This is the first volume of a six-volume collection of stories by J.-H. Rosny Aîné (“the Elder”), which includes all of his scientific romances, plus a number of other stories that have some relevance to his work in that genre. Although the series includes a volume of prehistoric romances, it omits the prehistoric romance La Guerre du feu (tr. as The Quest for Fire) that is readily accessible in English translation.1 I have, however, made new translations of several scientific romances that have been previously translated, including “Les Xipéhuz” (tr. as “The Shapes” and “The Xipehuz”), “L’Autre monde” (tr. as “The Sixth Sense” and “Another World”), “Nymphée” (tr. as “The Warriors of the Waters”), “La Mort de la Terre” (tr. as “The Death of the Earth”), “La Grande énigme” (tr. as “The Great Enigma” and L’Etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle (tr. as Ironcastle). I have done so in the interests of completeness rather than because the previous translations are unsatisfactory (although one or two of them are).
The contents of the six volumes are:
Volume 1. THE NAVIGATORS OF SPACE AND OTHER ALIEN ENCOUNTERS: The Xipehuz, The Skeptical Legend, Another World, The Death of the Earth, The Navigators of Space, The Astronauts.
Volume 2. THE WORLD OF THE VARIANTS AND OTHER STRANGE LANDS: Nymphaeum, The Depths of Kyamo, The Wonderful Cave Country, The Voyage, The Great Enigma, The Treasure in the Snow, The Boar Men, In the World of the Variants.
Volume 3. THE MYSTERIOUS FORCE AND OTHER ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA: The Cataclysm, The Mysterious Force, Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure.
Volume 4. VAMIREH AND OTHER PREHISTORIC FANTASIES: Vamireh, Eyrimah, Nomaï.
Volume 5. THE GIVREUSE ENIGMA AND OTHER STORIES: Mary’s Garden, The Givreuse Enigma, Adventure in the Wild.
Volume 6. THE YOUNG VAMPIRE AND OTHER CAUTIONARY TALES: The Witch, The Young Vampire, The Supernatural Assassin, Companions of the Universe.
J.-H. Rosny Aîné is now generally reckoned to be one of the most important pioneers of French scientific romance, not necessarily second in rank to his much more popular and far more widely-known predecessor Jules Verne. Pierre Versins, in his definitive Encyclopédie de l’Utopie et de la Science-Fiction does not hesitate to describe him as France’s greatest “conjectural author” (Rosny was Belgian by birth but Parisian by calculated cultural affiliation), not excluding Verne. Jacques van Herp, in his introduction to an omnibus collection of Rosny’s scientific romances and related tales edited by Jean-Baptiste Baronian, states flatly that “Before Rosny, science fiction did not exist; all that existed was a related literature: anticipation” and, after characterizing that earlier (Vernian) literature as an assembly of tentative extrapolations of the contents of our own world, adds that: “With Rosny, fortunately, everything changed.”
Actually, van Herp’s judgment is wildly overestimated; any change wrought by Rosny’s early ventures into scientific romance certainly did not happen overnight, and was always weighed down by crippling difficulties. In his own day, Rosny’s scientific romances went virtually unnoticed at first, and it was not until they were belatedly identified as having a significant kinship with those of H. G. Wells that anyone thought them significant; because Rosny had written several of his key works before Wells made his debut, some French critics became keen to establish the priority of his work, just as they were keen to represent Wells as a follower in the footsteps of Jules Verne. Rosny, however—like Verne, and with equal justice—was quick to deny that the apparent kinship between his work and Wells’s was as close as these observers claimed. His protests went unheeded, and he was frequently labeled “the French H. G. Wells” thereafter, but that did not make it any easier for him to publish more work of a similar sort. In respect of the broad evolution of scientific romance as a genre he was a unique pioneer, whose imaginative reach was unprecedented, and has rarely been matched even by the relatively few writers who have undertaken to imitate or extrapolate aspects of his work, but he has never been popular, even among connoisseurs of speculative fiction. That is mainly because his best work was so very unusual, and usually lacking in certain traits guaranteed to encourage the affection of readers—but there is no doubt at all about his originality, or the imaginative quality of the contribution that he made to speculative fiction.
Seen in the context of his long life and prolific literary career, Rosny’s contribution to scientific romance was sketchy, problematic and puzzling—but in such a context, it is not necessarily a bad thing to be problematic or puzzling, and the sketchiness of his production was not his fault, being reflective of the intense hostility to speculative fiction that has always been obvious in the literary marketplace, and even more obvious in the chatter of conventional critical opinion. The translation of his work into English, although not entirely neglected, has—until now—been very patchy and rather fugitive, and this has made it very difficult for historians and critics of speculative fiction working in the English language (as the vast majority of them do) to assess his contribution accurately. Hopefully, this collection, and the accompanying commentary, will help to make that much easier.
J.-H. Rosny Aîné was the principal pseudonym used by Joseph-Henri-Honoré Boëx, who was born in Brussels in 1856. In the beginning, the pseudonym was simply J.-H. Rosny, but he decided after some years of near-fame to share that pseudonym with his younger brother, Séraphin-Justin-François (who preferred the name Justin), and it remained a joint enterprise for a decade and a half, until the two fell out and decided to separate; because both of them wanted to maintain the limited but significant prestige attached to the pseudonym, they divided it into two, becoming J.-H. Rosny Aîné (the elder) and J.-H. Rosny Jeune (the younger). (The two brothers had five other siblings, but none of the others are of any relevance to their writing career.)
“J.-H. Rosny” was neither the first nor the only pseudonym that Joseph Boëx used. During the most prolific period of his work for periodicals he is known to have sometimes signed himself “Henri de Noville,” and he signed some of his early books “Enacryos” before reprinting one of them under the Rosny name, but some of the other names he used have never been identified, so the whole scope of his work remains unknown. There is, however, no doubt that the vast majority of his most interesting work appeared, or was reprinted, under the J.-H. Rosny by-line. He never used his own name in the form that he had received it, although he did sign one non-fictional essay J.-H. Boëx-Borel, the second component of the surname being the maiden name of his second wife.
This set of circumstances has inevitably caused problems for critics, who have never been quite sure how best to refer to Joseph Boëx while discussing his life and work. Most critical and biographical articles settle for “Rosny,” in spite of the difficulties thus caused in specifying his young brother’s contribution to the name’s achievements, but Jean-Baptiste Baronian’s supplementary material in the Robert Laffont omnibus of Rosny’s romans préhistoriques dutifully refers to him as R.A., while designating his brother as R.J. Although that strategy is tempting, “R.A.” has too many alternative referents to be free of potential confusion, so I shall stick to “Rosny”—or, occasionally, “Joseph”—in spite of the inevitable contortions this will cause whenever the younger brother comes into the discussion. Fortunately, there is good reason to believe that the younger brother never made any contribution to any of the small number of prehistoric romances or scientific romances that appeared while the two brothers were working in association.
Pierre Versins begins his article on the elder Rosny (his encyclopedia also includes a brief article on Rosny Jeune) with an anecdote about the young Joseph Boëx writing a Utopian essay at the age of 11 about a land of free children escaping the persecution of their parents, which allegedly annoyed the father after whom he had been named—but Rosny’s similarly-named father had, in fact, died when he was seven, so any annoyance must have been felt by his widowed mother, for whom bringing up seven children cannot have been easy. Young Joseph could hardly have known his father at all, but it may be worth noting that Joseph Boëx senior probably did not like his surname much, having inherited it from a mother who disowned him at birth—after refusing to name his father—leaving him to be brought up as a ward of the Belgian state.
Although Versins’ article and the chronology of Rosny’s life included in the Laffont omnibus both stress that Joseph junior began writing at an early age—Baronian’s chronology credits him with a collection of verse completed at the age of thirteen—and always looked upon it as something of a vocation, he took a long time to get his literary career off the ground, or even to attempt its launch. Indeed, he seems to have formed the opinion, even in his teens, that he needed a long period of education before he could move on to stage two of his life-plan—and also that he needed to plan his own curriculum rather than rely on the one provided by any existing institutional system. He left school at 15 to work in a bank, studying English in the evenings; Baronian records that he published a few articles in Belgian newspapers in 1872, but he did not attempt to build a career on those publications.
In 1875, Joseph took advantage of his English lessons to get a job in London, where he worked for a telegraph company, on the night shift, and continued his program of self-education by day. Baronian says that he published some work in English periodicals, but gives no details, and the pattern of the references contained in J.-H. Rosny’s subsequent publications strongly suggests that the bulk of his reading and writing was in French. His self-designed educational curriculum was very heavily biased toward sciences, ranging from physics and astronomy all the way through to newly-emergent social sciences like paleoanthropology.
Although he was not a man to say a great deal about himself, and might even be thought to have been deliberately secretive, Rosny did include some useful reflections on this period of his life in one of his two volumes of literary memoirs, Torches et lumignons [roughly, Bright Lights and Guttering Candles] (1921) and some further inferences can be gleaned from the most personal of his three early semi-autobiographical novels, Marc Fane (1888), which is a detailed account of the ambitious self-education program designed by the eponymous clerk in a telegraphy office, and the tribulations he experiences in carrying it through. In Torches et lumignons, Rosny explains that his passion for science was not only derived from his conviction that such knowledge was more valuable than that provided by a “traditional scientific education;” he states that: “I also remain incomprehensible if one forgets my extreme taste for metaphysics and science. For me, science is a poetic passion; it opens myriads of channels or openings into the universe; it never appears dead to me.”
Given this “poetic passion” and the other item of potential incomprehensibility to which the “also” in the above quotation refers back—Rosny describes himself as a complex and essentially contradictory personality, in which “realism is intimately and constantly mingled with the most chimerical idealism”—his self-education cannot have been quite as relentless and methodical as Marc Fane’s, but it was certainly patient and elaborate. His life-plan must, however, have been thrown slightly off track in 1880, when he married an Englishwoman, Gertrude Holmes. The family lived in London for a further five years—probably longer than he had originally intended to stay there—but Joseph paid increasingly frequent visits to Paris, where he intended to go once his embryonic literary career was ready for hatching out. Justin had already been there for some time, apparently waiting for him, when the older brother eventually relocated his still-growing family late in 1884.
Rosny begins Torches et lumignons with a description of his submission by hand, in the autumn of 1885, of what was to become his first-published novel, Nell Horn de l’Armée du Salut [Nell Horn of the Salvation Army] (1886), a revelatory study of the world of the London poor, written from occasionally-bitter experience. Although it is based on first hand observation, the central character is only loosely based on Gertrude Holmes, and the fates of the two women are contradictory; while Rosny married Gertrude, Nell’s French lover callously abandons her, leaving her with no alternative but to become a prostitute in order to support her illegitimate child. Gertrude presumably got a better bargain than Nell, but Rosny apparently came to feel that he had not done nearly as well as his hero; although it produced four children of whom Rosny claimed to have been fond, the marriage was direly unhappy, and eventually ended in divorce.
Although Nell Horn must have been recently finished when Rosny handed it over to Monsieur Giraud in the offices of the Nouvelle Librairie Parisienne, he had been working on it for years, alongside numerous other works. Like many aspiring writers, Rosny was far better at beginning projects than bringing them to conclusion, and had accumulated a vast store of fragmentary manuscripts and notes while living in London. In Torches et Lumignons he notes that in 1885, after arriving in Paris: “I retouched Les Xipéhuz, I finished my Livre étoilé, which did not see and will not see the daylight of publication; I assembled the multitudes of Le Bilateral, I jotted down Marc Fane and the lineaments of Daniel [Valgraive]; I lost myself in endless dreams of La Légende sceptique, I revised L’Immolation, I sketched out a romance of Cavernes.”
Assuming that this account can be taken seriously—and there is no reason to doubt the list of titles—it appears that at least four of Rosny’s first six published novels already existed in some form before he completed Nell Horn, together with drafts of four more works, two of which were never published. Significantly, in the context of the present project, the second group of four includes two of this key works of scientific romance—“Les Xipéhuz” (1887; tr. herein as “The Xipehuz”) and “La Légende sceptique” (1889; tr. herein as “The Skeptical legend”). Equally significantly, from the same viewpoint, the two that never reached publication also seem likely, to judge by their titles, to have been in that same genre. If, as seems probable, Cavernes was the source of the fragmentary story eventually published as “La contrée prodigieuse des cavernes” (1896; tr. in vol. 2 as “The Wonderful Cave Country”), that would suggest that some of Rosny’s later publications in the genre might have been written, or at least imagined, much earlier than their dates of publication.
Rosny was very keen to win friends and influence people once he had launched his literary career, and was ardently desirous of being accepted into Parisian literary society—partly, no doubt, because he understood the importance of networking in building a career, but mainly because he had such a great admiration for that society that he could imagine no greater reward than to be gladly welcomed into it. He sent a copy of Nell Horn to Emile Zola, hoping to win some praise for the novel’s extrapolation of the Naturalist credo that Zola had made famous, but the famously curmudgeonly Zola was dismissive. Rosny’s fortunes took a sudden and momentous turn for the better, however, when he sent another copy of the book to Zola’s great rival, Edmond de Goncourt, who was considered by many (not least himself) as the true founder and greater exponent of Naturalism.
Goncourt not only sent Rosny a letter expressing the praise that the younger writer craved, but also invited Rosny to visit him at his home. That meeting changed Rosny’s life; it is probably no exaggeration to say that if it had not been for Goncourt’s patronage, Rosny might have disappeared into oblivion after the publication of Nell Horn—which sold little more than a couple of hundred copies—and never published another book. Instead, Goncourt took the fledgling writer under his wing as a protégé, and introduced him to his weekly literary salon, generally known as the Grenier [loft], as a writer of great promise—a judgment that other people, including Albert Savine, the owner of the Nouvelle Librairie Parisienne, and the editors of several notable periodicals, took seriously.
Rosny was by no means the first young writer to have been favored in this way by Edmond de Goncourt—who seemed to some observers to have been desperately seeking a replacement for his younger brother, Jules, ever since the latter had died in 1870—but he was the last, retaining his position until Goncourt died in 1896. He seems to have replaced Goncourt’s former favorite, Jean Lorrain, virtually overnight, and he quickly became the central figure of an entourage of young writers who were standard fixtures at the Grenier and were regarded there as the up-and-coming generation of Naturalist writers. Although the others had all published material before Rosny published Nell Horn, his late start meant that he was a few years older than they were, and his accumulated store of manuscripts meant that he was able to make more rapid progress; those circumstances, combined with his assertive personality, quickly made him the brightest star in the constellation.
The other writers in Goncourt’s neo-Naturalist cadre of protégés included Paul Bonnetain, Lucien Descaves, Paul Margueritte and Gustave Guiches, with whom Rosny joined in a conspiracy directed against Zola, seemingly prompted by another member of the entourage, Gustave Geffroy. (Goncourt remained ostentatiously uninvolved and was never formally convicted of having masterminded the coup, although his loathing for Zola was well-known and it was widely suspected that he was the ultimate puppet-master of the plot.) The result of the conspiracy was the publication in the August 8 issue of the newspaper Le Figaro of an open letter to Zola which came to be known as Manifeste des Cinq: a new Naturalist manifesto that put the boot into Zola in no uncertain terms, accusing him of having vulgarized, devalued and debased that literary mode—holding up the recently-published La Terre (tr. as Earth) as a horrible example—and declaring the independence of their own Naturalist work.
All five of the Cinq subsequently regretted having issued the Manifeste and repudiated the views sternly and extravagantly expressed therein, but at the time it succeeded in its purpose, which was to cause something of a sensation in the literary community. Although the document had five signatories, Bonnetain was subsequently to reveal that it had actually been written by Rosny, and to allege that Rosny had flatly refused to accept any amendments suggested by his co-signatories. The document was welcomed by the leading French literary critic of the day, Anatole France—a diehard antagonist of the supposed vulgarity of Zolaesque Naturalism—who referred to it in his memoirs of La Vie littéraire (1913) as a Revolutionary Terror, in which Rosny represented “a strict literary Dantonism” while his four companons were mere “Jacobins.” It was also welcomed by Max Nordau, author of the scathing Entartung (1893; tr. as Degeneration), who considered Zola’s Naturalism to be one more symptom of the degeneracy of modern culture—but cited Rosny’s Vamireh (1892; tr. in vol. 4) as evidence that Zola’s former disciples were only deserting the fold in order to descend further into the cultural mire.
The contemporary impact of the Manifeste can be judged by scanning a series of interviews conducted by Jules Huret between three and four years after its publication, initially published in the Echo de Paris and swiftly reprinted in book form by Charpentier as Enquête sur L’Evolution littéraire [An Inquiry Concerning Literary Evolution] (1891), in which Huret attempted to consult all the luminaries of contemporary French literature as to the direction that French literature was currently taking, initially focused on the explicit question “Is Naturalism dying?” and the corollary question of whether, if so, the Naturaliste school was to be reformed, or replaced by a new school derived from authors recently hailed as Psychologues or Symbolistes, or victimized by some other convenient label. Although some of the people to whom Huret wrote asking for an interview sent letters instead of actually seeing him, his subjects were, on the whole, extraordinarily co-operative (with the exception of Guy de Maupassant—described by Huret as “the most unapproachable man in Paris”—who did agree to see him at his home, but then flatly refused to talk about literature).
Given that the Echo de Paris routinely featured work by numerous members of the Grenier’s inner circle—including Rosny and other members of the Cinq—it is not entirely surprising that even the minor writers in that circle were all featured in the book, but it is obvious that Huret’s basic interrogative agenda was set by the Manifeste, and that many of the opinions expressed by the younger writers featured were orientated in relation to it, either for or against. The results were extremely varied—in respect of Naturalism they ranged from Henri Céard’s languid “How can Naturalism die, since it has never existed?” to Paul Alexis’s urgently-dispatched telegram “Naturalism not dead. Letter follows.”—and many of Huret’s respondents were brutally dismissive of the conventional critical assortment of writers into Naturalistes, Psychologues, Symbolistes, etc., as well as being completely at odds when it came to identifying the writers who belonged in each category, but the terms of the argument are sufficiently consistent to determine that all but a tiny minority of the Parisian literati of 1891 knew perfectly how the battlefield was marked out, and judged that the Cinq had established a significant strategic position.
One of the things Huret asked his respondents to do was to name the new writers who would play a significant part in the future evolution of French literature, and Rosny’s name was one of those most often cited. He was not only named by the other four members of the Cinq, Gustave Geffroy and Goncourt himself, but by other “senior” members of the Grenier’s inner circle, including Joris-Karl Huysmans and Paul Hervieu. Cracks in the solidarity of the Cinq were already manifest, however; Bonnetain observed dismissively that “Rosny liked to spoil his enormous talent by an abuse of pharmaceutical neologisms,” while Descaves accused him of having “an incommensurable, mad pride, of which he has no conception” and observed that he was “always preaching” at the Grenier. The latter judgment was not unchallenged, however; Anatole France presumably had it in mind when he wrote a review-essay on Rosny’s work in the same year, focused on Le Termite (1890), in which he declared that: “Whatever anyone may say, M. Rosny is not vain. Neither is he proud. He knows nothing of arrogance… He does not admire himself, but he has an infinite respect for that portion of the divine wisdom which nature has placed in him, and if he is full of himself it is due to stoic virtue. He is a man of great integrity, but difficult to improve.”
Anyone reading the Echo de Paris or the Enquête in 1891, therefore, and keeping up with the opinions of the leading critic of the day would have been bound to come to the conclusion that Rosny was an important writer, not only for what he had already accomplished as a “Neo-Naturaliste” but for what he might go on to do in future. When Huret reacted to criticism of his ready-made system of classifying writers as Naturalistes, Psychologues, Décadents et Symbolistes, Parnassiens, etc. by producing a tongue-in-cheek alternative system, he placed Rosny among the “Boxeurs et Savatiers” [Boxers and Kick-Boxers]. The simple fact is, however, that Rosny owed the spectacular reputation he had developed between 1886 and 1890 far more to salon gossip and critical back-scratching than to the actual sales of his books, which were—and remained—rather poor.
Rosny had not only become a regular at Goncourt’s Grenier but had been introduced by Goncourt to other influential writers, most notably Alphonse Daudet, and to other influential salons. Rosny obviously loved that aspect of literary life; the second part of his second volume of literary memoirs is taken up with his nostalgic description of the various salons he attended regularly and the writers he met there; it gives pride of place to Madame Arman de Caillavet’s salon, where he met and cultivated the acquaintance of Anatole France, her long-time lover and some-time collaborator. Some of Rosny’s descriptions take great care to compliment the food served at those salons which took the form of dinners, for which he may well have been exceedingly grateful in the early days—although the reader might occasionally be inspired to wonder how it compared to the fare that Madame Boëx and her four children were eating at home, where they obviously spent a great deal of time in his absence.
What had first inspired M. Giraud to make an offer of 250 francs for a 1000-copy first printing of Nell Horn was an enthusiastic reader’s report, whose author is unidentified in Torches et lumignons, save for the fact that she was female and was said to have been “touched” by it. Rosny affords scant importance to this, save for his gratitude for the part it played in getting his career moving, but it is worth noting that, although almost all the literary critics of the day were male, publishers were keenly aware of the importance of female readers and, in particular, of the fact that it was female readers who found books “touching” who were responsible for the success of a seemingly-new school of fiction centered on the works of Paul Bourget. Bourget, who was identified by Huret and others as the archetypal Psychologue, was a practitioner of a kind of naturalistic fiction that preferred exploring the psychological motivations of characters rather than their morality—whether religiously-defined or not—or their supposed hereditary defects. (Zola’s school of Naturalism was “physiological” rather than “psychological” because it sought to explain its characters’ moral defects or excesses in terms of hereditary factors modified by the social environment.)
It seems probable that Giraud and his employer, Albert Savine—who was then making a determined effort to expand his business—both hoped that Rosny might have the potential to emulate Bourget. Savine must have been delighted when he saw that one of “his” authors was making such rapid progress in Parisian literary society, meeting all the right people. Rosny’s subsequent works turned out to be far less “touching,” even when he tried to bring female characters into the foreground and focus intently on the romantic relationships of his characters, but he did manage to maintain himself in a prominent position in the Parisian literary community, suggesting that he might become a great success anyway. Savine seems to have maintained his high hopes of Rosny into 1887, following the critical success of Rosny’s second novel, Le Bilateral (1886), but he felt forced to modify his publishing plans considerably in the course of that year.
The short story collection L’Immolation [The Sacrifice] (1887) in which Rosny included “Les Xipéhuz” as the last of five items, following four naturalistic contes cruels, offered a list of volumes “à paraître prochainement,” not one of which actually appeared; they were Nouvelles Londoniennes [Londonian Short Stories], Le Livre étoilé [The Starry Book], La Légende sceptique and Grisailles [Studies in Grey], the last identified as a volume of poetry. Also mentioned as “sous presse” was Les Corneilles [The Crows], which had already appeared as a serial in the Revue Indépendante, one of several periodicals in which Rosny had found a warm welcome thanks to his star status in the Grenier. Its editor, Edouard Dujardin, was a regular at the Grenier, and it was he who published Rosny’s second item of speculative fiction, then called “Tornadres” but later retitled “Le Cataclysme” (1887; tr. in vol. 2 as “The Cataclysm”).
Fane: roman de moeurs parisiennes, which was actually the next Rosny book Savine published, as Marc Fane, in 1888, was only mentioned as “en preparation” in the preliminary material to L’Immolation. Savine evidently decided to postpone Les Corneilles—a relatively conventional and somewhat anodyne account of resistance to an arranged marriage—and not to publish the other items at all, presumably in response to the relatively poor continuing sales of the three books he had already published. Although L’Immolation contained advertisements for a second edition of Le Bilateral, accompanied by a sampler of glowing reviews of the first edition, that second edition presumably did not sell very well, and Savine must have deduced from the continuing poor sales of Nell Horn that it would be best to avoid any more works set in London. The other cancellations testify to Savine’s decision to market Rosny purely and simply as a naturalist novelist—probably somewhat to Rosny’s chagrin.
Rosny subsequently arranged the publication of “La Légende sceptique” as a serial in the Revue Indépendante, shortly after Albert Savine had bought that periodical from Dujardin and appointed Rosny on its staff as literary editor. Rosny observes in Torches et lumignons that he spent long hours mulling over the philosophical notions contained in the piece with the new editor Savine had appointed, François Dere, Comte de Nion—presumably as a means of ensuring its welcome, despite its awesome esotericism and peculiarity, and Savine’s reluctance to publish it in volume form. Rosny frankly admits in Torches et lumignons that these were the only possible circumstances in which “La Légende sceptique” could ever have got into print, and he must have been equally well aware that the publication of “Les Xipéhuz” and “Tornadres” had also been the result of exceptional circumstances. He obviously accepted Savine’s reasoning, however reluctantly, with respect to the mysterious Le Livre étoilé, and never bothered to finish Cavernes; as his career achieved lift-off, Rosny obviously made a decision to concentrate more exclusively on the aspect of his literary personality that had won him his valuable friends and influenced some influential people. The decision was undoubtedly wise, in terms of his reputation—but by 1890, when Rosny was at the height of his critical fame, the writing was already on the wall with regard to his marketability in any genre, and he must have been keenly aware of the fact.
Although Rosny obviously had other material in hand from the work he had done in the earlier months of 1885 and from his days in London, Savine had every reason to follow up the publication of Nell Horn with that of Le Bilateral, a novel which must have been entirely written after his relocation to Paris, being based on Rosny’s excursions through the suburbs of that city. In Torches et lumignons the author observed, while talking about his early years in Paris, that “I was a great roamer. Every day I wandered for three or four hours… [I was] almost always on foot, in spite of an innate indolence. But walking did not seem laborious to me; I was drawn on by a daydream force that no longer allowed me to feel tired. I also loved to chat with unknown people—especially revolutionaries.”
Rosny undoubtedly considered the observations he made and the reveries in which he indulged while walking to be an essential component of his creative endeavor, and his conversations with people he met by chance to be the kind of research required of a writer dedicated to quasi-scientific observation. He was, however, evidently interested in what many of his interlocutors had to say—especially the various socialists, anarchists and nihilists, many of them exiles, who had found a refuge in Paris (with whom he could, if necessary, converse in English instead of French). His work in this vein was of interest not merely to Parisians but anyone interested in the awesome complexities of the schism afflicting contemporary socialist thought. A newspaper article Rosny wrote on his findings was translated for publication in America in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1891, and the discussion it generated was probably influential in recommending some of his short fiction for translation, including two of his scientific romances: “L’Autre Monde” was translated in The Chautauquan in 1896 as “The Sixth Sense; or, Another World” and “Nymphée” in The Eclectic in 1908 as “The Warriors of the Waters.”
Rosny was not himself a socialist, and presumably thought that the neo-Naturalist component of his creative personality required a scrupulous philosophical neutrality, so it is not unduly surprising that his judgment of the political activists to whom he talked was that they were unduly single-minded, quite unable to entertain any viewpoint other than their own. Le Bilateral presents a carefully-organized compendium of such “unilateral” characters, subjected to harsh judgment by the character bearing the eponymous nickname, who is allegedly highly unusual in being a complex and essentially contradictory individual, able to see matters from multiple viewpoints.
Although Rosny’s commitment to a revisionist form of Naturalism in several of his early works controlled the way that contemporary critics evaluated him, and still colors critical evaluations offered today, his work was always highly idiosyncratic. In the interview he gave to Jules Huret, Paul Hervieu declared that Rosny was not a Naturalist at all, but that even such supposedly realistic works as Daniel Valgraive were “hatched in supernaturalist regions of hallucination or dream.” Paul Margueritte also denied in his interview that Rosny should be characterized as a Naturalist, arguing that he “merits a separate epithet, specifying all that he brings of the new and the human.” Rosny always took care to stress the bilateralism of his personality and the importance of its “poetic” or “chimerical” elements. In Torches et lumignons he wrote, stridently:
“I have always considered realism as a fragmentary aspect of literature; from my earliest works on, one will find more fantastic essays than realistic essays: Les Xipéhuz, Tornadres and La Légende sceptique are as far away as possible from realism. In consequence, the label of naturalist, applied to me, seemed to me to be an insult, and almost a calumny. I have never applied it to myself. If it had not been for that baroque manifesto, even ignorant Parisian critics would not have classified in so narrow a category a writer who interested himself in the entire universe, in all times, and in all dreams.”
Even if one leaves aside the other components of Rosny’s personality and work, there is no doubt that his brand of Naturalism was far from Zolaesque—or, for that matter, Goncourtian. As M. Giraud’s reader had obviously observed, in addition to its Mayhewesque detailing of the wretchedness of life in London’s “underworld,” Nell Horn contains a strong dose of sentimentality, especially in its treatment of the heroine. In the same way, in addition to its wealth of detail about the myriad schools of revolutionary thought lurking in the back streets of Paris, Le Bilateral contains a much stronger dose of philosophical analysis and judgment than was strictly in accordance with scrupulous observation, even of the theoretically-loaded variety licensed by Zola. By far the most idiosyncratic aspect of Rosny’s Naturalism was, however, the influence of his equally-idiosyncratic fascination with science—which was, of course, also the progenitor of his adventures in scientific romance.
Rosny makes no attempt in Torches et lumignons to explain exactly what he was trying to accomplish in his early days as a writer, but the replies he gave to Huret’s questions when he was interviewed for the Enquête do offer an account of the sort of revision of which, in his opinion, Naturalism stood in need. After having judged that Zola had spoiled his work with an “excess of triumphant materialism,” while setting Goncourt aside as a vital pioneer and Daudet as a unique artist whose supposed association with the school was largely accidental, Rosny claims that what is necessary to carry the tradition forward is “a more complex, broader literature…a progress toward the enlargement of the human mind, a more profound, more analytical and more accurate comprehension of the entire universe and the humblest individuals, acquired by the science and philosophy of modern times.” In his view, the Psychologues were too narrow in their approach, as Zola’s hereditary theories had been, while nothing had yet come out of the Symbolist school but “a new stock of metaphors.”
For Rosny, a scientific account of human nature had to include the insights of other sciences too, and must not be overly introspective, being obliged to consider people in the broadest possible context, both in time and space. For him, physical anthropology was a vital science, because it placed contemporary human nature and behavior in a context that extended back beyond history into prehistory, and thus to the entire evolutionary process that had produced humankind. As a Frenchman, his version of evolutionary theory owed at least as much to the Chevalier de Lamarck as to Charles Darwin, and it had a marked “ecological” component that was arguably ahead of his time, which gave him a distinctive view of humankind’s place in Earthly nature. He was equally insistent on the importance of a human being’s relationship with the findings of astronomy; unlike Camille Flammarion, the great popularizer of astronomy, who had become convinced that the stars were important to humans because humans would one day have the chance to live elsewhere in the universe, thanks to serial reincarnation, the thoroughly materialistic Rosny thought that they were of vital importance anyway, simply by providing a measuring-device by virtue of which humans could appreciate the true magnitude of creation—a magnitude that inspired him to a kind of metaphysical extrapolation very different from Flammarion’s, and allowed him to develop an even more distinctive view of humankind’s place in Cosmic nature.
These interests, and the viewpoints they generated not only led Rosny to repeated early experiments in scientific romance—although he neglected such endeavors for a long time once he had realized that his work in that vein was commercially unviable—but they also affected the manner in which he framed the descriptions included in his neo-naturalistic works, and the kinds of explanations he gave for the behavior of his characters. He was well aware of the fact that he was highly original in this regard, and was right to take some pride in the fact, although he soon learned that readers were often unsympathetic to it—especially the kind of readers that Albert Savine had hoped that he might attract, on the basis of the somewhat misleading example of Nell Horn.
Marc Fane, which Savine chose to release after Le Bilateral and L’Immolation, is the most frankly autobiographical of Rosny’s works and must have been in progress for many years. Savine followed it up in the same year with Les Corneilles but then seems to have become thoroughly disillusioned; after publishing Le Termite [The Termite] (1890) he gave up, cutting Rosny loose, for reasons which Rosny had made painfully clear within the text of Le Termite, and which Anatole France highlighted in his review-essay on the text and its writer.
Although Le Termite is not, strictly speaking, a roman à clef, it contains easily-recognizable portraits of several significant figures in the Parisian literary community, including Edmond de Goncourt (Fombreux), Zola (Rolla) and Alphonse Daudet (Guadet). The central character, Noel Servaise, is a purely hypothetical straw man—an unsuccessful and embittered neo-Naturalist who probably would not even have been invited to sign the Manifeste des Cinq had he actually existed—who is there mainly to be insulted for his lack of imagination, but the text is less interested in what the leading lights of literary Paris think of Servaise than what they think of a more promising writer named Myron, who is very obviously based on Rosny himself. Fombreux/Goncourt—painted, somewhat riskily, with less obvious sympathy than Guadet/Daudet, though far more than Rolla/Zola—likes Myron’s work but disapproves of his incessant use of scientific language and thinks his style “tortuous;” Rolla/Zola likes it far less, but is keen to make exactly the same criticisms in somewhat stronger terms. Even the narrative voice makes no bones about the relevant tendencies in describing Myron:
“A bitter disputant, full of confidence before the old masters, he appeared a presumptuous as well as a tiresome and emphatic repeater of arguments; he was at the same time tolerant and pig-headed. He repelled Servaise, by reason of his involved style and prophetic poses, at every point at which an exuberant nature may clash with a sober and depreciative one.”
Given this self-judgment, it is hardly surprising that Anatole France, while obviously wishing to praise Rosny’s good points, also feels obliged to admit that he cannot abide his “terrible defects,” which he sums up, brutally, in a single clause: “he lacks taste, proportion and clarity.” Later, having summed up all the arguments that Myron/Rosny repeats against himself, France concludes that: “M. Rosny is no man to listen to these timid counsels. He will never give up.” France was wrong about that—Rosny had already given up on the more exotic produce of his poetic passion and was about to start soft-pedaling the other tendencies to which his friends objected—but he was right to observe a certain resentful stubbornness in Rosny’s character, which would persist in rearing its head in later life. Albert Savine—who might well have thought that there was a little of his own staid philosophy in the “anti-metaphysical mind” of Noel Servaise—had been even quicker to give up on what he had come to consider a lost cause.
By 1890, therefore, Rosny’s career had reached a crossroads, and the prospect of a long struggle lay ahead of him. It was not only his association with La Revue Indépendante that had suddenly become problematic, but his ready welcome at many of the other periodicals that had taken him up while he was fashionable, and he was condemned from then on to a relentless search for new outlets.
There is little doubt that the optimistic period that began in 1886 was the happiest of Rosny’s life, save for the stresses of his unhappy marriage, and there is an exceedingly powerful nostalgia in his reportage of it in Torches et lumignons, but it did not last long. The situation was further confused by the fact that, from 1891 onwards, Rosny began to advertise the fact that he was no longer one writer but two. Daniel Valgraive, which Rosny had been working on since the mid-1880s but did not publish until 1891, was the first J.-H. Rosny novel in which the younger brother’s contribution was acknowledged by the elder, and most of the work published thereafter was completed without any such contribution, but that did not inhibit Joseph from making much of the name’s now-dual ownership.
The reasons for the publicization of a collaboration that might have been more apparent than real remain stubbornly unclear, although Rosny reported in his own published comments that it was a possibility that the two brothers had discussed long before it became any sort of actuality. Lucien Descaves mentions the move in his interview in Huret’s Enquête in terms suggesting that he thought it a mere publicity stunt, and clearly believed Rosny had entered into the allegedly-close collaboration partly in order to imitate his mentor, who had worked so closely with his own younger brother, and partly because such a collaboration was so “rare and difficult” that his supposedly overweening vanity simply could not resist the challenge.
The memoirs that Rosny Aîné wrote, long after the sharing of the pseudonym had been formally ended in 1907, make almost no mention of the younger brother beyond the essential, perhaps reflecting the fact that their falling out had by then become a kind of cold enmity. There is, however, a brief memoir by Jules Renard, recorded in the printed version of his Journal, reprinted in the Laffont omnibus of Rosny’s prehistoric romances, in which Renard recalls snatches of various conversations he had with Rosny prior to March 1908 (when the record was first made), in which Renard alleges that: “He does not collaborate with his brother; they juxtapose themselves. His brother finishes a book commenced by his elder, and reciprocally.” He quotes Rosny as having said “My brother has fewer words than me at his disposal, but we think the same thing.”
This is an extremely flimsy, and perhaps unreliable, basis for evaluating the terms of the Boëx brothers’ literary association, but if it is combined with the appearance of the works themselves, it seems highly likely that the vast majority of the works published under the Rosny name while it was being shared were produced by Joseph alone, with a minority—mostly consisting of short stories—that were produced by Justin alone, and a relatively small number of novels that were the result of one brother finishing off a fragmentary work that the other brother felt incapable of completing. The most compelling reason for considering this likely is the pattern and volume of their subsequent publications once they had split the pseudonym in two. It must be admitted, however, that the components of Joseph’s own personality seem always to have been working “in juxtaposition” rather than collaborating, and the patchiness of his solo work is so extreme that it is difficult to identify instances in which another hand might have been involved.
Although he claimed in Torches and lumignons to have “revised” some of his works, Rosny’s texts give absolutely no indication of being anything other than first drafts, often cobbled together, or at least strung together, as patchworks that the author never made the slightest attempt to amalgamate into coherent wholes. The principal reason that reading his works remains so frustrating is that so many of them seem to be continually changing course, stubbornly refusing to seek any kind of overall unity of direction, theme or ambition. This tendency is particularly obvious in scientific romances, the composition of which was unable to take advantage of the natural dynamic that comes from setting carefully-designed characters to work in familiar social contexts, where both they and their imagined situations have an intrinsic narrative momentum. When dealing with extraordinary characters and/or extraordinary circumstances, that natural dynamic and its corollary narrative momentum are lost, and authors who are used to making their stories up as they go along very often find themselves floundering when producing “heterocosmic” texts; Rosny was not only no exception to this rule, but might well be reckoned its most obvious exemplar. Given the inherent difficulty of picking up such texts, it is hardly surprising that Justin—who had no poetic passion for science—seems only to have taken over texts of a much more conventional character.
If Lucien Descaves was right to think that the original basis for the advertisement of the fact that “J.-H. Rosny” was two people working in uncanny sympathy was a desire to emulate Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, at least in Edmond’s eyes, it is not difficult to see why Rosny might have wanted to do that. Rosny must have been aware of the value of his status as Goncourt’s favorite, and also of the precariousness of that status. Although it would be unjust to be unduly cynical about it, that value went beyond mere matters of influence; it actually had a promise of hard cash attached to it, which must have been doubly attractive to Rosny, in that the commercial failure of his novels ran parallel to an increasing desire to divorce his wife—a move that was bound to prove expensive, given that he would have to make formal financial provision for their four children.
The reason that Edmond de Goncourt’s favor had a cash value is that the ageing author had no direct heirs, and made no secret of his intention to pass on his fortune to a select society of writers, who would constitute a kind of “alternative Academy” fostering and sponsoring writers excluded by the notoriously conservative Académie Française—to which Goncourt had never been elected. The society would also have the duty of obtaining publication for the journals that the Goncourt brothers had maintained for many long years, but which were still considered far too scandalous for publication by contemporary publishers. To say that Goncourt “made no secret” of this intention is, in fact, a drastic understatement, for it was a carrot he continually dangled over the heads of his entourage, perpetually teasing them with the possibility that they might or might not be included.
Rosny was obviously desperate to be named as one of the members of this select company; indeed, he testified to the pride he took in his membership by altering his by-line as soon as his appointment was confirmed. His signature then became “J.-H. Rosny de l’Académie Goncourt,” and Joseph’s literary signature remained “J.-H. Rosny Aîné de l’Académie Goncourt” after the split with his brother until the day of his death—after which his publishers promptly dropped the latter part as an unnecessary embellishment (and, strictly speaking, an inaccurate one, since the organization’s official designation was as a Societé rather than an Académie, although the latter appellation became almost universal). Joseph Boëx clearly considered that it was J.-H. Rosny’s appointment to the Académie Goncourt that confirmed and symbolized the status he had so eagerly sought, and it became a key component of his identity, as he conceived it. It presumably seemed all the more valuable to him because he had to live so long in expectation of it, not merely while Edmond de Goncourt was still alive, but for seven long years after the latter’s death in 1896.
Rosny’s own version of the story of the problematic foundation of “L’Académie Goncourt” is told in the long essay that begins his second volume of Mémoires de la vie littéraire [Memoirs of Literary Life] (1927), and is usually reckoned to provide its title because it appeared in larger type on the cover and title page than the overall title. The essay explains how Goncourt’s will was challenged by a group of distant relatives, who took the challenge through the available courts, all the way to the Conseil d’Etat (which, as the notional regulator of the real Académie, was rumored to be implicitly hostile to the founding of a rival). Thanks to their lawyer, Raymond Poincaré, however, the surviving writers named by Goncourt to occupy the seats of the new Societé (Alphonse Daudet had died in the interim) won the day, and the Goncourt Academy was finally founded in 1903. Unfortunately, Goncourt’s investments had only been worth half what he had expected when he drafted the provisions of the will, with the result that the salaries attached to the seats were only 3000 francs per annum, instead of the anticipated 6000. Even so, that salary was far from trivial, in terms of contemporary literary incomes—especially the incomes of writers who sold as poorly as Rosny.
Although the Academy had ten seats, at its inception, it only had nine names, because the appointment of “J.-H. Rosny” required two of them. The problem of Daudet’s death was solved by allowing his son Léon to inherit his seat. Rosny dutifully notes in his memoir that Goncourt’s former favorite, Jean Lorrain, was devastated to find that he had not been named, although Rosny did not repeat the observation he had earlier made while describing Lorrain in Torches et lumignons, when he mentioned that the Academicians “dared not” repair Goncourt’s omission by electing him to one of the seats that subsequently fell vacant. Lorrain had, alas, tainted his literary reputation by tackling too many subjects deemed dubious on moral grounds, and had failed to escape the censorious cut that had let in Joris-Karl Huysmans (who had reverted to piety as well as Naturalism after penning the controversial Bible of Decadence À rebours) and Octave Mirbeau (who had not yet written the equally Decadent Le Jardin des supplices), along with Elemir Bourges, Léon Hennique, Paul Margueritte, Gustave Geffroy and Lucien Descaves.
Although Rosny’s great expectations had been somewhat delayed, and were eventually reduced by half, he nevertheless went through with his divorce in 1896, having already become reconciled to the fact that he would have to cut his literary cloth more to market expectations if he was to make a living from his pen. He was married again, to Marie Borel, in 1900, and that presumably put a further burden on his finances, requiring him to concentrate even more intently on the commercial viability of his published work. Although he did not give up entirely on eccentric productions—Les Femmes de Setnê [The Women of Setne] (1903), which he signed Enacryos, is set in ancient Egypt and briefly features an exotically-populated lost land—the work published under the J.-H. Rosny name after 1896 remained carefully conventional, occasionally descending to such blatant popularity-courting endeavors as La Tentatrice [The Temptress] (1897), Les Amours d’un cycliste [A Cyclist’s Love-Affairs] (1899), Le Crime du docteur [The Doctor’s Crime] (1903) and Le Millionnaire [The Millionnaire] (1905). Whether or not this seems regrettable in retrospect, the collaboration did maintain the two brothers’ production at a reasonably prolific level; they averaged about three novels a year from 1894-1906, and rarely reached that level thereafter, even when the production of the divided pseudonym is added together.
Although “J.-H. Rosny” did publish a handful of scientific romances after Joseph had announced his collaboration with his brother, most were brief or conscientiously moderate, and it is probable that the more adventurous examples were based on material written many years previously. Jean Morel, who wrote two articles on Rosny’s prehistoric romances and scientific romance for the Mercure de France in 1923 and 1926 (the former in collaboration with Pierre Massé) said in both that he had “good reason to believe” that the younger brother had not made any contribution to the relevant work; if he did not get that information directly from Rosny he presumably obtained it at only one remove, via Alfred Vallette; the Mercure’s editor. The situation was slightly confused by Pierre Versins, whose article on J.-H. Rosny Jeune dutifully included a list of relevant titles produced during the period of collaboration, but Versins was equally careful to state that any contribution Justin might have made must have been “minimal,” and all the other available evidence suggests that it was non-existent. Although he produced two items of lost land fiction after the pseudonym was split, neither of which involves any kind of alternative evolution, Versins observes that J.-H. Rosny Jeune’s only work based in scientific speculation was Le Destin de Marie Lafaille (1945), produced some years after his brother’s death and perhaps intended as a belated homage to him. For the duration of the collaboration, however, even Joseph wrote little or nothing new in a speculative vein, and the naturalistic novels he wrote on his own—whichever ones they might have been—also became conspicuously less idiosyncratic. The change of direction and modification of ambition the brothers quickly routinized after 1893 did not, alas, prevent something of a backlash against the brief hyping of Rosny’s work as the promise of a brighter literary future. The spearhead of that backlash was Anatole France’s review-essay, but the relatively sympathetic tone of that piece was decisively set aside by a cruelly sarcastic demolition of Rosny’s work and reputation in an 1895 issue of the prestigious Revue de Deux Mondes penned by René Doumic—a critic renowned for carrying out hatchet-jobs, on behalf of a steadfastly conservative literary philosophy that eventually won him election to the Académie Française in 1909.
Doumic’s article on “Les Romans de M. J.-H. Rosny” begins by inviting the reader to transport himself forward a few years, into an era in which “the tendencies that have begun to manifest themselves in education have conclusively triumphed. Letters have finally been exiled to information… The University has realized its desire to be modern… For everything concerning art and literature, the younger generation have entered a world where their gaze is no longer saddened by the vestiges of ancient things; everything is recent. It is not that the times have attained ignorance; quite the reverse; men have never been so wise. They know everything, once they have been to school… They have been taught all the sciences, for there is no useless science. Every year brings its new quota of discoveries. The brain of every French citizen is like an encyclopedia; it is a repository of formulas, a storehouse of scientific ideas. Humankind has crossed an important threshold. It has entered, under full sail, a positivist and utilitarian era, frankly democratic and resolutely scientific.”
Doumic goes on to ask: “In a society thus constituted on its true foundations, will people continue to read books? It is to be feared so, for perfection is an ideal toward which poor men may well extend all their efforts, but they will never attain it. Literary vanity still has a fine future ahead of it. What sort of books will be written in that time following ours? Let us assume writers endowed with fine faculties, capable of observation and provided with imagination, laborious and respectful of their pens, haunted by generous dreams. Let us assume that they will write novels. What will these novels be like? The question is not idle, and to resolve it we are not constrained to content ourselves with hypotheses; we have an easy means to answer it with some precision, and that is to consult the novels of Monsieur J.-H. Rosny.”
Doumic notes that less than ten years have passed since Nell Horn was published, and asks his reader to recall the movements of ideas, currents of sensibility and influences that has provided the literary atmosphere of those ten years, when Naturalism was in decline, perishing “by the excess of its own narrowness and vulgarity.” By virtue of its complexity, he claims, the modern soul “attracted and troubled the most subtle analysts,” especially with respect to the “eternal problem of love,” which has become even more problematic because “from all points of the worlds of reality and dream a wind of sadness had desiccated hearts.” In Doumic’s eyes, this problem has been solved by authors who have “reinvested” in tenderness, charity and pity, if not formal evangelical religion, but Rosny, he claims, has remained defiantly immune from such influences, remaining “as far from the psychologists as the dilettantes, and from the neo-Christians as from the aesthetes.” Reading Rosny, according to Doumic, “one has the impression of traveling in a strange land, in which characters, questions, ways of thought and language are disconcertingly different.”
The essay continues: “M. Rosny, although he has already written a great deal, is little known, and his books, full as they are of talent, have few readers. A few enthusiasts for his work reckon that the semi-indifference of the public is one of the great injustices of the modern epoch, and a confirmation of our frivolity. It is only just to acknowledge that M. Rosny has not made any concession to easy success; he has not lowered himself to employing any of the assured means that certain authors of the era have used to sell their books.” Doumic also notes that Rosny “offers no indiscretions” regarding his person. “All that is known,” he adds, “is that person is double; J.-H. Rosny is one author in two individuals: his books are the collaboration of two brothers arrived at such a degree of intellectual penetration that on any given subject, their ideas being communal, they can set to work, each writing the same page on his own account. Compared with this fraternity, that of the Goncourts was, as is evident, a fraternity of enemy brothers.”
“What first leaps to the eyes,” Doumic says, when he moves on to a consideration of Rosny’s actual texts, “is that the author of these books has, I certainly do not want to say a scientific turn of mind, but a taste for science. Almost all the characters he puts on stage are, if not scientists, half- or quarter-scientists. This one is a physician, that one a medical student, others chemists of some sort. They are writing a considerable work, whether it is on The Elimination of the Nordic type from the Aryan Family or a History of Modern Migrations; if they are not dreaming of some Metaphysics of Animals it is because they are absorbed in a project on Tranformist Legislation. Each one following his aptitudes and his tastes, they are trying to pick up some crumbs of universal knowledge. There is the young telegraphist Marc Fane. He has, as yet, only received a professional education when he conceives a project of working for the benefit of humankind. Persuaded that everything is contained in the history of ideas, and that to accomplish the most meager progress for humankind it is necessary to know all the needs of modern society, he sets out to complete his studies. He outlines a program for himself compared with which Pico della Mirandola’s was child’s play. All the sciences will be represented therein, and each will have its ration of time. ‘The ration of some branches would only be five minutes a week—design, astronomy, music. Gradually, that would increase to ten hours of politics and twenty hours of sociology.’ Naturally, the sciences that attract Marc Fane preferentially are the least advanced, the least complete, those which have the least scientific certainty and the most apparatus thereof. Marc Fane thus acquires all the elements of knowledge, with no guidance, no criticism and no order, pell-mell…
“I am wary of confusing M. Rosny with his characters and assuming that he is fabricating their biographies with fragments of his own. I merely remark that all the sciences inscribed in Marc Fane’s program have left some memory of themselves in M. Rosny’s novels. Astronomy holds an important place there. Constellations, planets and stars are noted there by their names… Geology, paleontology, anthropology, ethnology, zoology and a few related sciences are for M. Rosny the ordinary repertoire of his comparisons…
“M. Rosny effortlessly makes himself the contemporary of cave-men. While our gaze timidly ventures into a corner of society or the soul, for him moves easily into a period of time more than twenty thousand years in the past, and which has no limit in the future. Little interested in individuals, he attaches himself passionately to questions of species and race… It is from the same viewpoint that M. Rosny envisages social questions; natural rights, the division of labor, the division of wealth, heritage, family, Malthusianism, population, depopulation and repopulation. Science presents the question of adultery to him in an aspect which, in order not to be the sentimental and passionate aspect to which novelists usually confine it, has no more probability of being its true aspect ‘the indomitable instinct that desires a renewal of selection’…
“This worship of science is, in M. Rosny, essential and fundamental. It is that to which all his theories are attached or subordinate; it is the reason that he has devoted himself to literature, and it is the source of his aesthetics… To extract from the scientific work of the century the elements of literature that it contains—such is the task that he has assigned himself and to which he attempts to adapt the form of the novel.”
I have quoted this at such length because, setting Doumic’s obvious disapproval aside, it is an accurate and perceptive account of the basic outlook of Rosny’s early work, establishing the ideative context from which his early scientific romances emerge. After more detailed consideration of Nell Horn and Le Bilateral, Doumic brings his textual analysis to the conclusion that: “All these novels are those of a good pupil of the naturalist school. One could say the same of Immolation, a peasant study reminiscent of the most brutal short stories of Maupassant [and] Le Termite, a study of literary mores, the most frankly detestable I think, of the author’s books, simultaneously pretentious and dull.” Having ignored Rosny’s other scientific romances, perhaps on the grounds that they were too short to qualify as romans, he tries to accommodate Vamireh, Rosny’s first roman prehistorique, to his argument by claiming (inaccurately) that “in spite of its title and subtitle, [it] is nothing but a novel composed according to the formula and by the ordinary methods of the documentary school…”
Doumic does concede that Rosny’s more recent works are of a different kind, being more accessible in form and containing more human interest—he adds that they are less “hair-raising”—but is keen to progress to an account of Rosny’s literary faults, and thus pays no detailed attention to anything published after Vamireh. His primary complaint is the lack of continuity in the novels. “The episodes succeed one another at random, devoid of connection rationale or appreciable utility, developed in inverse proportion to their importance: no order, no proportion, no choice, no taste.” He also complains bitterly about Rosny’s neologisms and odd forms of expression, which “do not enrich the language,” claiming that he violates the rules of grammar because he does not know them and suggesting that his improprieties of expression are based in murkiness of thought, although he “hastens to remark” that such faults are less common in the more recent works.
All of these criticisms have some justification, although the oddness of Rosny’s modes of expression is not so obvious in translation, where a necessary adaptation to English grammatical and syntactical conventions inevitably obliterates some of their eccentricity in respect of French conventions. It is, however, worth noting that Doumic does not seem to realize that the lack of continuity in Rosny’s works is a by-product of their patchwork method of composition rather than a deliberate artifact, and that he completely ignores the most important factor mitigating all these supposed facts: that Rosny’s imaginative reach, if not his grasp, was unprecedented.
The simple fact is that Rosny would not have been able, let alone willing, to grope so far into the unknown for new ways to look at human nature and the cosmic environment of humankind had he been the kind of writer who planned his works more meticulously in advance and adapted his works more carefully to patterns of reader demand, in terms of their structure as well as their content. In brief, his work could not have been so worthwhile in some respects had he not been so seemingly faulty in others; Doumic, who had very rigid ideas about what writers ought to be doing and how, could not even see the merit in Rosny’s imaginative endeavors, and thus thought it appropriate to condemn him—but lovers of speculative fiction inevitably take the opposite view: that his achievements in the realm of speculation justify and excuse the essential awkwardness of compositional method.
Inevitably, Doumic rounds out his essay—after a few mildly hypocritical paragraphs complimenting Rosny for certain merits he retains despite his faults, though not the one just identified—by returning to the futuristic thrust of his opening paragraphs, venturing into prediction: “But even though it is of today, his oeuvre has its right to significance. It will be yet another ornament of an epoch in which that which was once high intellectual culture will founder… That is what we have followed with sympathetic curiosity in M. Rosny’s novels: it is the future of the novel in an enlightened barbarism, in which art and literature have beaten a retreat before triumphant sociology.”
In this respect, of course, Doumic was utterly and absolutely mistaken; not only was Rosny’s early work not a symptom of things to come in the broader literary world, but it was not an indication of the way in which his own career would be forced—and, indeed, had already begun—to develop. The scientific outlook that he tried to cultivate did not triumph, either in education or literature, but fell instead into a peculiar and perverse ignominy, treated almost universally with the kind of blind and stupid hostility of which Doumic was so proud. That might easily have prevented Rosny from ever venturing back into the realms of speculative fiction, but in fact it did not, and once Joseph Boëx was free of the shackles of his “juxtaposition” with his relentlessly unspeculative younger brother, he soon found several reasons for doing so.
After the serial publication of “La Légende sceptique” in 1889, there was an evident hiatus in the publication of Rosny’s scientific romances, although Vamireh certainly warrants consideration as a literary extrapolation of late-19th century discoveries and (mostly mistaken) theories in paleoanthropology. The novel was serialized in 1892 in the early issues of a new periodical, the Revue Hebdomadaire, whose editor was probably pleased to acquire a contribution by such an up-and-coming writer, who had already published in many of the prestigious periodicals of the day. The same periodical went on to publish Rosny’s naturalistic novel L’Impérieuse Bonté in 1893-94.
The editor of another new periodical, Le Bambou, was also sufficiently interested in Rosny to be willing to serialize work of this sort in 1893, beginning with the roman préhistorique Eyrimah (reprinted in book form 1896; tr. in vol. 4) and continuing with an account of unknown human races surviving in a remote part of Asia, “Nymphée” (tr. in vol. 2 as “Nymphaeum”). Both stories are conspicuously patchy, and the second is finished off in a brutal fashion, after having already undergone some awkward changes in direction, so it seems highly likely that both were cobbled together from pre-existent materials dating back to the mid-1880s.
During the remainder of the two brothers’ partnership, only four short scientific romances and one further prehistoric romance appeared under the J.-H. Rosny name. The brief sardonic prehistoric romance, “Nomaï” (tr. in vol.4) appeared in the Revue Parisienne in 1895. “Un Autre Monde” (Revue de Paris 1895; tr. herein as “Another World”), which extrapolates—rather uneasily—an idea sketched out in “La Légende sceptique,” was almost as ground-breaking as “Les Xipéhuz,” but the other items are noticeably more conservative. As previously noted, “La contrée prodigieuse des cavernes” probably derives from the mid-80s manuscript identified by Rosny as Cavernes, and “Les Profondeurs de Kyamo” (1896; tr. in vol. 2 as “The Depths of Kyamo”), which features a further adventure of the same protagonist, may well come from the same source. Both are in the same vein as “Nymphée,” featuring the discovery of variant “dominant species” in remote “lost land” enclaves. Although there is no detailed bibliography of Rosny, and the full extent of his periodical publications has not been mapped, it is possible that these two stories were not published in periodicals, but appeared for the first time as the first two items in a collection issued by Plon under the title Les Profondeurs de Kyamo, whose other contents, carefully separated in the table of contents, are all mundane.
“Le Voyage” (1900; tr. in vol. 2 as “The Voyage”) is also a lost land story, which could easily have featured the same protagonist as “La contrée prodigieuse des cavernes” and “Les Profondeurs de Kyamo” but refrained, perhaps because it begins in a very different style, with an extrapolation of one of the prose poems patched into “La Légende sceptique.” It too seems to have been dropped into a collection of mostly-naturalistic stories rather arbitrarily, without any previous periodical appearance having been noted by modern bibliographers, and probably antedated that publication by some—perhaps many—years. No more prehistoric or scientific romances appeared in print while the two brothers’ partnership lasted—or, indeed, for two years thereafter, in spite of the fact that H. G. Wells had demonstrated in the interim that scientific romance could be popular, as well as interesting in its extrapolations.
References to Rosny as a “French Wells” began to be made as early as 1896, when the press associated with the Mercure de France—whose literary editor, Henry Davray, was H. G. Wells’s French translator—issued a small volume entitled Le Cataclysme, containing the title story and “Les Xipéhuz,” presumably in order to cement the claim to his priority. Such references did not, however inspire Rosny to any immediate further attempt to justify the label, or to emphasize the distinctness of his own speculative fiction. In spite of his “poetic passion” for science and speculative thought, Joseph Boëx seems to have resolutely refused to embark on any further ventures of that kind between the publication of “L’Autre monde” and the formal termination of his literary partnership with his brother.
We can only speculate as to the role Justin Boëx might have played in dissuading his elder brother from experiments in scientific romance while they were sharing their pseudonym, but it seems highly probable that their collective change of status to “J.-H. Rosny de l’Académie Goncourt” also had much to do with it. In spite of the fact that the Goncourt Academy had been conceived as a protest against the conservatism of the official Académie, its members were nevertheless defensive of their own aesthetic credentials.
Oddly enough, the first Prix Goncourt, awarded in 1903, did go to a work that some might consider to be a scientific—or, at least, metaphysical—romance, Force ennemie [Hostile Force] by John-Antoine Nau (Eugène Torquet), but it was the work of an already-respectable writer who never did anything else of a similar ilk, and the Prix Goncourt was never subsequently awarded to anything of that sort, or to anything else that might be considered a “genre” novel rather than a “literary” novel. Three of the first 20 winners (Claude Farrère, Henri Barbusse and Ernest Pérochon) did do some work in the genres of scientific or prehistoric romance, but they won the prize for works that were very different in character. Rosny seems to have felt, once he was appointed to the Académie Goncourt, that he was somehow obliged to shun such work as unbefitting a writer of his status. He did, however, eventually borrow the speculative premise of Force ennemie for adaptation to his own speculative context in one of his more interesting exercises in hackwork, La Jeune vampire (1920; tr. in vol. 6 as “the Young Vampire”).
Rosny left no precise record of the reason why he changed his mind about the propriety of writing genre fiction, but he made no bones about the fact that, as a man who had to make a part of his living from his pen, he was obliged to do a certain amount of hackwork. In all probability, there were two significant factors involved in his decision to include some speculative fiction within that aspect of his production; one was the foundation in Paris of a number of new “middlebrow” periodicals in imitation of such English periodicals as The Strand, which had been briefly hospitable to scientific romance, and the other was the fact that he began attending a weekly salon run by Maurice Renard.
I have already produced a five-volume set of Maurice Renard’s scientific romances similar to this one,2 whose supplementary materials map out that author’s association with the genre in great detail, but it is sufficient to say here that Renard was Wells’s most fervent admirer in France, and a diehard enthusiast for what he called the “scientific marvelous” and the potentialities of “scientific marvel fiction.” Because he came from a wealthy mercantile family, Renard had a private income when he first settled in Paris in 1908, and was able to indulge in a relatively lavish lifestyle. Salon culture had been in steep decline for some time by then, but Renard was as eager to join it as Rosny had been 20 years before, and set out to do so from the opposite direction, by starting one of his own. Although many notable writers and editors became regulars, the writer he was most eager to attract was Rosny, not because of his membership of the Goncourt Academy or his now-deflated reputation as an important neo-Naturalist, but simply because he was an anticipator of H. G. Wells. When Renard penned his “manifesto” for scientific romance, “Du Roman merveilleux scientifique et de son action sur l’intelligence du progress” (Le Spectateur octobre 1909; tr. as “On Scientific Marvel Fiction and its Influence on the Awareness of Progress”), he gave almost equal attention to Wells and Rosny as the pioneers and supposed masters of the fledgling genre—an opinion he had already made known to Rosny in no uncertain terms.
Perhaps Renard actually succeeded in persuading Rosny that scientific marvel fiction really would acquire the prestige in future that it had been so contemptuously denied in the past, but it seems more likely that he only managed to persuade him that such fiction now had a potential marketability that it had not had when Rosny had first tried it out. That potential proved short-lived, as did Renard’s optimism, but while Renard’s salon was still going, Rosny was persuaded to try his hand at “scientific marvel fiction” again, in a vein clearly influenced by Renard’s manifesto—and, in one instance, by one of Renard’s own novels. The two of them never collaborated, but they definitely “juxtaposed,” each of them taking sufficient influence from the other to enliven his own work considerably, if only for a while. Oddly enough, they were very different writers; Renard was by far the better craftsman, planning his work carefully and revising it assiduously in order to build coherent and intricate plots, but he never had Rosny’s imaginative reach, and the reach he did have owed more than a little to his interest in refining and further extrapolating ideas he had found in Rosny’s work.
Significantly, Rosny never suggested that any of Maurice Renard’s novels might be worthy of consideration for the Prix Goncourt, and never proposed him for election to the Academy itself (to which his namesake in Jules Renard had earlier been elected). The elder Rosny was prepared to allow Maurice Renard to influence his hackwork, to a degree, but he remained very conscious of the fact that the latter was only a genre writer, and hence a cut below him in terms of apparent status—even though Renard, having been pauperized by the Great War, never sank so low while making his living from his pen as to write pure pulp fiction, while Rosny did so without an atom of conscience.
Rosny’s first contributions to the principal French imitator of The Strand, Je Sais Tout—which had been founded in 1905—were conventional varieties of popular fiction. “Le Lion” [The Lion], a novella serialized in 1908, was a straightforward African adventure story, and “La Flèche au curare” [The Curare-tipped Arrow] (1909) was in a similar vein; either might equally well have appeared in the more downmarket Journal des Voyages, which was one of the last surviving refuges of Vernian fiction, mostly featuring mundane adventures set in far-flung corners of the ever-shrinking globe. His third sale to the magazine was, however, the serial novel La Guerre du feu (1909; tr. as The Quest for Fire), a new prehistoric romance that revamped the essential substance of Vamireh in the context of a more coherent adventure story, with a more urgent narrative thread. The novel became Rosny’s most successful work, eventually giving rise to the notable 1981 film adaptation by Jean-Jacques Annaud.
It is possible that Rosny initially intended the first of his “Renardian” scientific romances, “La Mort de la Terre” (tr. herein as “The Death of the Earth”), as a serial for Je Sais Tout, but it did not appear there, being serialized instead in Les Annales Politiques et Littéraire in May-July 1910 before being reprinted as the title-story of a Plon collection in 1912. The story clearly owes some inspiration to Wells’s The Time Machine, but both Rosny and Renard were well aware that Wells’s novel had had a French predecessor in Camille Flammarion’s La Fin du monde (1893; tr. as Omega: The Last Days of the World) and Rosny was, in effect, knowingly carrying forward a French tradition parallel to the English one. Indeed, Rosny took the trouble to equip the book version with a preface, in which he dissented from the opinion that he was a Wellsian writer:
“It has sometimes been said that I was a precursor of Wells. A few critics have gone so far as to say that Wells had drawn part of his inspiration from such of my writings as Les Xipéhuz, La Légende sceptique, Le Cataclysme and a few others that appeared before the English writer’s fine novels. I do not think that this is true, and I am even inclined to think that Wells has not read any of my works. He certainly does not share the monstrous ignorance of his compatriots in matters of continental literature, but the notoriety of Les Xipéhuz, La Légende sceptique, Le Cataclysme, etc. etc. was negligible in the era in which he started to write—and if he had read my modest books, I would deny all the same that he had been subject to any influence by them. The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau are original works, which it is necessary to admire without reserve. Besides, there is a fundamental difference between Wells and me in the manner of construction of unknown entities. Wells prefers living beings that still offer a considerable analogy with those that we know, while I willingly imagine creatures on a mineral sort, as in Les Xipéhuz, or made of a matter other than ours, or even existing in a world regulated by other forces than ours; the Ferromagnetals that appear episodically in La Mort de la Terre belong to one of these categories.
“In sum, save for a few points in which all writers occupied with the marvelous are similar, there is only an apparent resemblance between Wells and me, although it was probably not unnecessary to point this out.”
Rosny’s second Renardian romance—which obviously took its inspiration, and its basic narrative framework, from Renard’s Le Péril bleu (1911; tr. as The Blue Peril)—was La Force mystérieuse (tr. in vol. 3 as “The Mysterious Force”), which was serialized in Je Sais Tout in 1913. This novel went to some lengths to emphasize the point made in the preface to La Mort de la Terre, by introducing phenomena and life-forms even stranger than the ferromagnetals of the earlier novella or the Xipehuz, and much stranger than any featured by Wells or Renard. Curiously enough, however, this story too became accidentally entangled with the history of British scientific romances when readers began to notice coincidental parallels between its opening sequence and a novel that began serialization a couple of months later in Je Sais Tout’s model, The Strand. Again, Rosny was prompted to add a preface to the book version issued by Plon in 1914:
“On March 11, 1913 an American friend sent the following note to me: ‘Have you given an English writer—one of the most famous—the right to rewrite your novel that is currently appearing in Je Sais Tout; have you given him the right to take the central thesis and such details as the disturbance of the lines of the spectrum, the agitation of populations, the discussions of a possible anomaly of the ether and the poisoning of humanity, in their entirety? The famous English writer is publishing this at the present moment without naming you, without any reference to Rosny Aîné, placing the setting in England.’
“In consequence of that letter, I read the issue of the Strand Magazine in which my British colleague, Monsieur Conan Doyle, had begun publication of a novel entitled The Poison Belt. There are indeed annoying coincidences between the theme of his story and the theme of mine, including the disturbance of light, the phases of human panic and depression, and so on—coincidences that will be obvious to any reader of the two works. I confess that I cannot, in view of the extreme particularity of the thesis, restrain certain suspicions—all the more so because, in England, it quite often happens that writers buy an idea, which they then exploit as they please: someone might have proposed my idea to Monsieur Conan Doyle.
“Certainly, a coincidence is always possible, and for myself, I am inclined to be trusting. Thus, I have always been convinced that Wells had not read my Xipéhuz, my Légende sceptique or my Cataclysme, which appeared well before his fine stories. That is because there is in Wells a certain individual stamp that Monsieur Conan Doyle lacks. In any case, my objective is not to make any claim. I admit the possibility of a transmission of ideas between Monsieur Conan Doyle and myself, but as I know, from fairly long experience, that one is often accused of following those who follow you, I think it useful to establish a time-scale and to point out that Je Sais Tout had already published the first two parts of La Force Mystérieuse when The Poison Belt began to appear in the Strand Magazine.”
In fact, the time-scale proves beyond all reasonable doubt that the coincidences between the two novels were, indeed, purely coincidental; the fact that Rosny draws no such conclusion is presumably due to the fact that there was a long tradition in France of feuilletonistes writing daily newspaper serials, who delivered their copy on the day before the issue went to press. British magazines worked on a much more leisurely schedule, so the overwhelming probability is that Doyle had delivered the entire text of The Poison Belt to the editor of the Strand before anyone could possibly have told him about the theme of Rosny’s serial in Je Sais Tout. In any case, the divergence of the two stories after their opening sequences is very marked indeed, so any question of imitation rapidly disappears, and could never have seemed likely to anyone but readers who had only read the first episode of each serial.
Maurice Renard was so delighted with La Force mystérieuse as an example of “scientific marvel fiction” that he wrote an extravagant essay in praise of it: “Le Merveilleux scientifique et la Force mystérieuse de J.-H. Rosny Aîné,” published in the June 15, 1914 isssue of La Vie. When he wrote the essay, Renard was still hopeful that such examples might pave the way for a glorious future for the nascent genre with which he was infatuated, and there seems to be every reason to believe that he and Rosny would have continued to juxtapose such works for at least a little while longer had not circumstances intervened. Unfortunately, they did intervene, in the crushing form of the Great War, into which Renard—who had experience as a cavalry officer—was immediately drafted. By the time he returned to civilian and literary life, impoverished but not yet in despair, the world had changed drastically, and Rosny was all too well aware of the implications of that change.
In fact, Rosny probably did begin work on a third item of scientific marvel fiction in 1914, but did not manage to get it ready for publication for some time thereafter. Although it is no less of a patchwork than many of Rosny’s other works, the interpolation two-thirds of the way through the finished text of an entirely irrelevant episode in which the hero sinks a German submarine suggests that he felt obliged to modify it in order to fit in with the pattern of wartime propaganda fiction, and that some such insertion was the price of obtaining publication for it in 1917 as L’énigme de Givreuse (tr. in vol. 5 as “The Givreuse Enigma”). He had not published any books at all in 1915 or 1916, and his other 1917 publication, Perdus? [Doomed?] (likewise issued by Flammarion) was a straightforward exercise in propaganda fiction, as was his 1918 collection Confidences sur l’amitié des tranchées [Secrets of Friendship in the Trenches].
When popular fiction got under way again after the trauma of the war—as Maurice Renard found to his cost—the public mood had turned against science, because of the contribution new technologies had made to the slaughter, and scientific romance was completely out of fashion. The same did not apply, however, to prehistoric romance or more conventional forms of adventure fiction, and that was the kind of hackwork to which Rosny reverted in earnest. Even before the war had ended, he had attempted to repeat the triumph of La Guerre du feu with Le Félin géant, which was serialized in Lectures Pour Tous in May-July 1918 before being reprinted in book form by Plon in 1920. Although it did not do as well as its predecessor, it was translated into English for publication in America. Although the book—The Giant Cat—did not appear until 1924, Rosny might have been aware of the rights sale well in advance of that date, because the lost land adventure L’Etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle (1922; tr. in vol. 3 as “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Journey”) has the appearance of having been constructed with the idea of a similar sale in mind, featuring an American hero and seemingly mimicking the formulae of the pulp magazines.
Rosny also published a very brief lost land story in Lectures Pour Tous, “La Grande énigme” (1920; tr. in vol. 2 as “The Great Enigma”), in which he offered a brief glimpse of a conventional lost land preserving relics of the Palaeolithic era rather than featuring a variant evolution—a theme swiftly expanded in another adventure story, Le Trésor dans la neige (1920; tr. in vol. 2 as “The Treasure in the Snow”), in which he brought back the protagonist of “La Contrée prodigieuse des caverns” and “Les Profondeurs de Kyamo” for one last fling.
The extent to which Rosny was in communication with Maurice Renard once the war was over is difficult to estimate, since Renard could no longer afford to host a weekly salon, but the two undoubtedly met on occasion, and presumably shared Renard’s despair with regard to the fortunes of the new genre he had tried to nurture and had virtually been forced to abandon after publishing a truncated version of “L’Homme truqué” (tr. as “The Doctored Man”) in Je Sais Tout in 1921. There was certainly nothing in either man’s experience to encourage them to write more scientific marvel fiction thereafter—but Renard kept trying to get his existing work in that vein into print, and Rosny did manage to place one more novella of that sort in the periodical Oeuvres Libres, which had published Renard’s mock-Wellsian “L’Homme qui voulait être invisible” in 1923 and was also publishing a whole series of “mad scientist” comedies by André Couvreur, who was better known as a Zolaesque Naturalist.
The scientific romance that Rosny contributed to Oeuvres Libres was Les Navigateurs de l’infini (tr. herein as “The Navigators of Space”), which appeared there in 1925. It is an account of the first voyage to Mars, and the life-forms discovered there. The text makes Rosny’s intention to write a sequel clear, but none materialized at the time, and Rosny abandoned scientific marvel fiction for good, apparently agreeing with Renard that the genre had no future in France. Twenty years after his death, a story called “Les Astronautes” [The Astronauts] was published in a paperback edition of Les Navigateurs de l’infini as if it were the second part of a composite novel. Although I have translated “Les Astronauts” for this collection, in the interests of completeness, the close acquaintance I developed with the idiosyncrasies of Rosny’s style while carrying out this series of translations convinces me that only the first 5000 or 6000 words are actually his, the remaining 20,000 having been juxtaposed by another hand. The new text added nothing significant to Rosny’s scenario.
Les Navigateurs de l’infini might have been inspired by an interest in the actual possibilities of space travel, although it was the cause rather than an effect of Rosny’s subsequent adoption as an honored member of Robert Esnault-Pelterie’s Nouvelle Societé Scientifique de Recherches pour l’éla-boration de fusées destinées aux futures voyages interplanétaires [Scientific Society for Research into the Development of Rockets Designed for Future Interplanetary Journeys] in 1928.
Not unnaturally, after the failure of his final venture into scientific marvel fiction, Rosny reverted to more familiar ground. Although L’Etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle had failed to sell in America, as he might have hoped, his next prehistoric adventure story, Helgvor du fleuve bleu (1930) had better luck, translation rights being sold to the pulp magazine Argosy—probably for a far greater sum than was paid for French rights. It was serialized there in 1932, a date attached in some bibliographical lists to Rosny’s next adventure story, La Sauvage aventure (tr. in vol. 5 as “Adventure in the Wild”) although I can find no evidence of its appearance in a periodical before the Albin Michel book edition of 1935. La Sauvage aventure is an even more unashamed venture in pulp fiction than L’Etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle, although it is a calculated expansion of a novelette in a very different style (and with a very different ending), which had appeared in a collection of items by different authors in 1929: “Les Hommes-Sangliers” (tr. in vol. 2 as “The Boar Men”). Like its predecessor, La Sauvage aventure failed to sell to its intended ultimate market, and Rosny did no more work in that vein—although the fact that he was now in his seventies was probably the decisive factor in that respect.
La Sauvage aventure contrasts very markedly with a near-contemporary novel that was initially published as a serial in the Mercure de France, and was then reprinted as a book under that periodical’s imprint: Les Compagnons de l’univers (1934 tr. in vol. 6 as “Companions of the Universe”). If the former was Rosny’s ultimate experiment in pulp fiction, then the latter was his ultimate experiment in Naturalism, tending towards Existentialist fiction in its relentless focus on inner experience and a very peculiar form of angst. Some commentators have likened it to “La Légende sceptique,” some sections of which also have quasi-existentialist leanings, but while the earlier text focused on the angst of social isolation and illness, the later one focuses on sex, with an extraordinary cynicism that belies Rosny’s earlier (mostly highly idealized) treatments of the subject, although it has certain affinities with “Les Hommes-Sangliers” and the last-published of Rosny’s scientific romances, “Dans le monde des Variants” (1939; tr. in vol. 2 as “In the World of the Variants”). The novel does, however, have a minor component of scientific romance, which connects with certain other passages in “La Légende sceptique,” via a chain of reasoning and endeavor that needs special attention if Rosny’s work is to be fully understood.
“La Légende sceptique” is the most diverse of all Rosny’s patchwork texts, and demonstrates in no uncertain terms that his early writings were much more various in style and affiliation than his published novels suggested. It includes a sequence of eleven prose poems, clearly reflective of his admiration for Baudelaire—the author most frequently quoted by his characters—although their subject-matter is derived from his reading of scientific texts. It also includes a brief advice-manual for anyone desirous of founding a new religion, and a remarkable account of the progression of a disease, among other eccentrically introspective materials, but the heart of the enterprise is a collection of earnest philosophical essays derived from the author’s omnivorous reading of scientific works, which discuss the nature of the universe and the possibilities of human evolution.
To the contemporary eye, the ideas contained in this set of philosophical speculations must have appeared utterly bizarre, and some of them still seem bizarre to the modern eye, although others have either become manifestly obsolete or much more familiar. There is, however, no doubting the awesome scope of their ambition, nor that there is a component of brilliance contained within them. The manner in which the collective patchwork gropes for suitable literary formats in which to express such ideas, and fails to find any that is satisfactory, is sufficient explanation of the fact that Rosny largely abandoned that quest thereafter, and remained conspicuously tentative in the attempts he did make—but he did not abandon the further development of the ideas he had sketched out in the philosophical essays, and he continually returned to that development in print, in a series of non-fictional endeavors that were ignored at the time and have attracted no attention since.
The most substantial of these further essays, published as a book by Alcan was Le Pluralisme, essai sur la discontinuité et l’hétérogéneité des phénomènes [Pluralism: An Essay on the Discontinuity and Hetreogeneity of Phenomena] (1909), which appeared with the signature J. H. Boëx-Borel. It was successful enough for Alcan to issue a companion volume updating its argument in 1922, under the signature J.-H. Rosny Aîné, entitled Les Sciences et pluralisme [The Sciences and Pluralism], which sold well enough to be reprinted twice, in 1930 and 1932.
The most conspicuous of the author’s other essays in this vein appeared in the seemingly-unlikely venue of the Mercure de France, which had begun life as the semi-official organ of the Symbolist Movement and maintained a certain defiant originality long into the 20th century, as that movement faded away. It was in the pages of the Mercure that the notion of Rosny as a significant pioneer of the roman scientifique was most thoroughly developed, primarily by Jean Morel, and where his self-representation as an offbeat natural philosopher was also given space for display and maturation. The periodical’s editor, Alfred Vallette, had been another regular at Maurice Renard’s salon in 1908-1914, and had apparently taken some inspiration therefrom; although he only published one story by Renard he published a number of significant items of speculative fiction by other writers, including Gabriel de Lautrec, Henri Falk and Marcel Rouff.
In the July 1, 1921 issue of the Mercure Rosny published “Le Temps et l’espace” [Time and Space] a 10,000-word article that elaborated the thesis of the pamphlet in a three-part study, the first discussing the concept of “plural space” in the context of contemporary discussions of “geometric space” and “non-Euclidean space,” the second examining the debate initiated by Henri Bergson as to whether the scientific concept of time and the experience of time can be reconciled, and the notion of time as a “fourth dimension,” and the third discussing relativity theory, with particular reference to the implications of the Michelson-Morley experiment, Albert Einstein’s denial of the ether, and the ideas of Lorentz and Fitzgerald.
In the August 15, 1925 issue, Rosny supplemented his discussion of the relationship between space and time in “Le Puralisme intégral” [Integral Pluralism], which recruits various items of evidence and argument to oppose the assumption by scientists that the seeming complexity of the observable world is reducible to some kind of underlying simplicity, in which the world of the infinitely small involves the transactions of a few particles making up all kinds of atoms, and the entire universe is imagined as a repetitive sequence of stereotyped stars arranged into sidereal systems. In the February 15, 1931 issue Rosny further elaborated the consequences of his pluralistic thesis in the purely speculative “Vers le Quatrième Univers” [Toward the Fourth Universe] in which he proposes that “pluralism” exists on every conceivable scale—that complexity is, in fact, irreducible to simplicity, that everything is different from everything else—and that what we think of as the “whole” of existence is nothing of the sort, but only one aspect of an infinite number of existences.
In a sense, this argument is a straightforward extrapolation of the old theological argument about “the plurality of worlds,” which argued that it was an insult to God’s creative power to think that he had only created one world, and had been used in support of the Copernican hypothesis, to justify the assertion that the planets were also worlds, and that other stars must have planets of their own after the fashion of the sun. The plurality of worlds had frequently been coupled with “the principle of plenitude,” which argued that God could not have created all those other worlds only to leave them empty, and that each of them must therefore have its own life, including its own equivalent of the human race—a principle that inevitably had an exceedingly powerful influence on the development of scientific romances dealing with journeys to and the population of other worlds.
Rosny, however, took this argument a step further in “Vers le quatrième univers” and Compagnons de l’univers, in which he elaborated brief statements made in several of his earlier scientific romances with regard to “innumerable co-existence.” Briefly stated, his fundamental proposition is that the apparent emptiness of the space within atoms and between stars has to be an artifact of our senses rather than an objective reality—like Aristotle, he found the notion of “void” essentially abhorrent—and that, in accordance with the principle of plenitude, space must actually be full. In Rosny’s view, it has to be full not merely of matter that is inapprehensible by our senses but of an infinite series of cosmic aggregations of such matter, each one inapprehensible by all the rest—each one, in fact, in accordance with the principle of pluralism, quite different from all the rest, none of them being a simple variant of any of the others.
Since Rosny wrote his essays on pluralism, of course, physicists and scientific romances alike have become familiar with the notion of an infinite series of “alternative universes” and with the notions of “dark matter” and “dark energy” that hold the observable universe together while not being directly perceptible. The notion of a “multiverse” containing all possible alternative universes is now commonplace in science as well as science fiction, if not yet entirely respectable. It must be noted, however, that the imaginative reach of Rosny’s thesis remains substantially greater than these subsequent developments.
The conventional view of alternative universes displaces them in a hypothetical fourth spatial dimension, and allows each of them to retain its component of void as well as its fundamental subatomic simplicity; the extent to which they differ from our own is very often seen in terms of cosmically-trivial variations in Earthly history, and even the bolder versions that imagine alternative universes with different laws of physics are nevertheless still based on the notion of tweaking a fundamental simplicity. Rosny’s version of “the fourth universe” (his version of the multiverse) is much more ambitious, both in its packaging and its range—so much more ambitious, in fact, that it becomes very difficult indeed to package in conventional narrative, or any other literary form.
The history of Rosny’s dabblings in scientific romance, from the first three examples that reached publication in 1887-1889 all the way through to “Les Compagnons de l’univers” and “Dans le mondes des Variants” half a century later, is that of a series of attempts to incarnate some fraction of his vision of the universe in literary form, thus to prompt or inspire readers to move beyond their conventional way of thinking. The vision underlying his speculations, although it was not to be fully and explicitly developed for a long time, was already so far ahead of the visions underlying scientific romances and science fiction stories by other hands that no one working in the latter genre has yet got as far. Rosny was quite right to deny that he was some sort of equivalent of H. G. Wells, who only moved beyond theological assumptions about the essential humanity of the inhabitants of other worlds to suggest that the inhabitants of other worlds might be the products of alternative processes of evolution essentially similar to our own.
From the very beginning, Rosny was only interested in alternative evolutions as trivial variants, although he was certainly prepared to attempt to imagine such variants and find them fascinating; what he was really interested in was imagining beings and forces that defied our conventional classifications system: life forms that were not only not human but not animal or vegetable, being genuinely alien. Nor was he much interested in conventional cataclysms, such as earthquakes or ordinary cosmic collisions; what really interested him was the possibility of cataclysms of a different sort, resulting from the brief and peripheral interaction of alien universes, coexisting in the same unempty space as our universe but normally imperceptible and unknown to one another. In that, he was alone, not only in 1887 but also in 1939—and, for that matter, today. It was an originality that did him no favors, in terms of finding an admiring audience, but it was an originality that was surely worthy of pride, and perhaps even of a pride that seemed to some people, to borrow Lucien Descaves’ epithets, “mad” and “incommensurable.” It was not merely in his relation to Naturalism that Rosny really deserved a category of his own, but also in relation to scientific romance; there was not, and never has been, anyone else like him.
Nowadays, with the aid of hindsight, we can take the conceptual framework offered in Le Pluralisme and “Vers le quatrième univers,” apply it to much earlier works like “Les Xipéhuz” and “Le Cataclysme,” and see in those stories a kind of sense that was quite inapprehensible to their contemporary readers, and to many readers since. That is the way that they ought to be read—or, at least, that is the way that they can be slotted into the whole fabric of his speculative fiction in such a way as to allow the essential coherency of that work to be seen—a coherency that is sufficient to have prompted the ever-perceptive Pierre Versins to assert that Rosny had “only written one novel, of which ‘La Légende sceptique’ is the preface and Les Compagnons de l’univers the conclusion.” This collection of his works is, in effect, a translation of that sprawling patchwork “novel.”
I shall not proceed in this general introduction to more detailed analyses of particular stories, leaving that to introductions and afterwords to the individual volumes, but it is within the context of this general introduction that the contents of the whole six-volume project need to be seen and evaluated.
In planning the contents of this introductory volume it seemed sensible to begin at the beginning, placing “Les Xipéhuz” ahead of “La Légende sceptique,” even though the latter is, as Versins points out, a sort of preface to the whole of Rosny’s work in the genre of scientific romance. “La Légende sceptique” is, I fear, by no means a reader-friendly work, being filled to the brim with all the “defects” of which Anatole France and René Doumic complained, and it might well make considerable demands on the patience and understanding of readers of this volume, but an understanding of its concerns and concepts really is vital to an understanding of what Rosny was trying to do in his scientific romances, and why. Given that he made so little effort to include explanations of the events and entities featured in his imaginative works within the works themselves, some knowledge of the world-view displayed in the piece is invaluable to their comprehension; hopefully, it will compensate readers for their necessary effort with its originality, imaginative audacity and sheer bizarrerie.
I then thought it appropriate to supplement “Les Xipéhuz” with three further accounts of exotic alien life, for the purposes of comparison. Other accounts can be found in other Rosny works—most notably in La Force mystérieuse and “Dans le monde des Variants”—but these three are the stories in which alien life comes most clearly into focus as a key theme. As a group, “Les Xipéhuz,” “Un Autre Monde,” “La Mort de la Terre” and “Les Navigateurs de l’infini” offer a reasonably comprehensive sketch of Rosny’s ideas in relation to the distribution, evolution and ultimate destiny of life within the “fourth universe.”
The version of “Les Xipéhuz” translated here is the one contained in the Mercure de France volume of 1896, which appended it to Le Cataclysme. The text of “La Légende Sceptique” that I used for translation is the one reprinted in the Marabout collection Récits de Science-Fiction (1975). The version of “Un Autre Monde” that I translated was taken from the collection bearing the same title, published by Plon in 1898. The version of “La Mort de la Terre” was taken from the eponymous Plon collection first issued in 1912 (although the copy I used was the sixth edition, dated 1914). The version of Les Navigateurs de l’infini that I used was the one issued in volume form in 1927 by La Nouvelle Revue Critique. The version of “Les Astronautes” I used was the one in the 1996 Grama edition of Les Navigateurs de l’infini. (There is no discussion of the last-named text in the afterword because I consider it to be inauthentic.) I have no reason to think that any of these versions differs substantially from the versions reproduced in other collections, although the version of “La Mort de la Terre” contained in the Marabout Récits has a brief prefatory passage that is not in the Plon version.
Brian Stableford