, another play by Plautus, whose plot was similarly recycled by Molière; the name became synonymous with that of a double because Sosie’s features are duplicated in the play by Mercury in the course of carrying out a mission on Jupiter’s behalf.
5 A hospital for the blind founded in Paris by Louis IX in 1260.
6 A novel by George Sand, first serialized in 1847-48, which tells the story of a foundling who is driven from his adopted home when his foster-parents fall on hard times, but returns to rescue his widowed foster-mother, and eventually marries her.
7 The term Rosny uses here is apodes—which can be directly, if rather obscurely, transcribed into English with reference to fabulous birds that have no feet—but the metaphorical reference is merely to birds that rarely seem to land.
8 The sculptor and engraver Emile Soldi (1846-1906), who fancied that he could make anthropological deductions from ancient and folk art.
9 “The Shulamite” is the addressee of the Biblical Song of Solomon, but the more immediate reference that Rosny almost certainly has in mind is a relatively recent “scène lyrique” based on that poem, La Sulamite, first performed in 1885, with words by Jean Richepin—a writer with whom he was personally acquainted—and music by Emmanuel Chabrier.
10 This partial phrase is quoted from an apocryphal anecdote in which Galileo, having been forced by the Inquisition to recant his assertion that the Earth revolves around the Sun, murmurs as he gets to his feet again: “E pur si muovo” [And yet it moves].
11 Given her previous remark, Thérèse probably has Revelation 17:5 in mind—as Rosny surely must.
12 Presumably Lucien Barbillion, a physician who published various scientific papers and a history of medicine in the last decades of the 19th century.
13 Rosny inserts a footnote here: “Grantaigle is probably referring to interstellar space.”
14 Rosny adds a footnote: “It is possible that Grantaigle’s theory will be enveloped by us in an article or a pamphlet entitled A New Theory of Immortality.” I cannot trace an article with that particular title, or anything similar, and the direction in which Rosny developed his pluralistic ideas in the articles he published in the Mercure de France in the 1920s and 1930s do not include any notion of immortality, although the notion he developed of a tightly-packaged “fourth universe” would be easily adaptable to some such notion, by analogy with the Spiritualistic notion of an “astral plane” parallel to the observable world, in which spirits can move freely. The story “Dans le monde des Variants” (1939; tr. in vol. 2 as “In the World of the Variants”) provides an oblique illustration of the manner in which such a hypothesis might be elaborated.
15 Hugo de Vries (1848-1935) published his book on mutation theory in 1900-03; the theory was obsolete by the time Rosny wrote this story, the sudden gross mutations in de Vries’s theory having been replaced by the much subtler mutations of Mendelian genetic theory, but the terminology persisted, and the notion was retained in a great deal of popular fiction.
16 Rosny inserts a footnote to explain that Grafina—Gravine in French—is a Dutch title equivalent to the French Comtesse (or the English Countess).
17 Rosny inserts a footnote, which translates the first part of this speech as: “Vos, Zwarte! The tiger is dead…” He does not translate “stil” at this point in the text but subsequently translates it as “silence.” Here, it obviously means “whoa.”
18 Rosny’s footnote defines Jufvrouw as “Demoiselle” [Miss].
19 Louis XIV’s fervent persecution of French Protestants came to be known, familiarly, as the dragonnades because of his fondness for unleashing troops of dragoons in rapid raids.
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20 “As it was in the beginning, is now and shall be, forever and ever” (from the Lord’s Prayer).
21 The Grafina is reading or paraphrasing Isaiah 63:1; the words in the Authorized Version do not correspond exactly to those she uses, so I have improvised slightly to align the quotation more closely with a translation of her actual words. (The question is rhetorical, but it refers to a visitation of the Lord, promising redemption to “the daughter of Zion”—i.e. the Children of Israel, although the Grafina is obviously construing the passage metaphorically, with reference to her own family.)
22 Trees of the genus Palaquium are best known as the source of gutta-percha.
23 “Hounds! Tally Ho!”
24 The term Carabao (Rosny renders it Kérabau; it is derived from the Malay word Kerbau) is usually applied to a particular variety of domesticated water-buffalo, one of many employed throughout South-East Asia, but Rosny appears to be using it more generally. It seemed more appropriate to use the English equivalent rather than referring to the people in question as “Buffalo-Men” or “Kerbau-Men.”
25 I have transcribed Kannour directly; I am not certain whether the reference is to the place in France from which the French surname “Kannour” originates, or to the southern Indian district of Kannur or Kannoor, which would also be rendered Kannour in French.
26 Michiel de Ruyter (1607-1676) was a Dutch admiral who inflicted a humiliating defeat on the British navy during his raid on the Medway in 1667; he did not quite contrive to reach London, but his victory was decisive enough to bring the Second Anglo-Dutch War to an end. He had earlier fought in the First, and was later to fight in the Third.
27 The earthquake that struck Messina in Sicily on December 28, 1908, and the associated tsunami, were indeed reported to have killed more than 100,000 people.
28 The Chellean period, so-called by virtue of the fact that its typical stone tools had been discovered in some profusion in the vicinity of Chelles, on the Marne, was one of the subdivisions of the Stone Age identified by Gabriel de Mortillet (see the introduction to vol. 4).
29 The reader may remember that Hendrik had previously addressed one of the horses pulling his cart as Vos; Rosny—who was evidently dictating the novel to an amanuensis—might have forgotten that he had used it previously, or misremembered the context.
30 The puzzling implication that the Moon rises in the west is repeated, more explicitly, at a later point in the text. In other works by Rosny, as in reality, the Moon rises in the east, and the repetition makes it unlikely that the error was due to a momentary lapse of concentration; the significance of the suggestion remains unclear.
31 Frédéric’s inference is understandable, but seemingly inconsistent with Hourv’s earlier assertion that Corisande would only belong to him “when the Moon of Jade follows the Moon of Reeds,” a time apparently more than four weeks away. The text subsequently seems to assume, however, that Frédéric is right, perhaps because Rosny had forgotten or repented of making provision for a useful delay.
32 Cardinal Jean de La Balue (1421-1491) was imprisoned in an iron cage by Louis XI, whom he had previously served as Secretary of State, for having conspired against him with the last Duc de Bourgogne, Charles le Téméraire [Charles the Bold] (1433-1477).
33 Rosny inserts a footnote translating the Dutchman’s words as “Good! Very Good!”
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
Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
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
Charles de Fieux. Lamékis
Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic
Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
André Laurie. Spiridon
Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
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; The Secret of Zippelius
José Moselli. Illa’s End
John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
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; Nemoville
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
Acknowledgements: I should like to thank John J. Pierce for providing valuable research materials and offering advice and support. Many of the copies of Rosny’s works and critical articles related to his work were borrowed from the London Library. Also thanks to Paul Wessels for his generous and extensive help in the final preparation of this text.
English adaptation, introduction and afterword Copyright 2010 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2010 by Vincent Laik.
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ISBN 978-1-935558-39-2. First Printing. July 2010. 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 book are entirely fictional. Printed in the United States of America.
The Givreuse Enigma Page 31