Science fiction has a problem of paternity. French critics routinely refer to Jules Verne as “le père de la science-fiction.” Ads for the recent Penguin Classics edition of H. G. Wells proudly trumpet their author as “the father of science fiction.” We speak here for another party in this custody battle: the Belgian writer J.-H. Rosny aîné. We would, however, change the designation somewhat: Rosny is the father of hard science fiction. If we ask, with Mark Rose, “in what sense is science fiction about science,” the proponents of hard SF answer: it is all about science.1 Physicist-writer Robert L. Forward goes further. He claims that in order for a narrative to be science fiction, science must write the fiction. Forward means this literally: “I just write a scientific paper about some strange place—and by the time I have the science correct—the science has written the fiction.”2 For Forward, conventional fiction bends the laws of nature to its wishes and desires, whereas science fiction cannot. This in itself is a purist’s dream of SF. In light of it, however, our contention is that Rosny, not Verne nor Wells, was the first writer to allow science to write his narratives in the neutral, ahumanistic manner Forward proclaims.
The implications of our claim are great, and some questions are in order. First, what exactly is Rosny’s scientific vision, and how does it differ from that of Verne and Wells? We define Rosny’s unique perspective as one of “evolutionary ecology,” and it sets him apart from both writers. Rosny’s scientific education took place in England at the time of the Darwinian controversy, and led him away from the Comtean positivism that dominated Verne’s vision and the francophone world. For unlike Comte’s laws of phenomena, evolutionary theory emphasizes causality, and takes into account space-time transformation as nonteleological process. Likewise, although Rosny shares evolutionary theory with Wells, the rigors of his pluralist sense of the evolutionary process take him far beyond Wells’s humanocentric focus and toward a scientific view of humankind’s relation to its environment that we would today call “ecological” in the broad sense.
Second, how does Rosny, in comparison with Verne and Wells, develop his pluralist vision of evolution in fictional form? Rosny’s pluralism, as it opens out toward the relativistic sciences of the twentieth century, sees evolution in terms of an ecosystem, the complex and neutral interaction of independent biotic and abiotic factors in a particular location, that of Earth itself. In fictional works that span evolutionary time from human prehistory to the passage of all carbon-based life forms to new sentient life, Rosny strives to remove humankind and human reason, except as localized phenomena, from the center of the evolutionary process. Unlike Verne and Wells, he aspires in his fiction to the most rigorous neutrality and scientific objectivity, and thus is the first writer to set a gold standard for the future hard SF extrapolations of Forward and others.
Rosny strives as hard as any writer can who uses words and addresses a human audience to decenter humankind, to make it part of a larger system of life in evolution. The third question, then, is how and in what ways does the science actually write the fiction in Rosny’s work? Forward’s program might appear to be inimical to fiction in general, which is traditionally centered on the activity of human beings, and the mind-matter duality that generally defines such activity. Rosny’s scientific vision, however, allows him not only to inscribe a fictional arc from prehistory to the end of humankind’s world, but to look beyond this trajectory, in the final pages of La Mort de la Terre, to the possibility of a transhuman experience. Here humanity, seen as the apogee of carbon-based life passes some aspect of its biological and perhaps cultural heritage to another life form, and thus continues to evolve beyond its extinction as carbon entity. Thus in the final section of this introduction we will compare Rosny’s fictional treatment of his Last Man with the Last Men of the more recent hard SF writers Arthur C. Clarke and Gregory Benford.
The comparison reveals a significant difference. For while these recent hard SF writers seem to retreat from the transhuman moment, Rosny pushes transhumanity to the limit of scientific possibility. With perhaps the exception of Olaf Stapledon, there exists to date no more objective, ecologically sound treatment than Rosny’s of the passage from humans to new possible forms of life. Despite sympathies for humanity, Rosny realizes that we will someday have to “let go,” that the key element in the ecological balance is not humankind but life in whatever form it may take. In light of Rosny, transhumanity becomes the defining problem for hard SF.
Among French-language writers of his time, Rosny’s cultural and linguistic situation was unique. He was born Joseph Henri Honoré Boëx, on February 17, 1856, in Brussels. His formal education was cut short by the death of his father and ensuing financial difficulties. Forced to leave school, he learned to be a telegrapher. To find work, he went to London, where he remained for eleven years (1873–1884), working as a night operator for the British Post Office. This English period appears to have been crucial for his intellectual development. A voracious autodidact, Rosny learned English and apparently spent his days in the British Museum, reading widely in world literature. At the same time, he developed a strong interest in science. Controversy was raging over Darwinian evolution, and judging from evidence in works Rosny conceived (and perhaps wrote) during this time, he followed these arguments closely. He could have attended Huxley’s lectures at Imperial College.
Too little is known about these formative years in England. One ambitious biography of Rosny exists in English, Amy Louise Downey’s dissertation “The Life and Works of J.-H. Rosny aîné, 1856–1940.”3 For information on this English period, Downey claims to rely on documents and letters in possession of the Borel family, that of Rosny’s second wife. According to Downey, Rosny published several stories, in English, in London magazines. She sees Rosny moving in intellectual circles, and even posits an encounter with Wells. The latter is unlikely; Wells, born in 1866, was barely eighteen when Rosny left England in 1884. There are, nonetheless, documented facts. While in London, Rosny married and had a family with a young English woman of the poor working class. He most certainly conceived and wrote his first novel, Nell Horn (published in French in 1887), while in England. It is a naturalist novel that details life in the London slums the impoverished Rosny knew firsthand. It is also clear that he drew inspiration from English evolutionary debates for his other 1887 novel, Les Xipéhuz. Indeed, no analogues to the prehistoric extrapolation of this novel exist in the francophone world. Prehistoric speculations, in the wake of Lyell and Darwin, appear to be a British preoccupation, and famous examples exist from Wells to Brian Aldiss’s Cryptozoic! (1970). Darwinian thought informs Rosny’s seminal work at the deepest level. Not only does it offer a viable evolutionary model, but there is no hand of God guiding human destiny. If Les Xipéhuz displays the triumph of human reason, this triumph is neither preordained nor permanent. If not for contingencies of environment and heredity, the nonhuman life form could prove the fittest.
We have more documented facts about Rosny’s subsequent life. He moved with his family to Paris in 1884. The publication of Nell Horn and of Les Xipéhuz, in 1887, launched him on a successful literary career along parallel tracks, as a naturalist novelist and a writer of speculative fiction. Young Rosny moved in literary circles of the belle époque, becoming acquainted with the leading artists and intellectuals of the time, from Anatole France to Émile Zola and Alphonse Daudet. The naturalism of Nell Horn impressed the high priest of this form, Edmond de Goncourt. Rosny was named in Goncourt’s will, and later became president of the Académie Goncourt. At the same time Rosny’s scientific fiction made him widely known and respected among scientists. It is clear from his popularizing treatises, such as Les sciences et le pluralisme (1922), that he kept abreast of scientific advances. A 1936 entry in Portraits et souvenirs, the memoirs of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Jean Perrin, is testimony to the fact that he was respected by the most advanced members of the French scientific community: Perrin cites Rosny’s vast knowledge of all the sciences, commenting that “son travail sur le pluralisme abonde en aperçus originaux sur la physique” (his work on pluralism abounds in original ideas on physics).4 Downey claims Rosny knew the Curies and Einstein personally, and was conversant with the theories of Freud—all possible but undocumented.
Rosny continued to write both naturalist fiction and SF throughout his long life. He died in 1940, on the eve of Germany’s entry into Paris. It is ironic that, for a writer whose work is so marked by English Darwinism, his fiction has been so little translated into English. Except for one mass-market paperback—a semitranslation-rewrite by Philip José Farmer for DAW Books of Rosny’s1922 novel L’étonnant voyage d’Hareton Ironcastle—and a Hollywood film vaguely based on his 1911 novel La Guerre du feu (The War for Fire), mistranslated as The Quest for Fire, Rosny’s work remains unknown in the Anglo-American sphere.5 Rosny’s English years are possibly more crucial to understanding his work than his many years as a celebrity on the Parisian literary and cultural scene. For it was in England that this Belgian writer was exposed to a very different scientific tradition, and a vision of evolution that remained, even at the time of the novellas in this volume, highly controversial in francophone circles. Critics, for example, have often been content to contrast Wells and Rosny with reference to their sense of how evolution operates: Wells is seen as the Darwinian, Rosny as being closer to Lamarckian ideas.6 This division follows a comfortable cultural divide. But Rosny’s years in Wells’s England are mirrored in the evolutionary vision of Rosny’s works, which is uniquely ecological and clearly derived from Darwinian principles.
The usual comparison of Darwin and Lamarck is at the level of Lamarck’s idea of “soft inheritance”—the inheritability of traits acquired in one lifetime transferred to the next generation. The comparison, however, is moot, for neither Lamarck nor Darwin offers an adequate mechanism for describing the development of species at this level. That was to be the work of Mendel and modern genetics.7 Lamarck’s sense of evolution, however, is much broader than soft inheritance. Evolution, for Lamarck, comprises two central mechanisms: what he calls “le pouvoir de la vie” (the power of life), and “l’influence des circonstances” (the influence of circumstances). The latter involves Lamarck’s theory of use and disuse, whereby species develop specialized organs according to the needs of specific environments. This could apply to Rosny’s Targ and the Last Men in La Mort de la Terre, whose huge chests have developed because of lack of oxygen in the air on a nearly waterless planet. The former idea of the power of life, however, does not fit Rosny. Lamarck sees the development of life as an ever-complexifying process. This would mean that the ferromagnetics in La Mort de la Terre represent a “higher” species, when in fact they are better described as at the beginning of their era of evolutionary development. Nor is it evident that the humans who defeat the Xipéhuz in Les Xipéhuz are a higher or more complex form of life. If Rosny may seem to promise a Lamarckian development here, from the beginning he throws his reader a Darwinian curve ball. The process Rosny details, as we pass from Les Xipéhuz through La Mort de la Terre, is a clear product of natural selection. Rosny gives us the birth and death of all carbon species—including humanity itself—as part of a process without pre-established design, the result of ever-changing relationships between life forms and their physical environment. The stuff of Rosny’s novels is the struggle for survival, precisely as Darwin describes it: “As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.”8 Both Lamarck and Darwin may revere a life force; but Rosny follows Darwin in his sense of a single source of life, branching out in endless diversity of forms, all of them “beautiful and wonderful” in their own right, be they the nonhuman Xipéhuz, human beings, or the ferromagnetics that replace humanity.
Rosny, we will argue, is not only a steadfastly Darwinist writer but one who developed a supremely modern ecological view of evolution from his Darwinian education. As a Darwinian, he remained, and in a sense remains to critics today in positivist and Cartesian France, a stranger in his own land. He also remained—oddly, for a writer whose work covered the first half of the twentieth century—a stranger to relativity and quantum theory, theories of which he was aware, as we see from his nonfictional treatises. It was evolutionary theory that held lifelong sway over Rosny’s scientific vision.
At first glance, Verne and Rosny appear to be separated by a generational chasm. Rosny’s earliest scientific novels—from Les Xipéhuz to La Mort de la Terre—barely overlap Verne’s final period, which extends approximately from Robur le conquérant (1886) to the posthumous publication of Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz in 1910. Conventional wisdom would see Rosny’s essentially evolutionary view of science as different from Verne’s abiding positivism. If English science flirted with Auguste Comte and his positivist method, John Stuart Mill rejected that method in 1865 as unscientific because it refuses to consider causality. Comte has little place in the British tradition of empirical science that Rosny encountered in the form of evolutionism. Nonetheless, Verne’s scientist-protagonists seem consistently to operate as representatives of that Age of Science Comte saw as the apex of human achievement. They map, classify, generate taxonomic hierarchies. Working in what appears to be a fixed, spatialized system of human knowledge, they legislate order from the position of authority their logically perfected science confers on them. Nature is an intricate grid to be mapped, not a system in transformation. Seen as such, Verne’s science bears little resemblance to Rosny’s evolutionism, whose method is experimental in the modern sense.
The conventional view, however, may not be adequate, and the comparison of Rosny and Verne is a matter of greater complexity. On the one hand, Rosny was touched by positivism. In fact, the hold of positivism on French science and culture has been a strong one, enduring long after the method and its premises were challenged and finally rejected by science. Rosny began writing long after the end of the Age of Positivism. But his fiction bears the marks of positivist method on at least one level—that of the description of anomalous intelligent nonhuman species (generally of extraterrestrial origin in SF but in Rosny’s stories originating on Earth).9 Rosny’s description of the Xipéhuz, and to a lesser degree the Moedigen in Un autre monde, is “factual,” in the Comtean sense of classification along the axes of similarity and succession. The describer is unwilling to speculate beyond surface forms. These kinds of descriptions are still present in La Mort de la Terre.
On the other hand, Verne was not impervious to new, more experimental forms of science that appeared in his time. A serious challenge to dogmatic positivism was launched in France by Claude Bernard in his Introduction à l’étude de la médicine expérimentale, whose publication in 1865 coincided with the beginning of Verne’s career as writer. In this treatise, Bernard attacks the systematizing of Comte and the “scholastic” nature of much scientific theory in his age, and pleads for an “experimental” approach to nature, whereby science seeks out and confronts the physical unknown by means of observation, formulation of tentative models, and verification through experiment. Bernard’s method, closer to that of the empirical science of the Baconian tradition, and to Darwin’s evolutionary science, did not materialize all at once with the publication of Bernard’s essay. For years he had been professing “experimental medicine” at the Collège de France. It is interesting to note that the major novels published by Verne around the time that Bernard’s treatise was published all promise experiment and exploration in their titles: Voyage au centre de la terre (1863), De la terre à la lune (1965), Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869) and Autour de la lune (1870). Verne, in these works, appears to respond to the advent of this experimental science. But in what way does this response shape his vision of scientific activity? Bernard’s experimental method offers a way to compare Verne’s and Rosny’s approaches to science. How, for example, do Captain Nemo, whose field of investigation lies beneath the seas, or Professor Lidenbrock, who explores the interior of the Earth, process data? Do they question accepted theory when they discover new patterns of natural behavior that go against its conclusions? Likewise, how does Bakhoun proceed in his examination of the Xipéhuz? What method does Targ bring to his search for water beneath the desiccated surface of the Earth?
Bernard’s method involves the perception and processing of new data, leading to corrections, to reformulations of existing theories that allow science to make incursions into the unknown. This is precisely the method of Darwin’s evolutionary science. At the center of Les Xipéhuz is humankind’s encounter with a new species. Humanity’s first reaction, superstitious fear, proves disastrous. It is only when a new type of man, the rational Bakhoun, begins to observe the Xipéhuz, performing experiments in order to determine their physical characteristics and limits, that humankind begins to understand, and thus control, this hitherto unknown phenomenon. Bakhoun’s method may at first appear positivist—he classifies the new beings into categories. But he is soon forced to address questions involving causality. By experimenting with different weapons, he discovers that a pointed object, when it hits the pulsating “star” at their centers, causes these otherwise invulnerable adversaries to die.
As noted, Bakhoun himself represents a paradigm shift in terms of human cultural development, from superstitious nomadism to sedentary rational humanity. But this is a shift familiar to paleohistorians and Rosny’s readers alike. The battle with the Xipéhuz is an interesting tale, but in terms of evolutionary history, it is tangential. We have won our battle to the death with this competing species; when we do so, they become merely a might have been in the story of our evolution. The protagonist of Un autre monde, however, represents an event of a different order. Evolutionary change this time occurs within and evolves out of homo sapiens. The mutant is something new in our evolutionary process; as such he bears possibilities for future change.
First of all, because of his enhanced perceptual abilities, he becomes an instrument in the hands of science that gains access to a whole new world of beings living side by side with normal humanity, but in another dimension. His early classifications of these beings are positivist, focusing on similarities between forms and their sequential arrangement. He thus delineates the forms of the earthbound Moedigen, and distinguishes their behavior from that of the aerial Vuren. But positivism is not the only model for these descriptions. They remind us also of the first impressions of the two-dimensional being named A Square in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, published in 1884—a work Rosny may have read in English. A Square’s first impressions are only a prelude to further reflection, for he is soon confronted with a new phenomenon: a three-dimensional incursion into his two-dimensional world. Reflecting on this, he posits the possibility of a fourth dimension, which his three-dimensional interlocutor, Sphere, rejects as impossible. In like manner Rosny’s narrator, reflecting on this other dimension, posits a causal relationship between it and us, whereby actions there may have an impact on us here, to such an extent that understanding them and this possible causal link becomes an evolutionary and ecological necessity for human science: “Un règne, enfin, se mouvant sur les eaux, dans l’atmosphère, sur le sol, modifiant ses eaux, cette atmosphère et ce sol, tout autrement que nous, mais avec une énergie assurément formidable, et par là agissant indirectement sur nous et nos destinées, comme nous agissons indirectment sur lui et ses destinées!” (A kingdom of beings, finally, moving about on the waters, in the atmosphere, on the ground, transforming these waters, this atmosphere, this ground, in completely different ways than we do, but with a certainly formidable energy, and by that means acting indirectly on us and our destiny, just as we act indirectly on it and its destiny!)
La Mort de la Terre is a work whose every detail, almost, exists in a current of evolutionary transformation. At first we may find what seem to be positivist classifications in the descriptions that introduce the ferromagnetics. In chapter 2, these entities are presented as if they were a closed system: “ils comportent des agglomérations de trois, cinq, sept, et même neuf groupes, la forme des groupes revêtant une grande variété” (there are now agglomerations of three, five, seven, even nine groups, the forms of these groups being greatly varied). As in a tableau of Cuvier, we seem to have their formal limits and nothing more: “A partir de l’agglomération par sept, le ferromagnétal dépérit si l’on supprime un des groupes.” (For agglomerations of seven or more, the ferromagnetic entity perishes if one of its groups is suppressed.) At once, however, we realize we are in a world of shifting paradigms and evolving forms. It is no longer possible to make abstract categories of rival species, for these creatures are part of a vast, and unfinished, web of evolutionary transformations: “Actuellement, la présence des ferromagnétaux est à peu près inoffensif. Il en serait sans doute différemment si l’humanité s’étendait.” (Today the presence of the ferromagnetics is little more than harmless. It would no doubt be a different story if mankind were to expand its domain.) Targ is a scientific adventurer seeking to adapt to a world of dwindling water supplies. He conducts his “hygrometrical” experiments in various locations, hoping to find the water that will allow humanity to “spread out” once again. In terms of his search, the ferromagnetics remain a secondary issue, if an important one. For though they evolve in their own iron-based sphere, they still share the same Earth as Targ, and their evolution benefits from human activities. As opposed to the static-seeming Xipéhuz or Moedigen, Targ discovers late in the novel that the ferromagnetics are continuing to evolve: a new, more powerful “tertiary” form appears on the scene just as the last carbon-based life forms perish.
Rosny’s narratives, then, confine positivist method to increasingly localized situations, as experimental science opens new vistas that prove increasingly complex in their interplay of evolutionary factors. Verne’s narratives of experimental promise seem to reverse this movement. All of Verne’s aforementioned four novels appear to offer the reader startling adventures of scientific observation. New technologies, such as submarines and rocket ships, give scientists the possibility to go where no human has gone, to places where humans can observe and gather new data, facts that promise (like the discovery of the Moedigen) to alter humans’ understanding of nature radically.
However, after mounting these expeditions with elaborate detail—it takes almost the entirety of De la terre à la lune to prepare the ship and devise experiments—Verne invariably finds ways to deflect his observers from contact with the unknown. There is more to this than what Marie-Hélène Huet and others have noticed—that Verne’s discoveries appear to be rediscoveries, and “unknown” territories turn out to have been previously mapped.10 For there are moments when Verne’s scientists find themselves faced with a real possibility of seeing new phenomena, thus of having to revise or abandon the scientific consensus. Verne revels in taking the reader right up to these moments of discovery, only to swerve away from actual contact with the new. One might say that the most extraordinary thing in his “extraordinary voyages” is his creation of an elaborate art of “scientific suspense” that relies on raising and then dashing the hopes of his experimental scientists. The reader is titillated, then reassured, as science glimpses new, even frightening things but comfortably avoids them.
Verne’s most famous scientists—Captain Nemo and Professor Aronnax, the Barbicane-Nicholl-Ardan trio, and especially Professor Lidenbrock and Axel—are all confronted with never-before-seen phenomena. In 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, for example, Nemo takes Aronnax on a scientific underwater tour, offering glimpses of phenomena that, if studied and experimented on, could easily unsettle physical history as science has written it. Well along in the undersea narrative (chapter 9, part 2), Nemo and Aronnax walk among the ruins of a sunken city the reader later learns is Atlantis. Things appear that suggest that in this undersea environment, altered physical conditions have given rise to evolutionary mutations. And Aronnax, who thinks like Claude Bernard’s scientist, is ready to give primacy to evidence of the senses: “Et moi-même ne sentais-je cette différence due à la puissante densité de l’eau, quand, malgré mes lourds vêtements, ma tête de cuivre, mes semelles de métal, je m’élevais sur les pentes d’une impracticable raideur?” (And didn’t I myself physically feel this difference, caused by the powerful density of the water, whenever, despite my heavy garments, my copper helmet, my shoes of metal, I lifted myself up on slopes that were impracticably steep? [323].)
Verne’s scientist expends much energy and ingenuity in reaching the threshold of discovery, and Verne lavishes much detail on the description of his approach. But once he arrives at the unknown, we realize Verne has handicapped him mightily. We realize that in order for Aronnax to have any access to this environment, he has to wear his cumbersome diving suit. His becomes the torture of Tantalus. In these deep cavities he discovers “gigantic” crustaceans, “giant” lobsters, “titanesque” crabs, “terrifying squid tangling their tentacles like a nest of snakes” (“des poulpes effroyables entrelaçant leurs tentacules comme une broussaille de serpents” [324]). He needs his suit to protect him from these creatures, but it isolates him physically from making the first-hand contact a scientist needs to examine such specimens. Nemo must have scientific knowledge of this lost world; but Aronnax, isolated in his suit, as no way to question Nemo about the origin or nature of the phenomena Aronnax observes. Unable to communicate, his only recourse is to ask himself endless questions. We have the illusion of a scientist at work; the result, however, is tautology. Indeed, the final product of this scientific adventure is not new knowledge. It is rather a general lament, bemoaning the inability of observational science ever to grasp the richness of the phenomenal world: “Je touchais de la main ces ruines mille fois séculaires and contemporaines des époques géologiques! Je marchais là même où avait marché les contemporains du premier homme! J’écrasais sous mes lourdes semelles ces squelettes d’animaux des temps fabuleux!” (With my own hand I was touching ruins that were hundreds of thousands of years old, as old as the geological epochs! I was walking in the same place where contemporaries of the first human being walked! I was crushing under the heavy soles of my boots skeletons of animals from the times of fable! [327]).
A similar isolation besets Verne’s Moon explorers. They want to land on the Moon and explore its surface, but a miscalculation, sets them in orbit around it, such that they can only observe along a fixed path. We learn later that even if they had landed on the Moon and done experiments, no word of this would ever have reached Earth. For they fail not only to calculate for enough fuel but also (despite all their preparations) to think of bringing along a communication device capable of sending information. Rosny gives his astronauts the simple if improbable device of Morse code in Les Navigateurs de l’infini (1927), his late, and only, space novel. Can we believe that Verne, otherwise prodigious of technological detail, simply “forgot” this all-important device here? We have a similar example of a “naturally” aborted opportunity to gather new knowledge when the explorers, orbiting the Moon, pass over the Dark Side. This is new territory, but they cannot see it. Theirs too, like Aronnax in his diving suit, is the torture of Tantalus, for all they can do is make wild and fanciful theories, all in the dark. Verne throws in a little “scientific” suspense when a meteor suddenly explodes, and for an all-too-brief moment they have a glimpse of the unknown side. But the light fades at once, and they are no closer to making significant new observations. A final act of blindness is their attempt to land on the Moon by blasting their rocket. Miscalculation, however, propels them back to Earth, with no positive data on a new world seen through a glass darkly. At least Ardan and Barbicane are safe and sound. Not only does adventure trump science, but the nature of the adventure itself appears to be the trumping of science.
Despite escapades on the Moon or Mars, Verne and Rosny both confine their scientific explorations to the geosphere. The three Rosny novellas in this volume explore (1) a prehistoric Earth environment; (2) a world alternate to our present world yet sharing the same geosphere; and (3) an Earth undergoing ecodisaster, at least from the human perspective. Likewise, Verne’s explorers find nothing more in the depths of the sea or on the Moon than what is known on Earth. Verne’s and Rosny’s scientists, then, explore the same geosphere. It is their respective uses of this geosphere, however, that are radically different. For Rosny, the geosphere is the place of evolutionary possibility, where human life some day will be superseded, but where Earth, as place of struggle between animate and inanimate forces, abides. Verne’s Earth, however, despite his scientists’ stated desire to explore, even exceed, its limits, remains centered in mankind. The geosphere of Verne’s scientists proves to be the conventional anthrosphere of Cartesian rationalism.
In this regard, the Verne text to compare with Rosny is Voyage to the Center of the Earth. In this novel, Verne’s scientists journey farthest into the territory of evolutionary possibility. Ostensibly, the purpose of Professor Lidenbrock’s expedition to the center of the Earth is to verify Humphry Davy’s theory of chemical oxidation, which says there is no core of heat at the Earth’s center. But since Davy, as Allen A. Debus points out, had already disowned his theory four decades before the publication of the novel, he could hardly be the scientific motivation for this expedition.11 The explorers’ voyage, in fact, is not to the geological center of the Earth but to a space of much interest to the reader of Rosny—the space of evolutionary history, of the life forms that lead to the advent of homo sapiens. On their descent, Lidenbrock and Axel discover a “land that time forgot,” fifty years before Edgar Rice Burroughs coined the phrase. Their first find is a welter of previously unclassified fossils. In the midst of these they discover something bound to overturn then accepted theory: a humanoid skull, physical evidence that, if heeded, must change the evolutionary picture for mankind.
Not long before Verne wrote this novel, the so-called Moulin-Quignon man had been “discovered” (1863) and then soon denounced as a hoax perpetrated by workers at the site. This denunciation reinforced the Cuvier school, which argued that no human species could have coexisted with the fauna of the Quaternary Era. The Quaternary, however, is the very period of the fossil specimens Lidenbrock and Axel find. What they discover appears to be another “line” of humanity—such as the Neanderthal-like hominids in Rosny’s La Guerre du feu (1911). For an age of science fascinated by fossil remains and the possibility of “pre-sapiens” species, Lidenbrock and Axel have before them tangible evidence that challenges existing theories of the origin of mankind.
As if the bones were not enough, Verne adds new, now irrefutable evidence by bringing his fossil remains to life. Lidenbrock and Axel discover an island in the center of the underground sea where Quaternary flora and fauna flourish. All at once, they come across a giant being apparently a living specimen of the newly discovered humanoid species, tending its “flocks” of giant prehistoric creatures. But at the sight of this giant, Axel and Lidenbrock can only flee in terror. Real scientific evidence is under their feet, all around them, before their very eyes. Yet Axel categorically denies it all, everything the reader has seen and witnessed: “Nulle créature humaine n’existe dans ce monde subterrestre.” (No human creature exists in this subterranean world [299].) Moreover, Lidenbrock’s mention of the discredited Moulin-Quignon man reinforces the possibility that everything described was indeed a fabulation, the dream of two scientists become a waking nightmare, from which they awaken empty-handed. If this is another false discovery, it only reinforces the already-known.
In a sense, the mention of Moulin-Quignon is part of a script, one already written by science, that the novel’s adventures follow. These scientists are not writing their own exploratory text; they follow the traces of Arne Saknussemm, whose path is marked by ancient runes that they merely decipher. Future voyagers, likewise, will have Axel’s account to follow, which, he tells us in the end, he has published as Voyage au centre de la terre. Moreover, the names these explorers give to places they “discover,” like the Lidenbrock sea, only rename what they think is Arne’s itinerary; they are places future voyagers will rename in turn, creating a palimpsest rather than a terrain of new discovery. Even more deeply preinscribed in their journey is the text of anthropological positivism, written by Cuvier and his followers, and elaborated by the scientific establishment of Verne’s time. As their raft moves offshore, the two explorers observe giant plants that offer “l’aspect de la Terre aux premiers siècles de sa formation” (what the Earth looked like in the first centuries of its formation [186]). However, as they continue, the very nature of their observations reveals that they are not discovering a new evolutionary process but instead describing, category by category, a taxonomy already written down by Cuvier. They view plants, then giant fish, then a battle of sea reptiles, moving in sequence up the ladder of forms, from amphibians to large land animals. Cuvier’s way leads “naturally” to something that fills the human niche. So we are not surprised to find a “man” striding through this predetermined landscape.
Even so, the reader sees that Axel and Lidenbrock are physically there, in a strange and inexplicable place, among what are admittedly never-before-seen prehistoric specimens. Yet, to avoid the shock of the unknown, they continue to mistake the map for the territory. Instead of taking a fresh look at new life forms before their eyes, they imagine encounters in the flesh with creatures that fit contemporary paleontologists’ theoretical reconstructions: “Peut-être rencontrerons-nous quelques-uns de ces sauriens que la science a su refaire avec un bout d’ossement ou de cartilage?” (Perhaps we will meet up with some of those saurians that science has been able to reconstruct from a piece of bone or of cartilage? [188]) In terms of evolutionary theory, they turn things upside down: instead of locating the origin of species in a natural process, they relocate it in templates that human reason has constructed out of fossil remains. If their voyage proves anything, it is that mind creates matter, not the other way around.
It does not matter that Lidenbrock does not reach the center of the physical Earth. Verne’s explorers carry that center with them, for the center of Verne’s Earth is the anthrosphere. This is what unfolds from Axel’s famous dream. Bakhoun can write a chapter in the history of humankind because he has led humankind to victory over an evolutionary enemy that, had it prevailed, would have ended humankind’s story right there. In Verne, Cuvier’s “written” history of Earth appears to block all attempts by observational science to expand the knowledge of physical processes. In like manner, the entire history of human evolution appears to be already “written,” physically embedded in Axel’s being, to be summoned forth whole, in his waking “dream,” at his particular moment in humankind’s existence.
We think here of Carl Sagan’s “dragons of Eden,” which represent the idea that the totality of the evolutionary process from reptile to homo sapiens is wired into the cortices of every human brain, and is accessed in the present by dreaming, which subtends the rational mind.12 Axel exclaims: “tout ce monde fossile renaît dans mon imagination” (the entirety of this fossil world is reborn in my imagination [189]). In the immediacy of his present-tense account, Axel sees his entire being, mind and body, enfolding all of history, bounded by Earth, with mankind at its apex: “Toute la vie de la Terre se résume en moi” (all life forms of the Earth are summed up in me [190]). His dream is a résumé, one that collapses the evolutionary time scale, making it coterminous with his present human form. By quite literally assuming the prehistoric past, Axel ensures that no subsequent discovery will take our knowledge of evolution in any direction other than what culminates in nineteenth-century rational mankind, the prime example of which is Axel. The idea that any example of contemporary mankind contains its entire evolutionary history is everywhere in Verne’s narrative, down to such insignificant details as the description of Hans the Islander: “Son masque effrayant est celui d’un homme antediluvien, contemporain des ichthyosaures et des mégatheriums” (the terrifying mask of his face is that of antediluvian man, contemporary to ichthyosauruses and metatheriums [203]).
Axel’s dream in a sense preempts any scientific finds he and Lidenbrock will make. In fact, it sets the model for a pattern whereby seemingly incontrovertible facts are captured and enfolded into the human status quo. Lidenbrock and Axel, for example, discover a huge field of fossil remains. It is immediately converted, however, into an “ossuary,” one so vast it must be tended by multiples of an all-too-familiar human scientist: “L’existence de mille Cuvier n’aurait pas suffi à recomposer les squelettes des êtres organisés couchés dans ce magnifique ossuaire” (the existence of a thousand Cuviers would not have sufficed to reconstitute the skeletons of the organic beings lying in this magnificent ossuary [216]). In like manner, the discovery of a human skull among these fossils does not bring Lidenbrock to envision alternate theories, future possibilities. Instead he imagines himself in a university lecture hall, engaging in controversy with fellow scientists. The fact that he has before him tangible proof “que l’espèce humaine eût été contemporaine des animaux de l’époque quaternaire” (that the human species had been contemporary to animals of the Quaternary) leads only to more academic disputations. Even when he comes across an entire human fossil, the professor cannot stop his imaginary, past tense lecture. He taunts his “rivals”: “Les Saint-Thomas de la paléontologie, s’ils étaient là, le toucheraient du doigt, et seraient bien forcés de reconnaître . . .” (the Saint Thomases of paleontology, had they been there, would have touched it with a finger, and would have been forced to admit . . .). Lidenbrock gets so carried away that this fossil, before his eyes, turns into a cadaver his colleagues are invited to see and touch: “Le cadavre est là . . . vous pouvez le voir, le toucher” (The cadaver is there . . . you can see it, touch it [221].) Just as Axel’s dream contracts all evolutionary history to his living present, so Lidenbrock converts his amazing find into a specimen from some contemporary autopsy room.
Having witnessed Lidenbrock’s fossil resurrection, the reader is less surprised when this “cadaver,” before the daydreaming scientists’ (and the reader’s) eyes, actually comes to life. It might seem that when Axel and Lidenbrock come upon a living version of their “spécimen de l’homme quaternaire” (specimen of Quaternary man), they enter the realm of Rosny’s narratives of alternate prehistory. Indeed, at this moment, Verne comes as close as he ever does to confronting science with the unknown. His protagonists immediately swerve, however, away from scientific analysis to mythic perception. Instead of envisioning a new future, they evoke a perpetual past. Axel describes them as entering a physical realm that, paradoxically, is no longer subject to the laws of physics: “Par un phénomène que je ne puis expliquer . . . la lumière éclairait uniformément les diverses faces des objets.” (Through some phenomenon I cannot explain . . . the light illuminated the various facets of objects in a uniform manner [224]). Instead of writing a new text in the history of science, they fall back on another script already written: that of the fantastic and its famous literary proponent E. T. A. Hoffmann.
Verne’s scientists, with amazingly new phenomena before their eyes, do little more than pay lip service to the fact that this is a situation “à confondre la raison des classificateurs les plus ingénieux” (worthy of confounding the most ingenious classifiers [225]). Axel’s response is to turn to human cultural convention, to invoke mankind’s endless longing for a Golden Age. Verne’s protagonists, even though in possession of proof that a new past might lead to an alternate human future, seem to take refuge in a literary vision of an unchanging present. There is irony, however, in their evocation of this golden age. For however much the surface glitters, the core itself appears to be fallen. The Latin epithet Axel throws at the giant early man they have found, “Immanis pectoris custos, immanior ipse,” rephrases Vergil’s Eclogue 5:44: “formois pectoris custos, formosior ipse.” Vergil’s speaker is Daphnis, who refers to himself as “herdsman of a beautiful flock, himself more beautiful,” lines that reveal vanity at the heart of the bucolic world. Axel’s corruption of the text, by substituting “savage” for “beautiful,” places this being lower on the ladder of cultural evolution. In the face of the unknown, experimental science—in the guise of his archetypal scientist-apprentice Axel—defers in Verne to a “humanistic” response, and by doing so, avoids the questions Rosny might ask, questions that challenge the myth of humankind’s central position in the earthly scheme of things. For here, at Verne’s prime moment of evolutionary promise, scientific investigation loses itself in a web of intertextuality that only reaffirms the conventional ties between mankind and nature on which Verne’s worldview rests.
To describe Verne’s difference with Rosny, we need only imagine the various ways Rosny might have presented Verne’s moment of underground “contact.” Axel’s discovery of the underground world could have led to impending struggle between rival evolutionary lines. There could have been an entire “race” of antediluvian giants, poised like the Xipéhuz to reclaim the Earth above. If we take their point of view, the Xipéhuz too lived in Edenic harmony with their world; they too are confronted by Western rationalism. The difference is that while Verne’s scientists are never allowed to engage the other “world,” entering and leaving it without making any meaningful contact with the beings that inhabit it, Rosny’s Bakhoun engages, studies, and ultimately defeats, though not without regret, what is understood as an evolutionary rival. Or Rosny, as in Un autre monde, might have presented the giant as member of a mutant species. He might even have told the story from the giant’s point of view. Surely, in a hypothetical Rosny text, human scientists would not have given in to anthropocentric fears. At the very least, they would seek ways to understand it, and possibly communicate with it. They would hope to make scientific use of its ways of “seeing things,” as, from an evolutionary perspective, its faculties would necessarily have evolved along a different yet parallel track with those of human beings. Or, finally, Rosny could have recast Verne’s explorers as figures like Targ, in La Mort de la Terre, driven by physical necessity as well as scientific curiosity. Their discovery of the subterranean world out of time could, like Targ’s discovery of water, give humanity a reprieve from evolutionary forces like dwindling resources. Or even, if we follow Axel’s reasoning, the bucolic island and ample underground sea might provide, this time, a millennialist reprieve to Rosny’s apocalyptic vision of the Last Man, a place where a parallel human species is living out a moment of calm before its end. What for Axel was a static golden age for Rosny would be an interlude within evolutionary time, itself later doomed to perish in time’s inexorable march.
These comparisons mark the limits of Verne’s scientific speculation. In doing so, they make his difference from Rosny clear. Rosny’s evolutionary science is able to look beyond humankind and human reason as the culminating life form. Verne’s science, despite his celebration of the promise of experiment, does not move beyond the limits of its essentially anthropocentric Cartesian worldview. In fact, Verne’s literary genius proves a curious one: he makes brilliant and exciting use of science’s promise to engage the unknown, but he does so, ultimately, to celebrate the failure of science to engage that unknown. He takes his adventurers to the threshold of new discovery. They glimpse new natural phenomena, even new forms of human life. Then, invariably, acts of “fatality” intervene to cancel science’s hope of discovery, thus preserving Mankind’s centrality in the order of things. Verne’s positivist science remains in thrall to an anthropocentric vision, whose “evolutionary” ladder is Comte’s ascending stages of man, and at whose apex sits Scientific Man as Verne depicts him. How different is Rosny’s “man”: the new, ecological human, aware of himself as an interactive part of a vaster, interconnected whole of physical forces, organic and inorganic. Rosny’s world is the much vaster one of life in all its possible forms. It is a world where moments of equilibrium are invariably caught up in tides of transformation, where all things, including our sacred concept of humanity, are subject to change and entropy.
The Wells-Rosny connection might appear to be easier to define. They are of the same generation. They both show a keen interest in experimental science; both were exposed to the theories of Darwin. But Rosny is not simply a “French Wells.” Though they share common ground, their fictional approaches to the material of evolution differ greatly. Yet because of this shared background, close comparison is possible between the novellas presented in this book and stories Wells wrote during his “scientific romance” period. We will discover that Rosny’s use of science is more uncompromising than that of Wells, his extrapolations bolder. Verne’s famous remark about Wells—“mais il invente!” (but he invents)—seems to denote Wells’s more speculative use of science. In comparison with Rosny, however, the “inventions” of Wells, as well as those of Verne, reveal their anthropocentric limitations.
Wells wrote at least one prehistoric tale. He envisioned possible human mutations, and wrote short stories in which human beings acquire new senses that allow them to perceive other dimensions or even worlds. His novel The Time Machine envisions the end of the same Earth Rosny presents in La Mort de la Terre. Yet Wells’s treatment of these bold topics, compared with Rosny’s, appears surprisingly conservative. Rosny’s Targ is limited to small areas of the Earth because resources elsewhere will not sustain life. Wells’s Traveler is limited only by his own consciousness: by a theory of time that sees movement only in terms of his mental activity. He goes to 802,701 CE, but remains in terms of space confined to Richmond, and his own laboratory. His scientific investigations in 802,701 display no interest in venturing beyond this narrow area, no curiosity about the unknown wider world. Brought back to his own time and location in the end, the Traveler is oddly out of place in any world but his own. He apparently wore a Victorian day coat and socks (on his return “tattered, bloodstained”) on his travels to the death of the Earth. Later, on the journey to the past from which he never returns, he takes a knapsack and vintage camera, like any tourist of his era. Overriding all else in Wells’s novels and stories are the dimensions of irony and satire, as contemporary mankind faces, in inadequate manner, its past, future, or the possibility of an altered present. In contrast, there is neither satire nor irony in Rosny’s austere extrapolations, whose protagonists are always different from the reader. They are beings of a recreated past, an altered present, or a constructed future. The very nature of their fictional worlds is change, evolution in the broadest sense. Rosny takes a sober look at the irreversible workings of the physical world, seeking to envision how humans and other species might evolve within their dynamic limits. To explore the Wells-Rosny comparison, we will examine analogous works by each writer in each of the three areas represented by the stories in this volume: mutations; prehistory; finality.
In several stories, all written around the time Rosny was writing Un autre monde, Wells examines the question of mutated or transformed perception. Before we compare these stories with Rosny’s work, however, we must contextualize them. What was Wells’s audience, and how might that audience have influenced the way he depicted science and its workings? Wells published his stories, and serialized his scientific romances, in London magazines during the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign. Their readers were, in large part, the same smug, Anglocentric middle-class citizens Wells satirized, indeed detested. Yet it is their world of polite manners and bourgeois order that provides the context for his tales of strange mutations and astounding events.
The Parisian milieu in which Rosny’s novellas and novels appeared was not any less bourgeois. But he had several audiences. The audience for his naturalist novels was well defined. The audience for his tales of scientific extrapolation was much vaguer; in fact, as we see reflected in the bafflement of readers like Edmond de Goncourt and others, Rosny was obliged to create his audience. This was the case for “prehistoric” fiction, where an audience soon became familiar with its formulas. But during the first two decades of his literary career, it does not appear that Rosny wanted to write for a particular audience, or to cater to any contemporary frame of values in order to contextualize his scientific tales. On the contrary, estrangement appears to be the effect he sought, an estrangement wherein a phenomenon such as mutated senses could be studied with dispassionate objectivity, outside the barriers of lower-middle-class incomprehension. We see this in Un autre monde. It is a tale of contemporary life, but rather than giving it a Parisian setting, Rosny situates his story in the backwater of Dutch-speaking Flanders, a place so isolated that the protagonist has to specify its location in his first spoken sentence: “I am a native of Gelderland. Our patrimony amounts to a few acres of briar and yellow water.” Spontaneous genetic mutations are certainly less credible in a London drawing room than in this out-of-the-way place, among a forgotten part of civilized humanity. In contrast, Wells’s mutations occur in a milieu of small shopkeepers, middle-class teachers, urban homeowners, amateur scientists. Wells’s narrators belong to this milieu. And, in conformity with their milieu, all of them display a similar skeptical attitude toward these strange or uncanny occurrences, even in cases where science has “plausible” explanations for them. When something unusual happens in Wells’s stories, it begins and ends in this well-mannered world.13
Let us look briefly at a couple of Wells’s stories that deal with the same theme as Un autre monde: “spontaneous” physical mutations that lead to new perceptual capacities, capacities that attract scientific speculation, even manipulation by science. The opening sentence of “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes” (1895) prejudges the events to follow from a “common sense” point of view: “The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade’s explanation is to be credited” (430). It is Dr. Wade who will pronounce science’s final judgment on the “case” of Davidson, a scientist who, while working with electromagnetic equipment in his laboratory during a lightning storm, believes his eyes, his organs of sight, have been altered. Unable to see what is physically in front of him, Davidson claims instead to see a strange seascape, a barren island with penguins, animals that exist only on the other side of the world. As Davidson slowly recovers normal sight in the familiar world of his friends, the narrator ponders the possibility that Davidson’s is “perhaps the best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance.” This appears to be confirmed when a dinner guest, Atkins, shows the recovered Davidson a photo of the ship H.M.S. Fulmar. Although this ship has never been out of the South Seas, Davidson recognizes it as the ship he saw: “And then, bit by bit, it came out that on the very day Davidson was seized, H.M.S. Fulmar had actually been off a little rock to the south of Antipodes Island” (439). As explanation, Dr. Wade posits the Fourth Dimension much discussed in The Time Machine. Now, however, it is question of a spatial dimension, as in Heinlein’s story “And He Built a Crooked House”—a “fold” in space, whereby Davidson, “stooping between the poles of the big electro-magnet, had some extraordinary twist given to his retinal elements” (439). Wade’s conclusion, that it might be possible to “live visually in one part of the world, while one lives bodily in another” is dismissed by the narrator as “fantastic,” as another dubious claim for déjà vu. He permits himself to make fun of Wade, who has “even made some experiments in support of his views, but so far . . . has simply succeeded in blinding a few dogs” (440).
Unlike Rosny’s mutant, Davidson’s change is temporary, and he recovers normal sight. Yet there is a much more troubling aspect to Davidson’s description that goes unnoticed by the narrator. One incident in particular suggests there is more involved in Davidson’s “mutation” than just seeing in one world and physically being in another. He describes a sightless ride around London in a bath chair, during which he experiences the tactile experience of entering water: “Very slowly, for I rode slanting into it, the water crept up to my eyes. Then I went under and the skin seemed to break and heal again about my eyes.” He is “seeing” here with his entire physical being, and what he “sees” is not of the world of contemporary London: “A horror came upon me. Ugh! I should have driven right into those half-eaten . . . things” (437). It is hard to dismiss this, as the narrator does with Davidson’s sight at a distance, as a “mental aberration.” For what Davidson describes is not simply a mutation; it is a devolutionary process. For now new eyes appear to be developing in a new body, while this body, at the same time, appears to sink back into primal ooze. The Traveler in The Time Machine, published the same year, witnesses a similar horrific scene of devolving life forms. But whereas the Traveler observes, Davidson appears to participate, as mutating flesh, in a process of reversion to a primordial state.
Wells engages in a clever subterfuge here. The narrator can dismiss Dr. Wade’s four-dimensional explanation of Davidson’s new visual powers, both because they prove temporary (an “aberration”) and because they appear to be just another example of discredited paranormal occurrences. Science can dress up phenomena like vision at a distance with fancy theories, but this only renders science more suspicious. What Davidson describes in his London trip, however, is not an “out-of-body” experience. It is more like a slippage in evolutionary space-time, as if a modern man were asked to relive in the flesh an early stage in his development. The changes Rosny’s mutant undergoes are complex, but generally progressive, as his sense of sight undergoes further specialization. Davidson’s eyes, however, reverse the process of sensory differentiation. The reader shares Davidson’s horror as he slides bodily down the evolutionary scale into those half-eaten things. Nothing however is irreversible. He is, like the Traveler returning to comfortable Richmond, happy to regain his sight, and to share in the narrator’s mockery of Dr. Wade’s experiments. Better blind dogs than Davidson’s lost eyes.
“The Plattner Story” (1896) again begins with a skeptical narrator prejudging the facts in another strange case: “Never were there seven more honest seeming witnesses; never was there a more undeniable fact than the inversion of Gottfried Plattner’s anatomical structure, and—never was there a more preposterous story than the one they have to tell” (441). Plattner, a language teacher at a small school in the south of England, appears to be a mutant, whose “entire body has had its left and right sides transposed.” Indeed, unless a mutation has occurred, “there is no way of taking a man and moving him about in space, that will result in our changing sides” (443). This could only occur if we accept the fourth-dimension idea rejected by Davidson’s narrator. Plattner’s body would have been taken “clean out of ordinary existence . . . [and turned] somewhere outside space” (444). Davidson feels himself sliding into a new body and world; Plattner physically enters another world and returns. Because this other world appears to be the mirror inversion of ours, his return leaves its mark on his physical body, inverting his organs. It is as if Davidson’s plunge into primal ooze returned him to this world an amphibian.
Plattner comes and goes somewhat like the Time Traveler. He disappears for about a week, then suddenly reappears, in a strawberry patch: “collarless and hatless, his linen was dirty, and there was blood on his hands” (448). His account of how he enters the “other world” seems as fantastic as his altered anatomy is verifiable. He describes being given a “greenish powder” by one of his students. When he mixes this with other substances in his chemistry classroom, there is an explosion, and he vanishes. This may seem farcical, but surrounding events prove uncanny. During his absence, members of the community experience dreams: “In almost all of them, Plattner was seen, sometimes singly, sometimes in company, walking around through a coruscating iridescence” (447). Plattner’s story confirms this. He describes a world where shades watch humans as if from the other side of a mirror. Theirs is a world of black buildings, lit by a green sun, inhabited by drifting “things”: “They were not walking, they were indeed limbless, and they had the appearance of human heads beneath which a tadpole-like body swung” (454). Plattner physically inhabits this world, but at the price of inverting his organs.
How does Plattner’s other world compare with that of Rosny’s Moedigen? Plattner’s figures, suggesting the degenerate Eloi, or even the Martians of The War of the Worlds, remain distortions of the human form. There is no such mirror relation between the Moedigen and humans. The Moedigen are beings of very different form, who evolve to their own rhythm. Plattner’s creatures, in their dark streets and sunken church, cling to the form of living humans. Plattner’s listeners open their minds to the existence of his other world only if it is seen in terms of conventional myths: these shapes are souls of the dead, ghosts of human regrets, shades of opportunities not taken, “Watchers of the Living.” On the other hand, Rosny’s figures are interesting because they have no ties whatsoever with their human observers. Natural creatures, evolving in a space never before perceived by humans, the Moedigen are of concern to Rosny’s observers precisely because they are new, unmythified beings. The humans have no precedents that help them predict what the Moedigen will do or can do. Mirror images always depend on the beings that project them. Plattner’s creatures seem to be less-than-human inhabitants of a lesser world on the other side of the mirror of life. Plattner returns to the normal world, but unlike Davidson, he is permanently altered, his inner organs forever inverted. But what is the consequence of this? No one, short of an X-ray machine, can see it. Nor does what happened have any evolutionary consequence. It simply contains the warning that we may be, instead, secretly devolving. What science sees as breakthrough to another dimension may offer evidence that we are, beneath the uneventful surfaces of our lives, to the contrary losing our central place in the scheme of things. For Rosny, mutation provides the means of accessing new worlds, of advancing science. Wells uses it to warn his Victorian readers that the cracks in their teacups may indeed be lanes to the land of devolutionary death.
“The Crystal Egg” (1897) is not a story of physical alteration of senses or body, but it puts its protagonist in a situation very similar to that of Rosny’s narrator in Un autre monde. Mr. Cave, the proprietor of a curiosity shop, discovers he can see into another world by means of a crystal egg that mysteriously appears on his shelves one day. Cave hopes to investigate this world, but his greedy wife and sottish in-laws keep him from doing so. He takes his egg and finds sanctuary in the laboratory of Mr. Wace, a “young scientific investigator” with a “particularly lucid and consecutive habit of mind.” Like Rosny’s Dr. Van den Heuvel in Un autre monde, Wace proceeds to deal scientifically with a phenomenon that appears fantastic to the average person: “Directly the crystal and its story came to him, and he had satisfied himself, by seeing the phosphorescence with his own eyes, that there really was a certain evidence for Mr. Cave’s statements, he proceeded to develop the matter systematically.” Drawing Mr. Cave into the light of reason, he takes notes (“as a science student [he] had learned the trick of writing in the dark”) and makes careful descriptions of the “other world” (674).
Like the Time Traveler, Wace proceeds by gathering data, formulating hypotheses, and then correcting these as new data are observed. His first description reminds us in fact of the Traveler’s first, mistaken, view of the Eloi: “Incredible as it seemed to Mr. Wace, the persuasion at last became irresistible, that it was these [butterfly-winged] creatures who owned the great quasi-human buildings and the magnificent garden that made the broad valley so splendid” (674). Further investigation leads, however, here as in The Time Machine, to discovery of sinister doings beneath the placid surface. For both watchers become convinced that “the crystal into which they peered . . . stood at the summit of the end-most mast on the terrace, and that on one occasion at least one of these inhabitants of this other world had looked into Mr. Cave’s face while he was making these observations” (674–75). The egg is a two-way glass, which allows the others to scrutinize our world as well. Where, then, is this other world located? And why do they need to see us?
Rosny’s narrator remarks that the Moedigen go about their strange business totally oblivious to us. Their doings in their world may impact what we do in ours, but there is no clear line of cause and effect. There is clearly no invasive intent. In Wells’s story, however, written a year before The War of the Worlds, the beings observed show themselves hostile to humanoid forms. Wace detects “two small moons” in the otherworldly sky, and surmises that the scene witnessed is on the planet Mars. Along with “winged Martians” they observe “certain clumsy bipeds, dimly suggestive of apes, white and partially translucent . . . and once some of these fled before one of the hopping, round-headed Martians. The latter caught one in its tentacles, and then the picture faded suddenly.” Then an ominous “vast thing” appears: “As this drew nearer, Mr. Cave perceived that it was a mechanism of shining metals and extraordinary complexity” (676). This is a preview of The War of the Worlds, with its large-headed Martians and their machinery of destruction.
In Rosny, observation of the other world is the main goal; it will continue to be maintained, by other generations of mutants, beyond the life of the narrator. But in Wells, the window suddenly closes; Mr. Cave dies, and Wace learns too late that the egg has been sold to a “tall, dark man in grey” who subsequently disappears. Wells’s tales of evolutionary alterations in sense organs culminate with the crystal egg. Indeed, none of Wells’s mutations have any lasting physical significance. The reversal of Plattner’s organs serves no real purpose. Seen from the exterior he remains, for the narrator, a normal human, neither an “advanced being” nor an oddity: “He is quiet, practical, unobtrusive, and thoroughly sane from the Nordau standpoint” (443). The reference is to Max Nordau’s Degeneracy, a popular manual for identifying physical and mental “deviants.” Davidson’s altered eyes are a temporary anomaly. The crystal egg, finally, is an external device of suspicious origin. It disappears, leaving doubts as to its existence, and the record of a series of observations that just as well could be figments of the human imagination.
Wells’s idea of evolution, it seems, did not encompass the possibility of such spontaneous mutations ever happening in the span of human time. In a late work on evolutionary theory, The Science of Life (1932), written with the biologist Julian Huxley, Wells asserts: “The crises of Evolution, when they occur, are not crises of variation but of selection and elimination; not strange births but selective massacres.”14 As an evolutionist, Wells’s idea of humanity is conventionally pessimistic. Mankind’s sole hope for development comes not from nature but from acts of conscious mind, from education rather than mutation. His stories and novels, however, reveal just how feeble those acts of mind generally are. In contrast, Rosny’s vision remains positive, in the sense that despite cases of “selective massacre” like that of the Xipéhuz and, at the other end of the scale, of carbon-based life forms in La Mort de la Terre, the force of life itself endures, capable of vital transformations that continue the adventure of sentience.
Rosny offers a positive view of the birth of the mutant in Un autre monde. Here, what is essentially a variant human species, born of man and woman, makes use of human intelligence to adapt and survive. Un autre monde can be seen, in fact, as a Lamarckian response to Wells’s Huxleyan belief that on the human time scale, meaningful mutations do not occur. Rosny’s protagonist may at first call himself a “monster,” because of his violet skin and opaque eyes. Yet he quickly qualifies this statement. He realizes he is not the conventional “freak,” born with gills, fins, or animal ears. His differences (which he clearly understands) are in fact alterations of normal human senses that, when placed in a positive context, become assets. If he cannot see colors in the normal spectrum, he sees a whole range of colors in the ultraviolet that are black to the normal human eye. He cannot see through ordinary glass or crystal, but he does see through other materials that humans see as solid. He speaks so fast that normal human ears cannot distinguish his thoughts. Writing also proves too slow to capture them. Yet this can be an asset, for if speed of speech indicates speed of thought, he thinks much faster than the normal human. Once science understands that these altered faculties can be used for research purposes, the problems that remain become purely technical. A phonograph is devised to record his speech and play it back at normal speed. He is taught shorthand. In the manner of Asimov, physical obstacles are overcome by means of human ingenuity. Evolution in this story is a matter of increments. And if the potential of these “small” changes is misunderstood, or rejected out of fear, humankind will stagnate. Wells is pessimistic about evolutionary “leaps.” He is ultimately pessimistic about mankind’s ability to change the course of things at all. Rosny, on the other hand, is optimistic about science’s acceptance of small, often overlooked changes, and about its ability to adapt to new challenges.
Rosny is the clear inventor of “prehistoric fiction.” After his early publication of the strikingly original Les Xipéhuz in 1887, he continued to produce novels of this sort, and they sustained his reputation in France long after the vogue of naturalism had subsided. Notable among these works are Vamireh, 1892), La Contrée prodigieuse des cavernes (The Prodigious Land of Caverns, 1896), La Guerre du feu (The War for Fire, 1911), Le Félin géant (The Giant Cat, 1920), and Les Conquérants du feu (The Conquerors of Fire, 1929). In all these tales, Rosny explores the possibility of alternate evolutionary lines for life on Earth. These range from unknown species like the Xipéhuz to various known forms of fauna (the cave lion) and even flora. In his story “Le Voyage” (1897) contemporary explorers discover a region “lost to time” where a race of elephants has evolved a civilization that parallels human development. In the late novel L’étonnant voyage d’Hareton Ironcastle (The Astounding Voyage of Hareton Ironcastle, 1919) explorers discover what proves to be an alternately evolved race of intelligent trees.
Wells, in contrast, though writing in the wake of Lyell and the evolutionists, never seriously considered prehistoric reconstructions. His Time Traveler is believed to visit the past but, significantly, there is no record of it. Wells did, however, touch on the possibility of alternate evolutions. Stories like “In the Avu Observatory” (1894) and “Aepyornis Island” (1894), in what appears to be a parody of the “lost race” narrative, often humorously describe modern explorers’ or scientists’ brushes with prehistoric relics come to life. Nonetheless, a couple of Wells’s stories do merit comparison with Rosny’s stories of alternate evolution—most notably with the paradigm he creates in Les Xipéhuz. In Wells’s one specifically prehistoric tale, “A Story of the Stone Age” (1897), he does attempt, after a fashion, to reconstruct a prehistoric landscape of competing species, among which mankind wins the day. In his stories “In the Abyss” (1896) and the later “Empire of the Ants” (1906), mankind comes upon rival species that, like the Xipéhuz, could be alien but are more likely products of Earth evolution.
“A Story of the Stone Age” shows Wells to be well aware of the incongruity of such narratives, and in fact making fun of the artifice. On the surface, the story recounts a very Rosnyan subject: the evolutionary rise of mankind out of a pool of competing species. The story suggests that during the formative time depicted, species other than homo sapiens evolved skills that, like those of the Xipéhuz, might have made them masters of the Earth. This possibility is treated whimsically, however. Wells’s talking cave bears (unlike Rosny’s talking birds in La Mort de la Terre) are not creatures of a well-extrapolated evolutionary scenario. They are fairy-tale entities, beings from animal fables. And there are deeper ironies yet in the way the story is told. The first lines read like a Walter Scott narrative calling attention to its own artifices: “This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we now call it) to England.” The narrator identifies himself as contemporary, thus unable to know time before the memory of man. Nor does the smattering of science he admits to justify the smug tone of his “reconstruction”: “Fifty thousand years ago it was, fifty thousand years—if the reckoning of geologists is correct” (360). The reader soon sees that this narrative, which has begun so portentously, is in fact another Victorian “educational” tale for young women, if a rather odd one: “She was stiff, but not as stiff as you would have been, dear young lady (by virtue of your upbringing), and as she had not been trained to eat at least once in every three hours . . . she did not feel uncomfortably hungry” (366).
The content of this story, however, does not fit the stated moralizing framework. Its theme is neither the triumph of rational method and human courage, as in Les Xipéhuz, nor the rise of homo sapiens as a tool-using animal. The tools humans use in this story are not fire or some other “good” for mankind; as in the first tableau of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, mankind’s advancement in this tale is due to its discovery, and savage use, of superior weapons. The irony goes deeper yet: when the nasty, brutish protagonist Ugh-lomi kills bear and lion and a rival chieftain, his actions do not advance humanity in any way. Instead, he merely takes the place of the leader he slays: “Thereafter for many moons Ugh-lomi was master. . . . And in the fullness of time he was killed and eaten even as Uya had been slain” (417). In contrast with Rosny’s work, this tale presents the “evolutionary” process the way Kubrick presents the human odyssey in 2001: as a biological cycle in which nature is always red in tooth and claw and mankind the worst predator of all. It is classic Wells.
In the tale “In the Abyss” (1896), Wells has his skeptical narrator describe what appears to be the discovery of an alternate evolutionary species. Then again, this story could simply be the delusion of a man trapped for long hours in a bathyscape. The deep-sea explorer Elstead tells of falling on top of an undersea city inhabited by intelligent hominid-like creatures: “It was a strange vertebrated animal. Its dark purple head was dimly suggestive of a chameleon, but it had such a high forehead and such a braincase as no reptile ever displayed before; the vertical pitch of its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being” (503). This species breathes water, and has a “dark purple head” that resembles, however dimly, that of a reptile. Elstead’s description focuses, however, on the species’ high forehead and large braincase, “the vertical pitch of the face,” as marks of its affinity with homo sapiens. Its affinity may even be with posthuman creatures, as we are close here, in terms of Wells’s fiction, to the invasion of large-headed, humanoid Martians in The War of the Worlds.
Though the narrator remains skeptical, he notes that science has strong arguments supporting the validity of Elstead’s tale: “Startling as is his story, it is yet more startling to find that scientific men find nothing incredible in it. They tell me they see no reason why intelligent, water-breathing, vertebrated creatures, inured to a low temperature and enormous pressure . . . might not live on the bottom of the deep sea” (507). The narrator seems to lean, however, toward another interpretation of Elstead’s experience. Elstead describes being towed in his machine into a building at the center of this undersea “city” that appears to be a place of worship. As with cargo cultists, these undersea beings seem to worship the wreckage that falls on them from human shipwrecks. The walls of their “temple” are made of “water-logged wood, and twisted wire rope, and iron spars and copper, and the bones and skulls of dead men” (506). Whatever degree of civilization these beings have achieved, the narrator finds a way to cast them as superstitious inferiors, and by the same token to reinforce his unthinking sense of man’s superiority. For he is flattered to think that these undersea creatures worship human relics, and may in fact see men as gods: “We should be known to them . . . as strange meteoric creatures, wont to fall catastrophically dead out of the mysterious blackness of their watery sky” (508). These misbegotten beings bear resemblance to the creatures under Moreau’s “law” in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Indeed, the narrator’s comments hint at the same human vanity that drove Moreau to experiment cruelly with “lesser” forms of life. In Wells’s tales, his narrators generally hold to the norm; as representatives of what for his time was seen as normative humanity, these narrators occupy the middle ground between the devolved monsters below us in the abyss and the evolved Martians of The War of the Worlds who observe us with their “cool intelligences” from on high.
In Wells’s tales of discovery of what seem to be alternately evolved sentient species, the scientific picture remains clouded. The focus shifts instead to the fragility of the human condition, the mediocrity of normative humanity. Rosny’s treatment of the same sort of discovery stands out in contrast. The Xipéhuz can be called “strange meteoric creatures” only if we see them through the eyes of the superstitious nomads, who sacrifice themselves to them in suicidal manner. The true approach to this phenomenon—as validated by human history—is Bakhoun’s objectivity, the observation and analysis of the facts before him. The same is true for the protagonist of Un autre monde, and of Targ as he faces the question of the ferromagnetics in La Mort de la Terre. Rosny’s figures exist to observe, and thrive or perish by their observations. They possess neither ulterior motives nor emotional flaws that might deflect them from this primary task.15
In situations where humans encounter alternately evolved beings, Wells invariably refers to them as “aliens.” This dichotomizing of “aliens” and humans implies that there is something called human nature, and that it is a constant fact, unchanging in its endless opposition to the “other”—whether it be the alternately evolved beings, animals, or inferior humans. All of Rosny’s works feature encounters between humans and alternately evolved species, yet neither is ever treated as a static entity. Rosny may offer an example of human “advancement” in Les Xipéhuz. But he immediately puts this idea, like every other abstraction, in evolutionary brackets. Bakhoun displays the quality—the inquiring rational mind—that ultimately leads homo sapiens to master its environment; but Rosny also invokes the dynamics of evolution in order to imagine new life forms that will challenge humankind’s sense of its unique destiny. Humans do triumph in this narrative. Bakhoun represents an evolutionary “leap” from superstitious nomad to sedentary, rational man. But Rosny will show in La Mort de la Terre that he understands this “evolved” humankind to be one that in turn will pass: for Targ, cleverness and practical reason are no longer enough to overcome the forces of evolutionary transformation. Rosny does not allow serendipitous events to save humankind. He refuses to invoke a deus ex machina, like the Earth microbes that save humans from annihilation in War of the Worlds.
Bakhoun, then, is not “representative man.” He is simply one of many possible stages in human development. His qualities are still recognizable in Heinlein’s “special” man, who, when his peers succumb to terror, calmly studies the nature and habits of the enemy, and then acts effectively. Bakhoun, in a sense, is the ancestor of a figure like Sam in Heinlein’s novel The Puppet Masters (1951). But whereas Heinlein makes his special being the human archetype, ready to act in any day and age, Rosny places Bakhoun in a broader, pluralistic context. First of all, the Xipéhuz are not the parasitic “slugs” of Heinlein’s novel. Their forms have beauty to the human eye. In addition, they appear to observe a chivalrous code of conduct, sparing women and children in otherwise ferocious attacks. Finally, in good evolutionary terms, it is Bakhoun’s altruism in recognizing their beauty and nobility that leads to his defeating them. For the secret to human victory here is, as much as anything, Bakhoun’s respect for the adversary, his realization that there are higher evolutionary processes at work than simply human survival. The Xipéhuz teach Bakhoun many things. Most of all, they reveal that they (and no doubt many other species) are worthy to displace us, thus that such displacement is not a “bad” thing in itself, merely a viable option in the evolutionary course of things, which says that there can be neither communication nor compromise between two competing species, only territorial struggle to the death.
In a scenario repeated in many later SF novels, Bakhoun makes use of human cunning and courage—“low technology” and high mobility—to defeat the enemy’s superior “firepower.” Bakhoun annihilates the Xipéhuz, but at the cost of tremendous human loss. As in Heinlein, mankind has defeated a monolithic force through the fragile agility of the individual human mind and spirit. Quite unlike Heinlein, however, is Bakhoun’s final lament at the condition of life itself, where an element of design seems to enter the picture: “For now that the Xipéhuz have perished, my soul misses them, and I ask of the Unique One what Fatality has wished it that the splendor of life be soiled by the blackness of Murder?” Bakhoun’s experience has taught him to think not in terms of tribes or species, but in terms of life in the broadest sense. The Xipéhuz do not appear to be carbon-based life forms. Yet they share with humans the common goal of the advancement of life as opposed to death. It is this primary struggle of life against death that seems to define Rosny’s ecosphere in general. Even so, Rosny’s idea of evolutionary struggle evolves significantly from Les Xipéhuz to La Mort de la Terre. For in this work, perhaps his greatest, Rosny redefines equality of species not in terms of battlefield victory but as a matter of subtle balance and imbalance of resources. What is more, we now see, in Targ’s final gesture, the possibility that there might be communication between competing species. There might, in fact, be the possibility of transhuman progression, some sort of bridge from the human species to the life form that succeeds it. Rosny implies that the human faculty of mind Descartes sees as unique in the universe not only might have come to us from elsewhere but also might evolve, via the human bridge, beyond carbon life into new and unknown regions.
It seems obvious to compare La Mort de la Terre and Wells’s Time Machine. Indeed, at first glance, Rosny’s title seems to fit Wells’s story better than his own. For in the eyes of Wells’s Traveler, the death of all the life forms that have culminated in mankind is the death of the Earth. Rosny’s Targ, however, comes to a very different realization. The Earth that sustains life as he knows it passes. But the same Earth abides to sustain a new species, the ferromagnetics. This difference is fundamental.
Both works are alike, however, in that they take their protagonist, and the reader, physically to the end of human time. For Wells’s Traveler, time travel is no longer the purview of armchair dreamers or Merlin’s spells, for he builds a machine that lets him travel a material time line. The evolutionary journey becomes, for him, a physical voyage that takes him to the entropy beach, where he witnesses firsthand the waning of vital energy, the recession of life forms. He becomes, in a sense, a Last Man in the flesh. Yet his voyage remains, in terms of his travels, a classic one because he returns to where he started. Once back in his time and place, the Traveler is no longer the Last Man; he is now instead an actor who plays the part of Last Man, a role he has incarnated in the flesh for a biological week and no more. The evolutionary voyage has left physical marks on his clothes, but there is no change in his material body. In contrast, the evolutionary voyage of Rosny’s Targ is that of all carbon-based life forms, and it is without return. Last Man Targ bears, along with all of his species, the physical marks of a long agony—large chests to process rarified air, narrow abdomens from lack of food. These changes are irreversible; Targ cannot simply change his clothes.
A point of comparison and contrast between these two works is their recreation, in the context of evolutionary theory, of the story of humankind’s mythical beginning—that of Adam and Eve. Since it invented this story, Western humanity has dreamt of an arcadia or golden age, a new Garden of Eden, where somehow time is stopped, perhaps even the inevitable end of things is reversed. For Wells, this end of things is entropy; for Rosny, it is ecodisaster. These different designations are essential if we are to understand each author’s sense of beginnings and endings. For both writers, some form of millennial pause is possible. But the end remains inexorable; there is no cycle of time, no regeneration of humankind and nature. Both pauses must, by the logic of evolution, come to the same conclusion. The nature of the Edenic moment, however, differs greatly between Wells and Rosny. For Wells’s Traveler, finding a future Eden appears to be a psychological necessity. This proves, in the end, a delusion, swept away by the iron logic of evolution. For Rosny’s Targ, however, Eden is a physical possibility, born of a resurgent genetic line and a fortuitous discovery of water that allows it to exist, and made conceivable through human ingenuity and technology. Eden for Rosny is the reawakened potential of experimental science, a potential that is soon dashed by physical forces beyond human control.
The Traveler’s time machine opens the entire future to scientific investigation. A curious traveler would hop around, studying the development of certain phenomena, much as Bakhoun studied the Xipéhuz. Wells’s Traveler, however, roars off impetuously into the future and comes to what appears to be a random stop in 802,701CE. Moreover, he stays with the Eloi and Morlocks for most of his narrative. Why does he do so? If we remember that time is a dimension of his consciousness, it is possible that he wished to land in this future, his hand guided by some deep prelapsarian desire. Indeed, his first thought on arriving is that he has found a postindustrial Eden in this lush Thames valley of the future. The verdigris-covered Sphinx he first encounters ought to have warned him that physical time is also present in arcadia. On an unconscious level, however, he seems to dismiss his training as an observer, to deny the evolutionary vision that has brought him to the future in the first place. Through a series of painful corrections, he reluctantly comes to see the hidden horror behind the Edenic vision he obviously prefers to see.
Evolution posits irreversible, nonpurposive change through time. The future is, by nature, neither predetermined nor predictable; it must always be different, new. In spite of this (or perhaps because of it), many in Wells’s England feared that if mankind, then considered to be at its apogee, poked too far into the future, it would find degeneracy, devolution. Thus the initial reaction of the Traveler on entering his brave new world: “What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race . . . had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?” (25). When he spies the Eloi, however, he is almost too glad to confirm the opposite. He finds attractive, carefree beings, who live in communal dwellings. They cavort and play. He sees the dream of a “communist” commune of his time come true.
The Traveler is too keen an observer, however, to give in totally to wishful thinking. He notes that Eloi buildings show signs of disrepair. But if these people do not work, where do they get their food and clothes? There is not simply peaceful cohabitation of species here, for plants and weeds grow untended, chaotically. He chooses however to ignore these details for another one that points, this time, toward utopia in evolutionary terms. The Eloi are oddly alike physically. Might this not be the result of man’s mastery of nature, where variations and “accidents” have been eliminated, and no contagious diseases remain? There are no more pests, no more need to toil, to “struggle” in the Darwinian sense. Again, to whatever extent he is seduced by this arcadian vision, the Traveler remains enough of a scientist to sense a darker truth behind the Eloi facade. In conquering nature, mankind may have conquered itself: “I thought of the physical slightness of these people, their lack of intelligence . . . and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong . . . and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions” (39). He begins to realize he is in the future, and it is a time of winding down, not of genesis. Yet even in the act of admitting so, the Traveler’s vision remains clouded by elegiac regret. He retains his Eden in a lament for Eden lost.
To recreate Eden, we need a man and a woman. The Traveler is given his Edenic chance when he returns and finds his machine missing. Thinking he can never return home, he now becomes free to make this new world his own, to make himself Adam within it. Thus the meeting with Weena is significant, for she is his potential Eve. In fact, a certain “back to the Garden” symbolism surrounds their meeting. When he spies Weena drowning in a stream, and no Eloi attempting to rescue her, he “slips off” his clothes and wades in to save her. Having seen by now the lack of vigor of the Eloi, he thinks he has found in Weena something different, an atavism among a weakened gene pool: “I had got such a low estimate of their kind that I did not expect any gratitude from her. In that, however, I was wrong” ([58]). If gratitude is still present among these degenerates, there must be nobler sentiments yet. The dream is rekindled.
Interestingly, in the minds of modern readers, this barest of hints about Weena still inspires full-blown Edenic scenarios. Two such “readings” are found in George Pal’s 1960 film based on Wells’s novel and the Simon Wells remake (2002). In Pal’s film, the Adam and Eve motif is highlighted by the visual fact that Weena is a beautiful woman. She is, as in Wells’s story, initially an empty vessel. The difference, however, is that Pal’s Traveler reenergizes the beautiful body, and in doing so fashions his own Eve. Ultimately he restores to Weena and her people the capacity to resist, and evil and sin (the deformed Morlocks) are expelled from the land. The Traveler goes back to the present, gathers a set of encyclopedias, and returns to the virgin land (pace Henry Nash Smith), a fresh start, a new Eden. The Simon Wells remake uses a dizzying manipulation of time lines to give the Traveler two possible endings, one humdrum (a staid career with a blond Edwardian wife and a family), the other a new start with a dusky Weena in a future world of lush beauty, over which they rule as Adam and Eve.
Both films end here, giving proof of some deep cultural desire for an Edenic second chance. Both avoid sending the Traveler on to an encounter with a dying Earth. For Wells’s Traveler, however, Eden is ultimately a nostalgic interlude. Once the Traveler is forced to open his eyes to the scientific reality of the situation, his awakening is all the more horrific. Weena is seen as she really is, “a poor mite,” more a domestic animal than a child with promise. After he explores the underground lair of the Morlocks, he can no longer entertain his delusion that he has discovered arcadian innocence. But his thinking remains wishful, and he briefly imagines a sort of capitalist utopia, a world order based on a fragile equilibrium between Carolingian aristocrats and brutish workers. This is the tainted dream of Victorian apologists, the playful gardens and underground workers’ city depicted by Fritz Lang in Metropolis. The Traveler seeks to hold on to this vision, even in the face of evidence that the Morlocks are cannibals. It takes, finally, a Morlock attack to make him see the truth. What he discovers in the ruins of the Green Palace, in the night forest as he flees with club and matches, is raw physical devolution. The Morlocks raise the Eloi for food, Weena is lost, the Traveler recuperates his machine as white hands clutch at him in the dark. Fleeing this world, further flight only takes him to a more horrific future, where mankind has perished, and its Earth dying apace.
Rosny’s Edenic moment resembles that of Wells in that it comes at the end of human history, and seems to offer a final chance to renew humanity. Nonetheless, the difference from Wells, though simple, is fundamental. Because of his time machine, the Traveler is in violation of the process of physical evolution that has shaped the world of Eloi and Morlock. His story of time travel, therefore, is at best an evolutionary romance. He has seen the terrible future; he could have been trapped there. But luck and his fears bring him back to tell his tale. The narrator, on hearing this tale, says that to remain sane, he must assert the Edenic dream at every moment, knowing the end but living every day “as though it were not so.” Another lesson comes clear from the story itself: no time traveler will ever recover Eden lost, for no time traveler can change any part of the time continuum. A time traveler is merely an observer in the stream of time. All glide ghostlike through time; they are Emerson’s bird that never alights. Rosny’s Moedigen may resemble ghosts, but they appear to share a common space-time continuum with humans, thus may be an active element in the ecology of our Earth. The Traveler, however, is in violation of the laws of time everywhere except in his own biological existence, moving inexorably from Eden to end.
In contrast, Rosny’s Targ, by virtue of his evolutionary development, belongs biologically to a far future world. La Mort de la Terre is not a romance but an evolutionary epic. As such, it offers a sweep of time that is neither observed nor remembered but lived, biologically and ecologically, over a vast time line, at the end of which we find Targ and his peers, evolved humans who rightfully call themselves, in a strictly evolutionary sense, Last Men. Long historical analepses in this novella recount the collective wisdom of generations. They tell that life once thrived on sea and land, that humankind ultimately became the master of things. They also detail the logic of evolutionary forces whereby humankind’s rise has created the necessary conditions for its demise: “L’homme capta jusqu’à la force mystérieuse qui a assemblée les atomes. Cette frénésie annonçait la Mort de la Terre.” (Mankind harnessed everything right down to the mysterious force that bound together the atom. This frenzy heralded the Death of the Earth.) For Targ, a man living in this final time, the discovery of a new Eve is neither dream nor desire. It is an atavistic accident to seize on, one that offers the biological possibility of species regeneration.
Targ’s people preside over an empty wasteland without water. They are the final survivors of an “agony” of the human species that has lasted for a span of a hundred thousand years. Over this period humans have adapted, physically and culturally, to severe environmental changes. Human society is now rigidly legislated, and population control has been codified into iron law. These Last Men, said in the opening pages to possess “resigned grace” (“son être exhalait une grâce résignée, un charme craintif”), at first may suggest Wells’s Eloi, an effete and decadent race. But unlike the Eloi, Rosny’s Last Men have technology, developed in humankind’s past, that continues to sustain them, even in their decline. Wells thinks in terms of rupture, of radical rise and fall. Here instead the trajectory is a continuous curve, sloping up and then gradually downward to zero. These people have not lost the marvelous machines in Wells’s Palace of Green Porcelain, their books have not turned to dust. But the fact that Rosny’s humanity has retained them reveals just how insignificant mankind and its machines are when measured against the irreversible changes in the natural environment that are destroying all carbon life on Earth.
There is no need here, as in The Time Machine, to see through a green illusion. Targ’s evolved future world is an antiarcadia by virtue of its sheer physical nature: a harsh desert world where surviving humans are resigned to a slow, inevitable drying up of all sources of water. If one is tempted to see the small number of oases dotted around the desert Earth as utopian colonies, one should look again. True, their inhabitants have mastered agronomy; they have inherited sophisticated communication devices, “planetaries” and “gliders” invented in the past, that allow these islands in the net to interrelate across vast arid wastes. Yet a utopian stasis, set against the larger play of forces, is unsustainable. Targ must literally heed the slightest shaking of the ground. More and more frequent small tremors—“butterflies” in relation to the vaster cataclysms of the past—gradually send the existing water supply deeper and deeper into the ground: “Ainsi, le malheur qui ruinait la suprême espérance n’était pas une grande convulsion de la nature, mais un accident infinitésimal, à la taille des faibles créatures englouties.” (Thus the disaster that destroyed the last hope of mankind was no great convulsion of nature, but an infinitesimally small accident, of the same magnitude as the feeble creatures it engulfed.) Another difference: the iron-based ferromagnetics that stir outside the walls are, unlike the Morlocks, only indirectly born of humankind. Our industry prepared the terrain, and perhaps gave the spark, for their creation. Yet in the large view, they are merely another part of the general transformation of Earth. All the adversarial dualities of human thought simply dissolve into a complex web of cause and effect over which humankind ultimately has no control. The farthest thing from the sparse lives of these Last Men is desire for a golden age. Nor does Rosny need to place a sphinx at the portals of his future to remind us of the ravages of time.
Evolutionary atavisms do occur in Rosny’s terminal world. In Targ and his sister Arva, for example, old human traits of initiative and adventurousness are physically resurgent. Targ is a doer rather than a dreamer, a Bakhoun at the end of human time, a new incarnation of an earlier, now long-forgotten humankind that was willing to struggle against overwhelming odds. Despite this, Targ’s adventure is doomed because the conditions that sustain heroic human activity on the most basic, physical level are no longer present. Given this physical reality, it is all the more poignant that Targ does find, in Érê, a woman in the flesh who is capable of replenishing the Earth with a new race of vigorous humans. She is a new Eve in a world that has long lost the luxury of eschatology, of pondering such things as the “Fall.” Her blond hair merely signals atavistic genes from a heroic past. In her the blond heroine of legend is recast as a genetic gift. And Targ wins her hand with a deed that, if it might long before have been seen as heroic chivalry, is now the product of sheerest physical necessity. In the end, this couple and their family gain their Eden. But it in turn is nothing more than a material enclave, a place temporarily sheltered from change by humankind’s perfect machines. Targ’s colony, technically, could perpetuate itself forever in terms of energy and food; but it is doomed by forces beyond its control. Evolutionary time is an arrow, and what occurred in the beginning of humankind’s history cannot be repeated. Targ and Érê must face their inevitable End.
Is Rosny cruel to suggest the myth of Eden at the end of time, when everything points to the futility of such myths when faced with the iron laws of physical nature? Or is he simply presenting the terminal world in a neutral manner, as a world where all things, even our most sacred stories, are in the end reduced to a common denominator of genetic and biological survival? Either way, or both, Wells’s narrative, however grim, is comforting in comparison, because its subtext remains anthropocentric. It speaks for mankind, not for processes. The Traveler misunderstands the future, not because the physical conditions he faces are so complex as to be ultimately beyond his control,, but because the models he applies are human models: Edenic utopia, the labor-capital equation. A Rosny protagonist would study the Eloi and Morlocks as new facts, as objective phenomena. The Traveler reacts, and his reactions prove all too human. Because he is seeking a human future, he would neither see nor understand a species like Rosny’s ferromagnetics, beings that are chemically variant but still a form of life. When asked to look beyond human time, to a landscape that is empty of human life yet still has living forms in it, his response is to look back in horror, uttering a recessional that traces the process of life back from himself, the Last Man sitting on his machine, through mammalian life, to amphibians, and finally to the primal sea from which these “ancestors” of man first emerged. Just as his physical travel is regulated by the exactly equal stretching forward and backward of Mrs. Watchett, so his journey in evolutionary time comes full circle in himself, and his time—a humanity that, perhaps, never moved from 1895 at all.
How different is the vast evolutionary processional that accompanies Targ’s final moments! Wells’s Traveler, in his vision, moves back along his chain of evolution. In opposite fashion, Axel’s famous dream brings the entire process of evolving life forward to culminate in himself, nineteenth-century mankind at its evolutionary apogee. In contrast, Targ’s vision is unique, because it is not centered in humankind but tells of the rise and fall of all carbon-based life forms: “Il refaisait, une fois encore, le grand voyage vers l’amont des temps. . . . Et d’abord, il revit la mer primitive, tiède encore, où la vie foisonnait, inconsciente, insensible.” (He made, one more time, the grand voyage back toward the beginning of time. . . . And first, he saw again the primeval sea, still warm, swarming with life, unconscious and unfeeling.) Notice that the emphasis is not on ancestral forms of life that lead to humankind but rather on the physical conditions (“la mer primitive, tiède encore” [the primeval sea, still warm]) that result in the creation of carbon-based life in general. In this huge flow and ebb of flora and fauna, of names and learned designations, humankind is dwarfed, its “triumph” merely a brief instant in the history of life on Earth. Rosny gives us instead a vitalist dream of the awakening and proliferation of a plurality of evolutionary forms—iguanodons, cave bears, aurochs. Rosny’s only distinction, in this mighty paean to organic life, is between animate and inanimate things; he sees that all forms of life have emerged from the mineral and must someday return to the mineral. Thus, because the ferromagnetics will abide, humankind’s passing is not the end of life, but only of life as we know it. The single, raw fact is that another form of life inherits our world.
For his time, Rosny’s pluralistic vision is unique in its attempt to create a balanced ecosystem, in which humankind is neither all-powerful nor all-destructive but merely a significant element in a larger equation. True, in Targ’s dream, mankind is called “le destructeur prodigieux de la vie” (the prodigious destroyer of life). But though it ruled and ravaged, in this larger picture mankind is, if anything, only partly responsible for its end. For Rosny, the process of evolution is beyond human power or desire, and humans are neither to be praised nor blamed. Wells, in contrast, seems to place the blame on mankind. In his arrogance as new “scientific” man, the Traveler is the embodiment of the process that leads to the Palace of Green Porcelain. He and his kind write the theories and make the machines that, as we discover, have robbed mankind, and by analogy the Earth, of its vital energy. Man’s society will create the degenerate ecology of Morlocks feeding on Eloi, a cannibalistic machine of diminishing energy that mirrors the final entropy of all life forms. Seen through the eyes of mankind, the future panorama of The Time Machine inscribes a closed circle, where back to the future is now forward to the past. The Traveler’s narrative remains an elegy for mankind trapped between its mythic Sphinx and its modern myth of the culminating ape.
Targ’s vision, on the other hand, has clearly evolved. For example, most of his peers still see the ferromagnetics as vampires, beings who “drink” humans’ blood. For Targ, however, this is like calling humans vampires for breathing air; Targ is able to describe this process as a simple transfer of needed chemical elements. He and his circle have learned the lesson of mankind’s evolutionary adventure: the ferromagnetics are not our enemy but our successor. If we aided in their development, this was unavoidable, as they are a by-product of the same transformation of iron that fueled human industry. Rosny’s humans are presented as like any other population that grows, swells, and ultimately wanes and dies as the elements that sustain it are depleted. The rise of the ferromagnetics is simply another such evolutionary cycle. Despite obvious pangs of sympathy for humanity, Rosny’s narrator strives to present the geological upheavals that destroy carbon-based life as the doings of an indifferent nature.
Rosny’s evolutionary vision was unique for its time. It is still unique today, even in our age of “ecology.” It strives to present human beings engaged in a complex interplay of physical forces, and to do so in as neutral a manner as a human being can. Its approach is systemic, always seeing mankind as part of a larger system in transformation, and steadfastly refusing any theological or teleological subtext. Rosny notes the classic human hubris, and says mankind must bear some responsibility for changing the environment. But mankind is never wholly responsible, and in the end natural selection, seen in the most neutral manner possible, wins out. Nor does Rosny, in the opposite sense, exonerate mankind, making us the victim of hostile forces from without. The superstitious nomads first see the Xipéhuz as hostile invaders. But essentially the Xipéhuz are minding their own business, and merely react to defend their territory. The problem is that their territory, through natural population pressures, is growing, and begins to overlap with human expansion. Mutually impacting populations is the core problem in all three Rosny narratives. And though Rosny must, because he is human, tell these stories from the human point of view, he strives by all means possible to keep to the ecological middle ground, to present the workings of the system without taking sides. This is a very difficult stance to take when the story, as in La Mort de la Terre, is about the demise of humanity along with all accompanying forms of life. Yet the narrator of this novella openly states that the ferromagnetics alone are not the cause, or even the main reason, for humankind’s annihilation: “On ne peut pas dire que les ferromagnétaux aient participé à notre destruction” (One cannot say that the ferromagnetics actively participated in our destruction). Theirs is a life form that, in the classic Darwinian sense, has adapted and survived in a changing environment. Very few writers have wanted to carry the “inconvenient truths” of ecology this far.
Hard SF has been defined by Gregory Benford as writing “with the net up,” playing according to the rules of nature rather than to the sentimental desires of human beings. This defines a mode of storytelling that, in an age of modern science in which rational humankind is suspended between material infinities large and small, will not give in to the usual contrivances of conventional suspension-of-disbelief. In theory at least, hard SF does not allow its readers to avail themselves of the various retrieval strategies that might permit them to salvage their sense of humanity as they confront the edge of the abyss, the prospect of humanity’s extinction. If in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus we are told that the final note of Adrian Leverkühn’s cantata, humankind’s last hope for a presence in the material void, resonates endlessly in dark silence, hard SF tells us sound does not carry in the vacuum of outer space.16
But hard SF also comprises a worldview, a vision of the human condition and human evolution that does not violate material process but coincides with it, as far as we understand its workings. Essential to this vision, as it develops over the twentieth century, is the question of a posthuman or, more accurately, transhuman possibility: how and in what ways can we go beyond our spatiotemporal limits? Long before J. D. Bernal, Olaf Stapledon, and other evolutionary visionaries, Rosny posed the transhuman question in his writing. He did so in a strikingly speculative way in La Mort de la Terre, a work that predates Bernal by twenty years.
Bernal’s treatise The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929) could serve as a metanarrative for the development of hard SF. It takes scientific humankind to the threshold of a dimorphic split. Seeking to envision what a posthuman condition might be, Bernal restates the major questions that have accompanied the development of Western science since the seventeenth century: What is special about humankind—now seen as material entity? If that specifically human quality is thought, intelligence, is it possible for this quality to evolve beyond its human source without losing its specificity? The recent physicist-writer Robert L. Forward sounds like an evolutionist when he states that “there is a human world, and the real world out there; from the viewpoint of the scientist there are plenty more species to take your place. . . . Humans are not important, intelligence is.”17 In saying this, however, Forward does little more than restate the mind-matter duality that continues to shape hard SF speculation on transhumanity to this day. For the Cartesians, thought is the defining human quality; the rest of the universe is nonthinking. Therefore, either thought dies with humanity or whatever faculty evolves as posthuman must a priori resemble human thought. For Baconian skeptics, the human limit remains as well. For their part, Baconians challenge the centrality of reason, as a faculty severely limited by the imperfection of human sense organs. As they do so, they arrive, like the Cartesians, at a like rupture between mind and world. Their impasse, too, is similar: either we deny that we can ever know our posthuman self; or we find ourselves doomed to depict that self as the mirror of what we are—imperfect thought.
Forward’s statement that “intelligence,” as something larger than human reason, is the motor of interspecies evolution may seem to be an important step in defining transhuman possibility. Seventy years earlier, however, Rosny’s speculative masterpiece La Mort de la Terre offers a probing examination of a similar pluralist vision. In previous works, Rosny focused on the struggle of intelligent species. Now the focus is squarely on humankind, on its demise (how the human is no longer a factor in the changing ecology of Earth), and on the possibility that, in the broader ecology of evolving life forms, humanity may contribute to and ultimately communicate with the species that replaces it. By the logic of his narrative, Rosny leads readers to speculate on the possibility that some kind of message, informing future life forms of what we were, could be sent across the gulf that separates expiring and emerging life. He asks readers to imagine how this transfer might occur, and to ponder whether this message might have contributed to the creation of an intelligence a million years in the future. Furthermore, he asks if such a message might provoke this future intelligence’s interest in hearing our story, a story that is part of their evolution as well? Rosny’s narrative may be the first to suggest a genuine transhuman experience. As such, it is an essential element in the history of hard SF.
La Mort de la Terre is, in its own right, a masterpiece, whose speculative reach is unparalleled. For in terms of future life and intelligence, Rosny looks not only beyond humankind but far beyond carbon-based life itself. On a scale from fast life forms to infinitely slow ones, he is willing to see beyond his ferromagnetics and to include in his vast evolutionary picture the inert mineral reign as well. His vision, in the largest evolutionary sense, is that of Norman O. Brown: life against death. Therefore, his challenge to the mind-matter duality is sweeping. In giving this challenge fictional form, he sets the benchmark for further hard SF speculations on humankind’s place in the universe.
The fact that Rosny’s work is so significant yet remains unknown to most SF writers and readers today, even in the Francophone world, suggests the synchronicity of SF’s development across national cultural lines. In the three representative works presented here, Rosny develops a vision and methods of constructing fiction that parallels the development of scientific or hard SF in the Anglo-American sphere. Rosny’s fiction calls for scientific responses to questions suggested by the imagining of figures such as aliens, intelligent nonhuman beings, and mutants. In doing so ultimately, it raises Bernal’s question of transhuman possibility. It is Rosny, more than either Verne or Wells, who follows the road map that Bernal laid down in 1929 and that has proven to be the masterplot at least for SF at the harder extreme of its spectrum.
Let us discuss Rosny’s SF legacy point by point. First of all, he appears to be the first writer systematically to use neologisms, even invented words, in the construction of other and future worlds. As early as the late 1880s, Edmond de Goncourt described Rosny’s speculative novels as “fantastico-scientifico-phono-littéraires” (fantastico-scientifico-phono-literary),18 attesting to the power of word sounds alone to create worlds. For example, when one searches Google for historical antecedents to the tribal names in Les Xipéhuz—Zahelals, Dzoums, Xisoastres, Pjarvanns—one finds Rosny as the sole source. These are in effect phonetic constructions that suggest pre-Assyrian times, words whose sole function is to create resonant bridges between our world and imagined little-known or unknown worlds. The designation “Xipéhuz,” beginning with x and ending with z, phonetically suggests that the species it conjures is near the omega of its evolutionary cycle. In Un autre monde, the name Moedigen, which pops unbidden into the mind of the protagonist, suggests there might be, in its Germanic echoes, some obscure link between the kobolds of Nordic fairy tale and the other-dimensional species that is observed here for the first time. These overtones are mere suggestions, but they work to close the gap between known and unknown.
In La Mort de la Terre, Rosny not only conjures new devices and machines by means of neologisms, but actually builds a coherent future world around these terms, exactly as Robert A. Heinlein will later do with his rolling roads and waldoes. The process is the opposite of that of Verne. Verne describes Nemo’s fabulous underwater vessel in great technical detail. In the end, however, he gives it a name that falls short of designating a future class or type of machine. On the contrary, Robert Fulton’s earlier submarine (1800) was named Nautilus (in fact a banal derivation from the Greek nautilos, sailor). In contrast Rosny, like Heinlein, throws out designations—Grand Planétaire, radiatrix, resonateurs, motrices—that indicate something we can imagine, but something with no ties to anything concrete we know. These are devices that already exist in this future world, and the reader is left the task of explaining their function by witnessing them in action. Rosny also presents future phenomena without analyzing or explaining them. An example is his offhand mention of “un repas de gluten concentré et d’hydrocarbures essentiels” (a meal of concentrated gluten and essential hydrocarbons)—all its components are known, but their combination and use remain for the reader to fathom. Likewise, Rosny mixes invented terms like ferromagnétaux with already existing specialized terms such as hygroscope, a neologism coined in 1790 to refer to a real machine that measures humidity in the air. Finally, it appears that Rosny, like Heinlein with his waldoes, may have coined words that subsequently, in the real world, have given rise to actual things or classes of things. For example, Rosny’s use of the word aviateur (which we translate as “aviator”)—from the neologism avion (a thing with wings), coined by Clément Ader in 1875—may be the first such use in the French language of a name that has become commonplace today.
Second, Rosny develops, in Les Xipéhuz and other similar works, a syncretic and synchronic style that allows him to extrapolate narratives into improbably far-distant worlds yet retain an oblique link with the reader’s known world. Later SF writers will use a similar style. With Les Xipéhuz, Rosny is said to have invented prehistoric fiction. If so, he would appear to have invented a paradox; for prehistory is, by definition, prewriting. Without writing, there is no bridge, no communication, from there to here. So how can anyone pretend to tell the prehistoric story? Unlike writers who unabashedly invent a lost past as fairy tale, Rosny builds the bridge physically into his story by having Bakhoun invent writing, and by creating a fictitious modern linguist, M. Dessault, who transcribes his tablets. The discovery of prehistory through the scientifically authorized narrative of the very man who invents the means of conveying it is a neat science-fictional trick, born of the need to make literal what otherwise remains conventional.
There remains, however, another question the literal or scientific mind must ask. Rosny’s Bakhoun speaks of things he knows; his words vouch for their existence. But the words themselves are merely objects, things an archeologist or linguist has found. From them alone, how can we ever know their context? Moreover, they are a modern discovery. Can we know in what manner Bakhoun actually spoke them? Rosny’s “scientific” “attempt” to mediate these words raises these questions, asking the reader, in literal manner, to question what otherwise might pass for convention. Historical novelists like Walter Scott were aware of this problem of “speaking the past”—having a narrator supposedly of the time in question speak in the voice of that time, which the novelist could not know firsthand. Scott tries to “fake it” by giving his novels’ narrators (and characters) an “archaic,” medievalizing mode of speech, which even in its time was recognized as a nineteenth-century imitation, but accepted as a necessary convention. The opening pages of Ivanhoe offer a good example. Later, more scientifically inclined writers like Flaubert scoffed at such artifice. At the same time, Flaubert (along with some of his contemporaries) was genuinely troubled by the fact that we cannot physically know the past. Making the past “speak” then becomes a problem that does not exist for more conventional writers.19
Rosny clearly knows he cannot make prehistory “speak”; yet he must find a way to tell the story that does not insult his scientifically inclined reader. Rosny’s situation in Les Xipéhuz is that of numerous later SF writers who purport to narrate far-distant worlds. These are worlds the reader visits for the first time, in the company of a narrator who is presumed to have been there before, but of course because of the realities of space-time cannot have been. But if that reader does not demand the impossible literal tour, on what level does he or she accept taking the journey? Rosny confronts this problem by moving his narrative to a synthetic level, generating out of recognizable styles of historical discourse that have been restructured, a narrative that reaches beyond the limits of known history by imitating the process itself of evolutionary time, at least as science understands it. Rosny does not use anachronisms so much as cultivate them in syncretic fashion. The result is a minisimulacrum, in terms of narrative style, of humankind’s evolutionary history—past, present, and future.
The first narrator in Les Xipéhuz does not pretend to historical omniscience. Its opening remarks seem to echo the precise, methodical descriptions of nineteenth-century science, detailing the new beings in a manner we identify as “objective.” The tone suddenly modulates, however, as the focus shifts from the soon-to-be-called Xipéhuz to the superstitious nomads. Describing the frenzied actions of the astrologer Yushik, the narrator begins to speak a language of emotional excess that invites the reader to experience this world through irrational eyes. Again, when Bakhoun takes up the narrative, his voice brings another shift of tone and manner of speech. He is presented as transitional man, representing humanity’s movement from nomadic to sedentary, agricultural existence. And true to his role, Bakhoun is the first human to invent a means of writing. Indeed, the rest of the narration is his account of events as preserved in what is called the Book of Bakhoun. But when Bakhoun speaks and reasons, his voice is that of Comte’s Scientific Man. Rosny’s contemporary reader would see Bakhoun’s method of apprehending phenomena as reflecting this Scientific Man, seen as the culmination of humankind’s development. Rosny allows style and language to convey these two different worldviews, or methods of perceiving material reality, contrasting the nomads’ superstition with Bakhoun’s capacity for cold analysis. In terms of how prehistoric humankind might have really spoken or reasoned, both voices are nineteenth-century transpositions, anachronisms. The purpose of their contrast, however, is to overlay what is not known in the past with a plausible historical schema. There is, however, another modulation of tone and vision, this time within Bakhoun’s own discourse. This occurs in his final invocation, as his voice suddenly speaks to the future of a human species that has barely emerged from obscure silence, suggesting a possibility that was new to the average nineteenth-century reader, that of evolutionary transformation. The Comtean voice reflects the apogee of human development. But the new, final voice offers a broader vision, one that transcends species boundaries, that speaks of a general “splendor of Life”: “Car, maintenant que les Xipéhuz ont succombé, mon âme les regrette, et je demande à l’Unique quelle Fatalité a voulu que la splendeur de la Vie soit souillée par les Ténèbres du Meurtre!” (For now that the Xipéhuz have perished, my soul misses them, and I ask of the Unique One what Fatality has wished it that the splendor of Life be soiled by the Blackness of Murder?) For Bakhoun, any hint of “survival of the fittest” is at once swept away by a broader sense of evolutionary dynamics.
Though the storyteller is obviously anchored in one historical time and place, Rosny uses a controlled spectrum of language—from superstitious effusion to Bakhoun’s sober analysis of fact to his evolutionary mysticism—to carry the reader from the present back to the past, and then to suggest an unknown future. When Rosny’s narrator tells us “ce fut l’an mil des peuples enfants, le glas de la fin du monde, ou, peut-être, la résignation de l’homme rouge des savanes indiennes” (this was the year 1000 for these infant peoples, the bell that tolled the end of the world, or perhaps, the resignation of the red man of the Indian jungle), we know the voice of the “civilized” nineteenth-century Westerner is speaking. But when we read “un matin d’automne, le Mâle perça les nues, inonda le Tabernacle, atteignit l’autel où fumait un coeur saignant de taureau” (one autumn morning, the Male God burst through the clouds, flooded the tabernacle, reached the altar where the bloody heart of a bull lay steaming), we experience an otherwise unknowable past through words and rhythms, only to be wrenched back to our familiar culture by Bakhoun’s language of fact and reason. Bakhoun’s final words, however, combining emotion and reason, take us forward, to a possible future of multiple evolutionary possibilities.
In a sense, Rosny’s narrative offers the stylistic blueprint for later hard SF extrapolations, for example Benford’s Great Sky River and Tides of Light, or more recent intergalactic playing fields, for example those of Stephen Baxter, where vast distances of never-experienced space-time make “playing with the net up” little more than an exercise in scientific theorizing. Even more than with Rosny, the worlds portrayed in these deep space-time novels lie absurdly far off the reader’s historical-linguistic map. To narrate these worlds, the writer must construct a new dynamic from synthetic combinations of known tones and styles that do not simply evoke an unknown world, but render it coherent. For example, Benford cultivates, in a manner quite similar to that of Rosny, an anachronistic alternation between Conan-like primitive speech (a nod to sword and sorcery) and precise and informed scientific discourse. These are the twentieth-century equivalents of Rosny’s nomads and positivist Bakhoun. As in Rosny, these opposing forms of discourse come together in outbursts of scientifico-evolutionary mysticism. In analogous manner, Benford’s synthesis suggests the possibility that today’s humanity could someday find itself in an intergalactic otherness so strange that, in terms solely of reason or of emotion, it must remain inconceivable, let alone uninhabitable. A new SF narrative device, by which we tell by analogy a world otherwise untellable, appears to be born with Rosny. Benford and his contemporaries have simply spread Rosny’s technique across seas of suns.
Les Xipéhuz poses another problem that sheds light on the future development of SF. The issue here is the Xipéhuz themselves—where did they come from, and what does their physical presence in early human times signify? Most readers call them “aliens,” despite the fact that neither Rosny’s narrator nor Bakhoun uses such a designation, nor anywhere suggests that they come from any other location but right here on Earth.20 Rosny, it seems, does not present them as “alien” because he does not want to swerve away from the scientific task of trying to describe and understand phenomena we encounter, no matter how bizarre they may seem. The use of this designation “alien” in fact, in subsequent SF, marks a dividing line between hard and soft SF. However “other” the Xipéhuz appear, Bakhoun takes them as facts. They are physically present, so it is assumed that they too have evolved as humans did, sharing the same environment. Prehistory is an unmapped territory, so it is quite plausible that they have evolved in some area of Earth that humankind has not yet visited, as when Greek explorers discovered all kinds of “Indian wonders” outside their familiar world, wonders they asked their audiences to believe existed, because those audiences had not yet seen them. It is out of fear of such unknowns that we give phenomena like this an extraterrestrial origin, or see them as invaders, beings brought to Earth by some deus ex machina, the chariots-of-the-gods scenario. Moreover, behind our choice of the word “alien” lies a deeper fear: that of the fragility of humankind’s domination of its earthly environment. At first, the Xipéhuz appear to be so unlike humans that it is hard to imagine any common origin for both species. Yet, as Bakhoun’s persistent observation soon discovers, they do appear to share certain customs and mores with their human adversaries. Because of this possible common ground, they now begin to seem more menacing, because they somehow belong to our world yet prove eminently hostile to our being part of it. What is more, Rosny does not give his readers an extraterrestrial “out.” They are invited to speculate on how these beings may have existed in our darkest past, to ask scientific questions instead of succumbing to primal fears. For example, what traces might the Xipéhuz have left in humankind’s collective unconscious? Might perhaps humankind’s common preoccupation with geometry, for instance—a shared language and symbolism of triangles and cones across diverse cultures—be due to some psychic scar left as a result of this far-distant combat with beings like the Xipéhuz? Prehistory has now become virgin territory for scientific, hence science-fictional, speculations.
The struggle with the alien question has had a long life in SF. The phenomenon of déjà vu was much discussed in Rosny’s time. Maupassant’s protagonist in the second version of “Le Horla,” for example, considers the possibility that the demons and monsters of popular lore were in fact sightings of aliens, misunderstood at the time by the superstitious mind.21 Some eighty years later, Arthur C. Clarke, in Childhood’s End (1953), created a story line in which, in hard SF fashion, a significant figure of legend is revealed in fact to be a physical reality, and “supernatural” terror is explained away by rational observation. A race of aliens, the Overlords, appears in humankind’s near future. They have wings, horns, and tails, and part of the plot centers around their being mistaken for devils. In the end the Overlords themselves explain the mystery: long ago they visited Earth; they were spotted by early humans, who in their fear associated horns and a tail with their most terrible superstitions. In the Xipéhuz, Rosny offers his reader the same problem but, unlike Clarke, does not actually work out a concrete solution in narrative terms. But he does seem to offer his reader, in Bakhoun’s efforts to devise a winning military strategy, a concrete example of how humankind, at an early stage of development, might have acquired its geometrical mode of thinking, in this case from physical observation of beings whose essence itself was geometry. Indeed, might not the tight phalanxes Bakhoun employs be the natural response to his observations of the bodily shapes and movements of the enemy facing him?
Seen in the light of Rosny’s pluralist vision, the idea of alien invasion marks a persistent refusal to accept an objectively ecological sense of humankind’s place in the universe. For it is alongside the alien that the Cartesian ghost slips into SF’s back door. In fact, the act of naming another species “alien” is just another way of preserving the Cartesian sanctity of the human mind, now seen to be under threat from hordes of so-called aliens who are automatically presented as physical monstrosities, beings by definition devoid of reason.
In Rosny’s work another problem arises, one that is most significant for the future development of SF. This problem is one that threatens, we could say, from within: it is the spontaneous mutation that evolves out of the normative human species, and appears to menace it. Un autre monde addresses this question in a very strange manner, given the climate of 1890s fiction; this period saw numerous alien invasion tales, but there were also many tales in which invisible forces take over human victims. These forces’ purpose of course is to create a hidden mutation, such that the outward form remains human but the being inside is transformed into an unhuman monster. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the most famous of these “body snatchers.” But even earlier in France, the protagonist of Maupassant’s “Le Horla” sees himself locked in mortal combat with an invisible being bent on invading his life and mind. Emerging from the research of Pasteur and the theory of germs as microbiological vectors for disease, there appears to arise a fear of unseen alien forces taking hold of our bodies and minds. In light of this fear, it appears to have been more comforting to invent a visible agent, such as Dracula, in order to locate this fear. Once a visible enemy is named, we can perhaps contain or defeat it. Dracula is ultimately tracked down; Maupassant’s protagonists are judged to be insane, and put away in an asylum. In contrast, the mutant in Un autre monde, much like the Xipéhuz in their story, appears as a natural, neutral phenomenon. He is not the product of “evil” forces or of any human agency. One might imagine that for Rosny, given the phobias of the late nineteenth century, the spontaneous appearance of a mutated being, the potentially dangerous product of a natural process like evolution, might seem all the more frightening. But this is not so. Rosny treats the mutant as a clinical problem, one that human science assimilates, rather than rejects.
Un autre monde in fact has both aspects; there are invisible beings (the Moedigen), and there is a human who has undergone a significant mutation. But they are presented separately, in two very different configurations. First, Rosny’s Moedigen are the very opposite of invaders. Even if, as is postulated, they may share with humans the same ecosystem, they exist in a different dimension of that system, going about their business indifferent to, and till now unknown by, human beings. Second, the way Rosny introduces his mutant differs surprisingly from the treatment of mutants in other tales of this kind: the mutant himself serves as the intermediary between the visible and invisible worlds. Instead of being a menace to humanity, his mutant powers prove a boon to human science, for they enable humans to observe and study the invisible beings. Not only are they no direct menace to humanity, but we make no attempt to “contact” them either. The humans in this story treat the strange invisible beings as nothing more than another phenomenon to observe, beings apparently as neutral toward us as subatomic particles. They are facts; we may, through observation and study, discover that they could be problematic to us; but this is not a question of intention or malicious agency. They are not “against” us; they are simply with us.
There is another striking difference as well, this time in Rosny’s attitude toward science. In the scene in Maupassant’s “Horla” in which Dr. Parent hypnotizes and manipulates the narrator’s cousin we have the impression that science itself may have some unholy alliance with the invisible forces of the “other.” Rosny’s Dr. Van den Heuvel, on the other hand, is a “pure” scientist. His bias, if anything, is ecological in nature. For he is able—unusual for a scientist in the last half of the nineteenth century—to entertain the postulate that all phenomena, those we see and those we do not see, may somehow share a common physical world, and perhaps because of this may impact each other in ways yet to be discovered. This hypothesis in itself is radical for a work written at the same time as Wells’s War of the Worlds. Indeed, the very idea that Moedigen are among us, and that they might be invisibly at work destroying our world, might seem likely to strike more terror in readers’ hearts than Wells’s overt Martian invasion. Instead, Rosny’s scientists propose to study them, much as we study “invisible” particles today, in order to learn about the broader foundations of nature. If in Maupassant and Stoker, as in many of the myriad SF mutation tales that followed, the invisible remains a place of terror, in Rosny, the invisible realm is simply another observational landscape. In this story, Rosny goes against the logic of his time by touting scientific objectivity over fear of the unseen.
There is an even stranger aspect to Un autre monde. Rosny’s protagonist, though obviously a mutant, is never once referred to as such. Nor do the scientists who deal with him, and thus know his powers, seem to fear him as such, despite the fact that such a spontaneous transformation of human senses would have been deeply troubling to Rosny’s contemporaries. For if evolution itself appears to be a safely long-term affair, here radical change suddenly emerges from a normal human situation, implying some terrible breakdown in the processes of nature themselves. No Dracula is responsible for creating Rosny’s protagonist; he simply comes to be. What is more astonishing yet is the scientists’ lack of reaction when the mutant reveals something infinitely more troubling in the final paragraphs: that he is not a one-time sport of nature but in fact the founder of a lineage of mutants. He calmly informs us that he has found a mate, in an asylum of all places, married her, and produced an offspring who has the same mutated sense of sight, who is “l’exact réédition de mon organisme (the exact replica of my organism).” No reader of the time could miss this blatant dismissal of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Even more astonishing is the serene absence, in Dr. Van den Heuvel, of Frankenstein’s horrified response to the same prospect—that a “race” of mutants might ensue.
Rosny’s mutant, like Frankenstein’s creature, is presented as a mixture of monstrous and superior traits. Shelley’s creature addresses its creator and requests he give him a mate. Frankenstein refuses, fearing the consequences for humankind of this new race of beings. Denying his creature its future, Frankenstein forces it, in the role of avenger, to turn on and destroy its creator’s present existence. This is the Frankenstein impasse: to deny the bride is to obliterate all possibility of an evolutionary future for the new species; to give the bride is to breed fear of the future, of the creation of a more powerful and intelligent race that, although somehow born of man, threatens the destruction of mankind. This impasse stands in the way of an evolutionary vision of humankind going beyond itself. Most subsequent SF has come up against this barrier.22 Classic works such as Van Vogt’s Slan, Sturgeon’s More Than Human, and Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children feature groups of mutated humans whom society, out of fear of their difference and potential power, persecutes. If such stories suggest any evolutionary message, it is generally a twisted one. In Heinlein especially, the mutants fight back, developing their new genetic material in secret in order to create the superior “race” that Frankenstein (as these cases rightfully prove) so feared.
Rosny’s story simply ignores the Frankenstein impasse. Without resistance or fear, Rosny’s world seems to accept the advent of this new race of mutants, in the name of the advancement of science. Moreover, the mutant protagonist himself has no real fear of being persecuted. He has no intention of using his mutational advantage for any other purpose than aiding human science. “J’eus le frisson de la Terre promise” (I trembled as if I saw the Promised Land), he exclaims, when he enters the presence of Dr. Van den Heuvel, the scientist he will work with. To be sure, Rosny’s mutant is aware that he is different. He prudently (given the cultural climate in which he appears) conceals his differences on the road to Amsterdam and modern science. Even so, even though he looks and acts odd, and his speech seems incomprehensible, the crowd is not hostile, merely bemused, taking him for a savage from Borneo (a Dutch colony at the time).
He has a brief fear of his otherness when taken in the hospital to a room filled with aborted monstrosities of nature in jars: “Je me trouvai assis parmi des monstres conservés dans l’alcool: foetus, enfants à forme bestiale, batraciens colosses, sauriens vaguement anthropomorphes. C’est bien là, pensai-je, ma salle d’attente. . . . Ne suis-je pas candidat à l’un de ses sépulcres à l’eau-de-vie?” (I found myself seated amidst monsters preserved in alcohol: fetuses, children with bestial shapes, colossal batrachians, saurians that were vaguely anthropomorphic. . . . Am I not a candidate for one of these sepulchers, to be preserved in alcohol?) This fear, however, is not the paranoia of Maupassant’s protagonists. It is placed on an evolutionary level—the fear that he might be a one-time “sport,” an evolutionary dead end. But the scientists do not quarantine him, either in a jar or in an asylum. They simply accept him and his mutated sense as an object of study. And he in turn accepts existing for the good of science. He knows he has further powers of use to science, and will reveal them when the time is right.
There remains the problematic fact that his new optical sense can perceive invisible beings in another dimension. Society would surely brand this as “paranormal,” and “rational” science of the time would reject his claim without seeking to verify it. Rosny’s mutant, however, not only knows he has this ability but also knows he has a moral duty to use it solely to obtain scientific knowledge of the physical world. The mutant in fact has a plan to circumvent social obstacles. He cleverly maximizes the impact of a full revelation of his powers: “Avant d’appeler l’attention sur mes connaissances extra-humaines, ne pouvais-je exciter le désir de faire étudier ma personne? Les seuls aspects physiques de mon être n’étaient-ils pas dignes d’analyse?” (Before calling attention to my knowledge of extrahuman phenomena, might I not stimulate the desire in people to study my person? Were not my physical attributes alone worthy of being studied?) The mutant makes odd assumptions for his time. He assumes all future scientists will be Van den Heuvel. He also assumes that they will, like Van den Heuvel, accept this gift in his descendants, and will continue to use this new sense of sight as a scientific instrument to study the Moedigen. In the opposite sense, he is serenely certain that his descendants will continue to serve human science the way he has, that they will not seek personal advantage, or launch a vendetta against humankind: “Pourquoi ne naîtrait-il pas, de lui-aussi, des voyants du monde invisible?” (Why would there not be born, from [my son] himself as well, more seers of the invisible world?) and so on down the line.
Rosny’s scientists, unlike Victor Frankenstein and his progeny, prove capable of looking beyond their fears of a mutant future. Instead of a struggle, they seek partnership with the mutants, such that both can focus on a common goal, in this case the avoidance of a possible ecological crisis brought on by the Moedigen. Rosny’s mutant embodies the spirit of science in its purest form. In his final moment, he says “une béatitude infinie me pénètre” (an infinite bliss passes into me, an expression of his disinterested love of learning). In this sense, Un autre monde is the ancestor of later SF tales that favor cooperation with other species over paranoia and conflict, for example Murray Leinster’s “First Contact” (1946). More to the point, as a story of cooperative scientific research between potentially rival human evolutionary variants, Un autre monde moves toward a transhuman vision.
It can be argued that most hard SF confronts the same questions Rosny raises—aliens, intelligent nonhuman beings, mutants, the Frankenstein impasse—in the same rigorous way his work does, opposing objective reason to sentimental anthropocentrism. The implacable evolutionary logic of Rosny’s depiction of the death of humankind and humankind’s Earth, however, offers a situation that even the hardest SF has great difficulty in resolving. In La Mort de la Terre Rosny presents carbon life at the end of its tether, with humankind literally its last form, in a world ecology terminally hostile to its existence. Humanity’s end, however, as seen here in the broader ecology of evolving life forms, raises the possibility of a transhuman event. Can, in strictly evolutionary terms, some aspect of humanity not only pass to its successor life form, but have a significant effect on that life form’s future development? Can some kind of human legacy survive the death of humans’ carbon environment? How might this legacy be encoded—as species memory, genetic codes, or some other form of biophysical information—so as to be read by a posthuman entity?
Hard SF has speculated much on the posthuman, from Bernal to the significant symposium in Foundation 78 (2000).23 In all of this, humankind’s successor tends to remain a Bernalian construct: either some form of hybridized “enhancement” or a being composed of mental energy, like Bernal’s dimorph. In neither aspect do we see beyond the mind-matter duality that continues to ensure humankind a central role in future evolution, in a sense making evolution humankind’s evolution. In contrast, Rosny’s pluralistic sense of multiple life forms’ continuity-in-transformation opens a field of speculation where process is more important than product, where the transhuman rather than the posthuman is the focus. Even after a century of speculation—scientific and fictional—on humanity’s future, Rosny’s rigorously evolutionary Last Man scenario remains unique, and should make us rethink our approach to this problem. Such rethinking is especially needed today, in light of recent scientific theories of the possibility of “extremophile” forms of life on Mars and, most telling, of the NASA discovery, right here on Earth at Mono Lake, California, of a form of life that has arsenic as an essential element of its DNA. The idea of an iron-based life form reclaiming the Earth seems less preposterous in light of these discoveries.
Rosny’s title La Mort de la Terre is significant. Its focus on the death of humankind’s Earth cements the evolutionary link between human beings and their changing physical environment. Targ is both Last Man and last example of carbon-based life. Where he stands, there can only be two possibilities: life as we embody it perishes entirely, leaving no trace, or some aspect of that life is transmuted, passed on through the ferromagnetics to some future life form. Increasingly, as we follow Targ’s heroic but futile efforts to find water, to restore the lost environmental conditions that support his life form, death appears to be the only possible outcome. If science sees life going on, that is small consolation, for our life form will not. Even so, a close look at Targ’s final moment suggests that a transhuman event might be possible within the parameters of a thoroughly scientific view of things. Indeed, if we respect the logic of the narrative, it may already have occurred.
The account of Targ’s struggle is moving. He is clearly the conventional hero, the special man who struggles valiantly against impossible odds, and loses. On the level of human myth, he at first appears to be a recurrent figure: the chivalric knight who by means of his deeds claims the hand of the woman he most desires. Rosny’s Last Man is, in this traditional sense, the finest example of human tenacity, ingenuity, and virtue. But no hero in previous fiction has faced such an extreme collective tragedy. The idea itself of a hero assumes there will always be heroes, Beowulf will always arise to fight against darkness and brutish nature. Now, however, Targ’s sole “enemy” is a radical and irreversible transformation of life conditions, for which humans are only partly responsible. As hero, he is beyond good and evil. And he knows—as all forms of carbon life perish with him, despite moments of hope and wishful thinking—that there is no possibility, mythical or physical, of survival.
Targ knows his condition and its finality. Yet his final act is a free one: he gives himself consciously and of his free will to the ferromagnetics, in a quasi-existential manner. Targ knows that because he consciously accepts annihilation, he is free to exercise a final act of will, the sole freedom left to humankind at this extreme juncture. He could take the euthanasia drug, like his sister Arva and the other Last Humans, and simply drift into oblivion. Instead, Targ chooses to affirm his terminal humanity, by a willed act, in the face of the ferromagnetic successor: “Il eut un dernier sanglot; la mort entra dans son coeur et, refusant l’euthanasie, il sortit des ruines, il alla s’étendre dans l’oasis, parmi les ferromagnétaux.” (He uttered a final sob; death entered into his heart and, refusing euthanasia, he left the ruins, he went to lie down in the oasis, among the ferromagnetics.)24
These views of Targ’s final heroic act can, however, be subsumed in Rosny’s broader sense of a transhuman act. For in a sense, Targ does not face his end alone after all. In the paragraph immediately preceding his act of giving himself to the ferromagnetics, he offers a short meditation on his personal relationship with Earth’s environment, where humankind’s Earth becomes, one last time, his personal Earth. Indeed, Targ’s final sense of his human condition is an ecological one, in the basic sense of the word as referring to home. His final musings concern neither his personal act nor the terrifying certainty that his species must die with him. The full impact of his situation only comes when he understands that as Last Man, he is also the last living carbon-based life specimen on the planet, and with his passing an entire kingdom of life must pass.
Let us trace the steps whereby Targ comes to his acceptance of this sweeping vision, and to personalizing it as an ecological one, which contextualizes his final act of giving self. Targ has, in a sense, already personalized the entire history of carbon life, in a vast retrospective meditation in which he has reviewed the total evolutionary sweep, beginning with the primal sea and ending with mankind as master of the atom: “Le vainqueur capta jusqu’à la force mystérieuse qui a assemblé les atomes. ‘Cette frénésie même annonçait la mort de la terre . . . la mort de la terre pour notre Règne,’ murmura doucement Targ.” (The conqueror harnessed everything right down to the mysterious force that bound together the atoms. “This frenzy itself announced the death of the Earth . . . the death of the Earth for our Kingdom!” Targ murmured softly.)
If Targ now has his moment of despair, it is despair on an evolutionary scale: “Un frisson secoua sa douleur. Il songea que ce qui subsistait encore de sa chair s’était transmis, sans arrêt, depuis les origines. Quelque chose qui avait vécu dans la mer primitive, sur les limons naissants, dans les marécages, dans les forêts, au sien des savanes, et parmi les cités innombrables de l’homme, ne s’était jamais interrompu jusqu’à lui. . . . Et voilà! Il était le seul homme qui palpait sur la face, redevenue immense, de la terre!” (He shivered in his suffering. He thought that whatever remained now of his flesh had been transmitted, in an unbroken line, since the origin of things. Some thing that had once lived in the primeval sea, on emerging alluvia, in the swamps, in the forests, in the midst of savannas, and among the multitude of man’s cities, had continued unbroken down to him. . . . And here it was, the end! He was the only man whose heart beat on the face of the Earth, once again vast and empty!) With Targ, the culminating species has literally become the last piece of the life form that nurtured that species’ own rise. As such, however, Targ now feels the very opposite of Pascalian alienation. For one last time, Targ finds himself at home among familiar stars, the same stars that have comforted the gaze of the trillions of humans who have preceded him: “La nuit venait. Le firmament montra ces feux charmants qu’avaient connus les yeux de trillions d’hommes. Il ne restait que deux yeux pour les contempler!” (Night fell. The firmament displayed the lovely stars that had shone for the eyes of trillions of men. There remained only two eyes to contemplate them!) Moreover, Targ, in this situation, does more than simply contemplate. He now counts the stars he knows best, his stars. (“Targ dénombra ceux qu’il avait préférés aux autres” [Targ counted out those stars he had preferred to all others].) Finally, at the end of human time, he looks on as the most familiar of mankind’s heavenly bodies rises, “l’astre ruineux . . . l’astre troué, argentin et légendaire” (the star of disasters . . . the star riddled with holes, silvery, the stuff of legend). The Moon has accompanied humankind on its rise and fall, has been its most constant companion. It is at this moment, when Targ is fully in harmony with his ecology—physical and mythical—that he chooses to join the ferromagnetics. It is an act that makes him a willing part of the larger evolutionary process as it unfolds.
But the novella does not end here. Its simple, one-sentence final paragraph clearly suggests that something more has occurred than a terminal, statistically meaningless offering of the last carbon molecules that exist on Earth: “Ensuite, humblement, quelques parcelles de la dernière vie humaine entrèrent dans la Vie Nouvelle.” (Then, humbly, a few small pieces of the last human life entered into the New Life.) This final sentence suggests the possibility of a startling shift of focus from the human to the transhuman. It offers the outline for three important steps in tracing this process. First, the narrator indicates what has happened; second, the narrator suggests why this might have happened; third, the narrator offers a possible speculation on how Targ’s act may have effected the transhuman passage. First, following the temporal adverb ensuite (then), marking movement beyond the human, comes the narrator’s use of the preterite, the tense that designates completed action in the past: entrèrent. The narrator who has followed Targ’s final moments so closely is now, by the logic of the tenses, speaking after the death of the last human. The use of this past tense certainly suggests that what, logically, must now be a posthuman entity, is at this point speaking to an audience that, because all human life is gone, has to be posthuman as well. Mankind’s story, at least, has passed to a successor life form. Second, the word parcelle points to an interconnected, ecological system of life, a system in which whatever Targ has passed on must continue, in the larger scheme of things, to have a function. In such a system, if individual forms of life perish, life itself continues to change and evolve. Third, the adverb humblement appears to be a sign of empathy on the part of the narrator, this time for what Targ has given, and for his decision to become the vector for now-dead carbon life. This expression of sympathy, responding across the void to Targ’s selfless act, may explain the mechanism that has allowed a special form of information not only to pass into the new life but also to significantly influence its further evolution, indeed the creation of a future intelligence, which in turn is interested in telling and hearing Targ’s story. This mechanism is altruism.
The temporal logic of the narrator’s final sentence is striking. The adverb ensuite (then) indicates a narrative instance that follows Targ’s death. Then, as noted, the preterite entrèrent (entered into) indicates the absolute pastness of human life. The narrator’s use of the preterite is highly significant in this context. Had the narrator chosen the imperfect tense entraient (were entering into), we could perhaps still place the narration before Targ’s death. Targ having lain down among the ferromagnetics, the imperfect verb would depict him not as dead but in the act of dying; and these final words could then be said to represent his dying thoughts, presented in style indirect libre, with the narrator showing such intimate knowledge of Targ’s thoughts that the two voices become almost indistinguishable. The use of the passé simple preterite, however, places narrator and audience beyond Targ, locates them somewhere in a distant evolutionary future. The narrative logic of this verb tense affirms that some significant part of Targ’s “matter” has already passed on to future life forms. At this specific moment, the logic of tenses is clear. If Targ the Last Man is dead, who or what is narrating this final moment? To whom is it being told? A narrator and listener are out there, beyond Targ; and they are clearly capable of understanding and sympathizing with his, and humankind’s, final moments.
In both Les Xipéhuz and Un autre monde, a sudden shift of evolutionary perspective takes place in the final paragraph. These final shifts bring about a broader vision, a promise of evolutionary development. The same is true for the last statement of La Mort de la Terre, but the vision here is infinitely more challenging. For humankind is not ascending but perishing, hence forced to imagine what, if any, role human achievements might have in the evolutionary future of life. The contrast with Les Xipéhuz is clear. In that work, Bakhoun meets and defeats a rival species with whom he has no direct communication. The passing of the Xipéhuz is as final as is the total extinction of carbon life here. But to the human reader, Bakhoun’s culminating act, his empathy for the lost species, looks forward to a new vision of life, one capable of condemning the law of survival of the fittest as a cosmic crime against life. The final paragraph of Un autre monde offers a similar leap across evolutionary boundaries. This time the voice is that of the mutant whose “race,” now a physical reality, might in some future time conflict with mankind. Instead, however, the mutant chooses willingly to cooperate with human science, working toward the common exploration of a larger ecological system, one that now widens to include the alternately evolved Moedigen and the possibility that their activities may in fact impact what has now become a common or shared world.
In La Mort de la Terre, the question of evolutionary continuity is more problematic, for here humankind is the dying species that sees its evolutionary progress ruptured forever. In the final sentence, however, after that rupture has occurred, the narrator’s use of the strange word parcelle for the part of Targ that passes into the new life form suggests the presence of an evolving system of life, with which Targ’s seemingly terminal act is interconnected, its past given a future. In contrast, in the earlier passage where Targ’s situation is presented in terms that echo Pascal’s reed, the narrator’s word is particule, which simply means “small part” (petite partie). Particule implies no concern about what the particle is a part of. It is a word, as in la physique des particules (particle physics), that belongs to what Pascal calls the esprit de géometrie, to the world as defined by the mind-matter duality. The word parcelle, in contrast, implies the larger context of what we call today an ecological system. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defines it as a “petite partie de quelque chose” (a small part of something). Its use, at this juncture, more than suggests that we are dealing with an ecological vision; it asserts that even in the seeming finality of Targ’s death as particule, he remains, as parcelle, part of a whole. The word signifies both an assemblage of diverse parts and something that, potentially at least, remains a constituent portion of some larger, future whole.25 It is stated that what Targ gives is an element in a dynamic system of events, a system in continuous transformation and evolution.
In order for there to be interconnection, there must be some form of communication between species and life forms in evolution. But what is the agent of such communication? What element makes particules into parcelles? In every case of interspecies conflict or rivalry in these three novellas, an act of what Rosny calls “sympathy” (sympathie) appears to enable some factor—call it a meme, a gene, or something not yet known—to pass from species to species, creating a chain of communication that permits life forms to continue to evolve. Seen in this light, Targ’s situation is different only in degree, with passage now from one kingdom of life to another. Targ’s kingdom finds itself, however, in the situation of the Xipéhuz: another life form is displacing us. Despite this, several times during the narrative, Targ has expressed sympathy with the ferromagnetics, overcoming his bitterness toward his situation: “Parfois, Targ l’exécrait; parfois, une sympathie craintive s’éveillait dans son âme. N’y avait-il pas une analogie mystérieuse, et même une obscure fraternité, entre ces êtres et les hommes? Certes, les deux règnes étaient moins loin l’un de l’autre que chacun ne l’était du minéral inerte. Qui sait si leur consciences, à la longue, ne se seraient pas comprises!” (At times Targ reviled it; at times a fearful sympathy awakened in his soul. Was there not some mysterious analogy, an obscure fraternity even, between these beings and mankind? Certainly, the two kingdoms were closer to each other than either was to the inert mineral world. Who knew whether their forms of consciousness, in time, might not come to understand each other!) Targ’s evolutionary empathy in fact, at one point, stretches beyond even the ferromagnetic rival to embrace what he sees as the endlessly patient, ultimately triumphant, mineral kingdom of life: “A chaque mouvement de la lampe, des éclairs rebondissaient, mystérieux et féeriques. Les innombrables âmes des cristaux s’éveillaient à la lumière. . . . Targ y voyait un reflet de la vie minérale, de cette vie vaste et minuscule, menaçante et profonde, qui avait le dernier mot avec les hommes, que aurait, un jour, le dernier mot avec le règne ferromagnétique.” (At each movement of the lamp, rays bounced around the walls, mysterious and enchanting. The souls of myriad crystals awoke to his light. . . . Targ saw there a reflection of mineral life, of that life form both vast and minuscule, menacing and deep, that had the last word on mankind, that, one day, would have the last word on the ferromagnetic kingdom as well.)
Beyond Targ’s death, however, if there is to be communication, the act of sympathy must come from the other side of the evolutionary divide, in this case from the ferromagnetics. But they, at the time of Targ’s demise, are clearly at a precognitive stage. The question of course arises: Being as we know them to be at present, are they ultimately capable of developing the faculties needed for such an act of “sympathy”? And yet the statement of Rosny’s narrator in the final sentence suggests that some such development has had to take place, otherwise there would be no post-Targ narration. The preterite tense tells us that transfer has occurred, and we may infer that it was brought about by means of some kind of sympathy. We are left, however to speculate on how this might have happened. Rosny’s story, at this point, is an early example of the SF mystery, asking us to take a seemingly impossible event as literal truth and then inviting us to speculate on ways it might have come about. Did Targ’s parcelles contain a code, gene, or other means of transferring information? Did this in turn affect the course of ferromagnetic evolution? Did it provide a factor that determined the creation of a form of consciousness ultimately allowing communication across the gulf of evolutionary time?
Rosny gives us a clue to how the transhuman transfer of evolutionary traits occurred. To follow it, however, the reader must abandon anthropocentric thinking. Anthropocentrism has let other Last Man stories execute a last-minute swerve that saves some part of the human from total annihilation. Narratives from Granville’s Le dernier homme (1803) to recent works including Maurice Blanchot’s Le dernier homme (1957) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (which the French again translate as Le dernier homme; 2004) have deployed the same anthropocentric gambit: at the final moment they allow the last human to escape humankind’s material destiny by moving from history to allegory. The form of fiction that by its very premise abolishes humankind ends by preserving a single human voice, speaking endlessly into the void, as if human consciousness will always exist, and the human voice will always have an audience.26
In contrast, Rosny builds anthropocentrism into his text only to pass beyond it. At one point Targ and Arva, as they contemplate the ferromagnetics, see themselves in the mirror of the future: “C’étaient les vainqueurs. Le temps était devant eux et pour eux, les choses coïncidaient avec leur volonté obscure; un jour, leurs descendants produiraient des pensées admirables et manieraient des énergies merveilleuses.” (They were the conquerors. Time lay before them, was on their side, the way of things coincided with their obscure will; one day, their descendants would produce admirable thoughts, and wield marvelous sources of energy.) In light of Targ’s ultimate sense of physical finality, this vision of a ferromagnetic golden age might appear to be wishful thinking. Yet what if Targ’s parcelles, as freely given, in fact have transmitted this same message, this same desire for development, across the evolutionary void—might it not have become physical reality in some far-distant future?
Rosny’s narrator has from the outset suggested sympathy with humanity by closely focusing on the thoughts and actions of Targ and the Last Men throughout the telling. There is nothing unusual in this for a narrator this side of Targ’s death. But for the posthuman narrator of the final paragraph, any such expression of sympathy is not only surprising but revealing. Targ, as we know, has given the last elements of his carbon life freely, as a willed gift, in contradistinction to the unwillingness of his fellow humans to give this life at all. Now the narrator makes a comment on the quality of the gift itself, describing the nature of the parcelles as themselves entering “humbly” (humblement) into the New Life. The narrator’s choice of this word, which implies sympathetic judgment of Targ’s act, offers an evolutionary clue that the mechanism that has enabled the transfer of information between life forms is altruism.
At this point, some might object that Rosny’s narrator is simply the conventional omniscient narrator, and that all this discussion of past tense narration and narrative audience after the death of the Last Man is specious. A clear case can be made, however, that Rosny may have seen his narrator as an “evolutionary narrator,” that is, a narrator that speaks for the evolutionary process itself. Such a narrator, by definition, can never be omniscient, because evolution is an always-ongoing, open-ended process. Evidence that Rosny intends to create an evolutionary narrator comes from the carefully controlled change he makes in narrative focus as the story of the Last Men proceeds. The narrator of chapter 1 appears to be the conventional third person narrator—the detached, objective eye recording an important scene (the beginning of the fatal earthquakes) in the drama of the Last Men. Recorded dialogue and general commentary dominate. This is the mise en scène of Targ as principal actor. A sudden rupture occurs in chapter 2, however. All at once, the focus shifts from outside Targ’s mind to the workings of his memory, which contains “the history of the great catastrophes,” the retrospective story that now unfolds: “Depuis cinq siècles, les hommes n’occupaient plus, sur la planète, que des îlots dérisoires.” (For five hundred centuries, men have occupied, on the entire surface of the planet, ridiculously small enclaves.) The narrative focus, now inside Targ’s memory, sweeps back to encompass the story of the gradual fall of humankind and its environment from its industrial apogee to Targ’s own situation. Mirroring this, the narrative tenses undergo their own radical change of focus. For without warning, the narrator seems to abandon history for an act of empathy, modulating its voice from third person, first to the first person plural “nous,” then to a totally unexplained “je,” a first person singular now capable of speaking in the future tense: “Lorsqu’une conscience supérieure se décèlera dans le nouveau règne, je pense qu’elle reflétera surtout cet étrange phenomène.” (Whenever a superior consciousness will be discovered in the new species, I think it will especially reflect this strange phenomenon.) With this shift, the narrator places itself within the community of Last Man (“nous”) and at the same time speaks in a personal voice that says that it both “thinks” and thinks within the broader framework of the future evolution of new species. This narrator will revert to third-person discourse. But its focus, from this moment until Targ’s final act, becomes an increasingly intimate one, a third-person narration that, at the moments Targ meditates on humanity’s past or dreams of things to come, becomes almost indistinguishable from the protagonist’s own speaking voice, in a sort of style indirect libre. The two voices join in an empathy that culminates in Targ’s great visionary dream that itself spans all of carbon life. If we admit on the basis of the past tense of the final sentence that the voice of the narrator now speaks from a time beyond Targ’s death, then the empathy this narrator displays for Targ as he approaches his terminal moment may be an indication that some aspect of the Last Man not only has survived, but may have acted as a force of transformation for the narrating species’ subsequent evolution. Rosny asks us to consider here, on the vaster scale of posthuman destiny, an act of evolutionary altruism expressing the same motivation as Bakhoun’s final invocation. Targ, however, has grown beyond Bakhoun. For Targ is acting for the good not of another competing species but of a new kingdom of life, whose species have not yet been defined by evolutionary process. Targ looks beyond the survival of species to the survival of the principle of Life, even if that means mineral life. Still today, Darwinians ponder the possibility that such acts of selflessness may do more to advance the evolutionary process than adversarial struggle or heroic defiance.27 It is Targ’s final act that sets him apart from the other last humans. This could mean that his genetic, or memetic, material is special among all of surviving carbon life. His altruism may provide the vector whereby this material, given selflessly, is able to pass, effectively, across the evolutionary gulf. If we take the narrator’s posthuman situation as material truth, then it appears that Targ’s gift may have succeeded, where the same material, given reluctantly, or defiantly, might have failed.
Certainly Rosny, as rigorous evolutionist, does not minimize the immensity of the transhuman gulf. Altruism remains an improbable bottle in the evolutionary sea, and Rosny understands this. Yet he uses the possibility of a posthuman narrator to startle us into thinking that a purely material transfer may be feasible in strictly evolutionary terms. Altruism, in fact, plays a similar role in many endgames in later SF. An altruistic act, for example, is at the center of Heinlein’s much later novel Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958). Here young Kip stands before a cosmic bar of justice. The judges rule to wipe out humanity as a dangerous species, condemning the entire human race to “rotation,” to total annihilation. Kip’s first act is to blurt out his defiance of this judgment. In doing so, he does little more than affirm the judges’ conviction that humanity is dangerous because it is unpredictable by nature. Nonetheless, they offer Kip the individual the option of staying with them, in a sense of becoming the Last Man. He refuses and insists on being sent back to share the fate of the rest of humanity This altruistic act stops the inflexible judges cold in their tracks. Their “logic” is so confounded by Kip, his response is so inconceivable, that they suspend their judgment. Kip finds himself in Targ’s position, if for different reasons. By refusing to save his own life, he becomes, in the eyes of the alien judges, the redeemer of a species whose collective acts have proven powerless to prevent their annihilation. It is Kip’s sole act, as much a statistical improbability as the passage of Targ’s genetic material, that gives all human beings a reprieve, more time to evolve and possibly to avoid their future fate by acquiring, in this interim, the power to challenge and defeat their judges. The fact that Kip’s single altruistic act results in such sweeping consequences can be dismissed as a juvenile fantasy. Read in the light of Rosny’s Last Man, however, the foundation of Heinlein’s narrative can be understood to be a very real, if highly speculative, evolutionary concept.
Rosny is important in the history of SF because of his rigorous adherence to the scientific vision of evolution, and his ability to construct complex narratives that reject humanist for pluralist visions of evolutionary history. He is perhaps the first writer to launch the master narrative of SF, which traces the evolution of humankind through its technological and environmental transformations, up to the ultimate challenge of transhuman possibility. It is the same master narrative, elaborated (and in the end possibly betrayed) by writers from Bernal and Clarke to the cyberpunks, that could be said to define SF in the twentieth century. Of all his achievements, however, Rosny is finally important as the inventor of a science-fictional manner of thinking. It was Rosny who first created, in Un autre monde, La Mort de la Terre, and other works, a genuine logic of hard SF. Rosny was first to adhere to what became, for later SF, a material imperative. His narratives ground all possibility of figurative interpretation in the literal, material fact of what is stated. Thus, in the final paragraph of Targ’s story, the reader cannot dismiss the past tense, and its denoting of a posthuman narrator, as “convention.” We cannot simply reject the logic of space and time (and grammatical tense) in favor of conventional “suspension of disbelief.” Rather we are asked to take the situation as literal fact, and then to work, in extrapolative fashion, within the parameters of material logic to find some physical means of explaining the existence of this narrator, and from there to identify the vector that has permitted vital communication between two profoundly different chemical kingdoms and histories. Rosny’s bequest to later hard SF writers may be the transhuman problem; more than that, however, his legacy is a particular way of reading narrative, in a purely literal manner. Rosny offers future writers a new way of thinking; he asks them to look beyond metaphors and conventions to the physical facts of the narrative. Let us look briefly at how Rosny’s logic works in two narratives that rewrite the Last Man story in very different scientific climates: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) and Gregory Benford’s Timescape (1980).
As noted, Rosny’s use of tense makes us define as posthuman the narrator who speaks in the last lines of La Mort de la Terre. And by the same token, Rosny asks us to conceive an audience for this narrator, hence to find a motive for posthumans wanting to listen to this terminal story. By the time of his Childhood’s End, Clarke is clearly aware of the problem Rosny raised: that the conventional Last Man narrative is illogical, and that he must devise a new narrative strategy to tell it. He is also aware that readers will ask why anyone would want to hear that story, if humanity has already transcended itself and become something totally other. In the novel, human children suddenly opt out of the adult world and become the catalysts that convert all earthly matter, animate or inanimate, into the “Overmind.” The novel could end here, for the Overmind is so radically other that, logically, it neither hears nor cares about any story humankind could tell. At the very most, the Overmind might be interested in humankind’s creation myth. But that is not the story told. Instead we have the story of humankind’s demise, a story that logically no longer has a human audience. Clarke understands the paradox, but he persists in wanting a Last Man and his story. He also understands that this Last Man must have a listener within the text. And he creates one—the Overlords.
If we follow Clarke’s logic, humankind is simply the match that starts the fire, the spark that transforms everything on Earth into transcendent energy. Nothing we call “human” passes into the Overmind. At the same time, however, Clarke keeps open the possibility that some aspect of the human might survive, might be passed on to someone somewhere. Clarke thus creates an alternate narrative to that of the Overmind, one in which such a transhuman transfer might be possible. His protagonist, Jan, successfully schemes to be taken to the Overlords’ planet in the belly of a whale they transport to their museum of cosmic species. He does so knowing that when he returns from this near-the-speed-of-light adventure, all that he knows and loves will be gone. But he does not imagine that he will find even the Earth dying, and himself the sole witness to its destruction. Jan tells his story. But now he has a declared listener, for the Overlords are there, located between his dying words and the cosmic void, taking in his words, recording them for some obscure posterity.
Rosny’s Last Man narrative retells the myths of human destiny, exhausting them, until Targ stands as purely material entity before his evolutionary future. Clarke seems to follow a similar logic. Step by step, the story of Jan both evokes and demythologizes the Christian narrative. Jan has a role like that of Jonah, and perhaps his avatar, Christ. If so, Jan’s death may offer hope of “salvation” to someone or something; indeed, if his words then become the “gospel,” they too must be saved. The Overlords (their name suggests the pride that goeth before a fall) are an advanced yet inexplicably reprobate intergalactic race. If the Overmind is a God entity, then they, like Lucifer’s fallen horde, are its emissaries, must do its bidding. As a race they have been passed over by a process that reminds us of election, a process that has chosen humankind instead of them as its vehicle for transcendence. The Overlords remain curators of a Cuvier-like inventory of extinct or dead-end species. What they collect from Earth, however, may offer them a way out of eternal damnation. Transporting the whale, they catch Jan, and literally place him, the Christ-Jonah figure, at the center of their world. He thus becomes their potential savior, his words the Logos that might allow them to escape from evolutionary stagnation.
All of this, however, we learn, like the Overlords’ horns and tails, is preevolutionary apprehension, earlier humankind’s superstitious vision of what is now revealed as secular scientific reality. In fact, humankind’s relation to the Overlords is more like that of Pascal’s rational man to the overbearing universe. They are powerful, and have vast technological superiority over humankind. Yet it is because of its rational (here para-rational) faculties that humanity, however physically weak, finds the way to Overmind. Once the Overmind forms, Jan’s final words, his Logos, are meaningless to it. Yet for the Overlords, might not these words, like Targ’s parcelles, contain a code or some information that would open up, to Overlord cryptographers, a path to evolutionary destiny? Might not these words, as with Targ’s legacy, someday become flesh, giving the Overlords the means to become human, or at least let them incorporate some aspect of our otherwise lost species, putting them on an evolutionary path toward eventual access to Overmind?
Gregory Benford, in his novel Timescape (1980), again takes up the Last Man challenge.28 It would seem at first that the science Benford deploys—communication faster than the speed of light and the physical possibility it raises of an infinite number of worlds—abolishes any need for a transhuman experience. In such a universe, the iron laws of causality seem to be circumvented, election and evolution are reduced to localized phenomena within a larger “timescape.” Even so, in this highly flexible space-time net, with its infinity of apparent doors and escape hatches, the fact remains that if there are many worlds, each of these worlds must end, each must have its Last Man. Localizing the Last Man problem has not made it go away. If there is a myriad of Last Men, each must face the same problem Targ and Jan face: they all hope somehow to transmit something of humanity across the barrier of finality, to create the continuity that defines the transhuman moment. In Benford’s novel, Targ’s final moment has been multiplied by x. Each space-time world out of infinitely many has been localized. The question has become: as each world ends, how can the words of its Last Man breach the gulf of its causality? In such a universe, is it meaningful to speak of a trans-anything? Is the timescape nothing more than a bundle of disconnected particules?
In Timescape, the not-too-distant Earth of 1998 is dying from ecocatastrophe, one caused this time wholly by humankind. Two Cambridge scientists, Gregory Markham and John Renfrew, seek to avert disaster by using tachyons, particles that move faster than light, to send messages to the scientists of the past, warning them of the impending danger, hoping to get earlier humankind to alter the course of things before it is too late. They succeed in communicating this information to a scientist in 1963, Gordon Bernstein, and in the nick of time the process is halted, Earth is saved. But the question is: whose Earth is saved? Apparently, at the instant the message from the future is received, the time line splits. Bernstein’s Earth of 1963 will trace its own path, in which there will be no diatom bloom, and no assassination of John F. Kennedy. The world of 1998, however, the sender of the message, remains the world of ecodisaster and Kennedy’s assassination; it must go to its doom.
It seems at first that possibilities for new worlds are infinite. In the dazzling flux of tachyons, each instant divides into its own universe, new worlds without end. There is no longer a need either for apocalypse or for the protracted agonies of evolution. The long view of things is the very opposite of Rosny’s. Yet, just as Rosny’s readers must focus on Targ’s fate, Benford’s readers, still bound by the laws of narrative, must follow the individual destiny of Markham and his world. The infinity of possibilities remains a theoretical construct; as concrete reality, Markham’s world perishes as inexorably as the world of Targ. And in its demise, it snares the reader in Rosny’s ecological play of forces within which and only within which the transhuman possibility can occur.
Rosny’s story is poignant because it holds to a linearvision of time. Edens can be dreamt, but time, like Heraclitus’s river, is physically anchored in the vast flow of living things for which Targ’s humankind speaks. Benford’s physics localizes linear time to individual human units. In Rosny’s space-time, each individual action interconnects to, resonates with, the whole of evolutionary history. In Benford’s world, on the contrary, it appears that each action, even those that alter the past, concerns only its local time line and no other. We realize this when Gordon, in his present, meets the physicist Markham. The reader has already seen Markham die in a plane crash in 1999. But now we have a different “Markham” time line, with no plane crash in its future, and probably no tachyons either. Here we have two world lines, out of a vast possible number, bifurcating, each moving inexorably forward. Most likely it is the particles that move faster than the speed of light, shooting through our universe, invisible like Moedigen, that bring about such moments of double vision, improbably connecting two of an infinite number of possible time tracks.
As if in answer to Rosny’s monolithic evolutionary endgame, Benford’s tachyons seem to promise recapture of a human constant in a vast universe of otherwise indifferent and incomprehensible forces. For if each of us, theoretically, can at any instant generate another world, then causality fails. The river metaphor for time gives way to a Spinozan vision of space-time as a great tableau, where nature itself appears to be modeled on the paradigm of rational order: “Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no river-run of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea” (238).
Even so, Benford’s very description seems to tell us there is no escape from Rosny’s linear evolution. For even in the act of discarding individual human importance in the great canvas of time, his narrator seems to reassert the human element by using the all-too-human device of metaphor. Because this “timescape” remains the product of a “painter,” there abides, even in this neutral field of forces, the necessity of a human consciousness, a sentient entity capable of deciding to “collapse” wave functions, or not to collapse them. And so, despite the fearful symmetry of the mind-universe it posits, Benford’s text remains haunted by Rosny’s classic sense of time as a one-way stream of life and death. As its loops and waves morph into some great beast in the sea, Benford’s timescape resounds with echoes of Rosny’s paean to life in the cosmic sense. A plane crash in 1999 plunges Markham to his physical end. As the plane plunges, the hard fact of linear time, of his single time line, emerges within his interior monologue, to coincide with, then overwhelm, his unified theory to space, time, and the universe, a theory he will never utter: “They [the trees] rushed by faster and faster and Markham thought of a universe with one wave function, scattering into the new states of being as a paradox formed inside it like the kernel of an idea—If the wave function did not collapse. . . . Worlds lay ahead of him, and worlds behind. There was a sharp crack and he suddenly saw what should have been” (309).
Beyond all the paradoxes of time displacement, there is always a single, irreducible fact—that of biological time. Time displacements may challenge the universality of time. But there is no denying, and the quantified universe of tachyons is no exception, that for any localized time line there is always an end. In Benford’s novel, that locality remains Markham’s 1999, set on its inexorable path, experiencing its own unique form of ecodisaster, thus called on to make its own challenge to the transhuman barrier. Even in this relativized timescape, the passing of any world remains poignant, if not tragic in Rosny’s sense of the total end of a vast plurality of living species. Thus Benford’s novel ends on a muted tone, with Markham’s partner John Renfrew 1999’s Last Man. As with Targ’s final, futile search for water, Renfrew attempts one last time to break out of his time frame, to make tachyon contact with some other space-time location. The message he receives, however, is not from Bernstein’s world but from what Renfrew believes to be the year 2349, a location ever so close yet separated by an unfathomable gulf of “noise.” He realizes that he stands, in his dying world, at some tachyon junction, a cosmic way station with messages coming from all space-time directions: “He shook his head. All form and structure was eroded by the overlapping of many voices, a chorus. Everyone was talking at once, and no one could hear” (392). We are far from the serene vision of Benford’s cosmic artist. From Renfrew’s point of view, his world is an impossibly insignificant speck, lost in a vast canvas of worlds. Once again, Renfrew’s situation is that of Pascal’s human condition. For as the babble of voices changes into terrifying cosmic silence, he remains suspended between infinities. All the generators shut down in Renfrew’s laboratory, all the buildings and streets fall suddenly empty. Suddenly he, too, like Targ, knows in his physical body that however complex this “stream” of worlds he envisions, time’s river still flows for him: “Causality’s leaden hand would win out.”
Even so, as is not the case for Rosny’s death of the Earth, Renfrew still takes comfort in knowing his world is one among an infinite number of time lines. He senses a vast multidimensional array of worlds that, unlike Rosny’s “other world,” have absolutely no contact with each other. This is comforting in a sense, for if there is no single interpenetrating ecology that gathers all these individual time lines, then each world is, as Renfrew puts it, at least “safe” from the others: “The soothing human world of flowing time would go on, a sphinx yielding none of her secrets. An infinite series of grandfathers would live out their lives safe from Renfrew” (393). Once again, the final possibility for Renfrew is Pascal’s wager. If he sees himself forever lost in the world of tachyons and its infinite timescape, at the same time, it is by openly accepting that he is lost that he paradoxically feels “elated, free” (393). In his limited world, Renfrew, like Targ, must go to his end. But while Targ and Érê are doomed to live out the terrible collapse of their hopeless Edenic dream, Renfrew finds his arcadia just down the road in his tangible temporal present. His family still awaits him, as well as the famous preserves on the shelf, which can keep all of them alive for a long time. With Rosny we move in a straight line, living through increasingly painful failures to survive, until the family circle itself is decimated. Benford’s tour de force, in contrast, ends with a whimper. In this novel all about messages and communication, the final human voice is that of domesticity. But it is still a message; as such, it defies the messageless void of res extensa. Benford’s Last Man can console himself in his misery. For Renfrew, hearing a myriad of possible messages in the swirl of tachyon data, knows he is not alone. Stories are being told, even though he cannot understand them. What is more, he can retire to his survivalist bunker where, as in Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold, things may keep going on after all. Some serendipitous twist in space-time may save his family yet.
To paraphrase Robert Forward, humans don’t count, intelligence does. For Rosny, however, humans do count, but the interconnectedness and continuity of life counts even more. We see, then, why the logic of Rosny’s narratives is transhuman rather than simply posthuman. At Targ’s transhuman moment, the logic of verb tense and syntax connects to the larger logic of a broad ecology of matter—living and inert—in transformation. Life and world form a vast system that must evolve. In the evolution of hard SF, however, Forward’s vision appears today to overshadow Rosny’s. Increasingly, the scientist-writer seems to lean toward a vision that favors the conversion of matter into mind. For example, in the lead story of his 1994 anthology Matter’s End, “Mozart on Morphine,” Benford’s scientist-protagonist, a string theorist, not only makes the classic case for mind-matter duality but moves in the direction of Spinoza’s vision of matter as mind.29 This is a story about accidents and illness, the frailty of thinking reeds: “We seem so small. Yet we have a common, perhaps arrogant impression that we matter, somehow” (21). There is still an echo of Rosny’s evolutionism in the pun of the title. For is not the end of matter the end of mind and life as well? But Benford’s protagonist reverses this proposition: might not the end of matter instead mark the beginning of mind? With string theory we have the possibility, only suggested by the tachyon universe, that matter and mind are in fact one and the same, with mind becoming an entity like Spinoza’s rationalist God, deus sive natura. Benford’s protagonist goes on to speculate that humans indeed might matter, if the physical universe were revealed by science to be mind: “Still, there emerges now evidence of mental processes at work on many levels of physical reality. We may be part of some larger act. For example, perhaps we contribute remotely to the universe’s thinking about itself” (220). The turn is elegant. But the result is the sort of imagined recapture that Rosny ultimately refused, where mind seeks impossible parity between itself and the extended world.
The quotation from Goethe (Mephisto tempting Faust) that Benford offers as an epigraph to “Mozart on Morphine” can serve as an apt description of the difference between the vision of his fictional physicist and that of Rosny: “All theory, my friend, is gray / But the golden tree of life springs green.” Rosny chronicles the growth of the tree of life from green to ferromagnetic rust and hopefully beyond. His work remains essential today, for it not only articulates a key crux of SF extrapolation—the transhuman possibility—but offers, in working out Targ’s evolutionary destiny, a viable speculative alternative to the resurgent Cartesianism of much hard SF. Rosny’s ecological pluralism strives to reach beyond the anthropocentric barrier of human culture. It reaches beyond that faith in reason that serves Bakhoun so well yet confounds Targ. Rosny’s broad sense of the evolution of life is a powerful antidote to the humanocentric sentimentality of many SF works, even those that claim to be most “scientific.” It offers as well a sobering alternative to much of the “ecological” rhetoric we endure today.
One final comment. Some might conclude from our comparisons of Rosny’s work to that of both Verne and Wells that Verne and Wells ultimately set story above science, while Rosny stuck to the text of science, perhaps to the detriment of the art of storytelling. It is true that both Verne and Wells were master storytellers who found novel ways of integrating new or at least novel scientific concepts into conventional narrative forms, especially the historical and travel narrative. Rosny, however, with his sparse prose and plausible analytical descriptions of places, times, and beings that are otherwise products of extrapolative imagination, has created a mode of storytelling that remains unique in its objectivity and honesty. Rosny proves that when science does write the fiction, the writing does not have to be bad. It is true that Rosny’s style is often crabbed, lacking in articulation. We have tried to render this faithfully in translation, sometimes to the detriment of the English prose. But there are moments of high poetry. And there are powerful narrative moments. Who can forget Bakhoun’s lament at the Darwinian annihilation of the Xipéhuz? Who is not moved when Dr. Van den Heuvel, faced with a being his world would invariably reject as mutant or madman, decides to use his new form of vision to advance knowledge of the unknown? Who does not thrill at the thought that some modest parcel of dying humanity might shoot the gulf, become a creative element in the evolution of the “next” form of life? These moments are proof of the unique literary power of Rosny’s blend of fact and vision.