This is the second volume of a six-volume collection of stories by J.-H. Rosny Aîné (“the Elder”), which includes all of his scientific romances, plus a number of other stories that have some relevance to his work in that genre.1
The contents of the six volumes are:
Volume 1. THE NAVIGATORS OF SPACE AND OTHER ALIEN ENCOUNTERS: The Xipehuz, The Skeptical Legend, Another World, The Death of the Earth, The Navigators of Space, The Astronauts.
Volume 2. THE WORLD OF THE VARIANTS AND OTHER STRANGE LANDS: Nymphaeum, The Depths of Kyamo, The Wonderful Cave Country, The Voyage, The Great Enigma, The Treasure in the Snow, The Boar Men, In the World of the Variants.
Volume 3. THE MYSTERIOUS FORCE AND OTHER ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA: The Cataclysm, The Mysterious Force, Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure.
Volume 4. VAMIREH AND OTHER PREHISTORIC FANTASIES: Vamireh, Eyrimah, Nomaï.
Volume 5. THE GIVREUSE ENIGMA AND OTHER STORIES: Mary’s Garden, The Givreuse Enigma, Adventure in the Wild.
Volume 6. THE YOUNG VAMPIRE AND OTHER CAUTIONARY TALES: The Witch, The Young Vampire, The Supernatural Assassin, Companions of the Universe.
The first volume of the series includes a long general introduction to Rosny’s life and works, which there is no need to repeat here; the following introduction will therefore be limited to a brief account of the stories included in this volume, which will be supplemented by a more detailed commentary contained in an afterword.
The first six stories included here are Rosny’s shorter ventures in the subgenre of “lost land” stories, which features remote enclaves on the surface of the Earth whose isolation has permitted biological evolution to follow a distinctive track. The majority of 20th century exercises in the subgenre feature survivals from prehistory, after the fashion of the subgenre’s archetypal texts, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864; revised 1867) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), but Rosny’s ventures—the first four of which antedated Doyle’s novel—attempt extrapolations of a subtly different sort, being primarily concerned with a series of alternatives to the human “dominance” that is the most marked feature of our world, substituting variant human species, or species of a different sort.
The plausibility that evolution might have taken a different path in isolated enclaves had, of course, been ensured by 19th century accounts of the extent to which animal life in Australia differed from animal life everywhere else on the globe. Unfortunately, by the time that anyone began to build serious speculative fictions based on that analogy, the world was running short of places where such isolated enclaves might plausibly be located, and the subgenre always seemed a trifle belated, fit only for popular adventure stories that made no serious claim to rational plausibility. In the latter years of his career Rosny wrote several such adventure stories, but never entirely sacrificed the quest for serious speculative content. L’Etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle (1922; tr. in vol. 3 as “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure”) eventually becomes closer in theme and in spirit to Le Trésor dans la neige (1920; tr. herein as “The Treasure in the Snow”) than to “Les Hommes-Sangliers” (1929; tr. herein as “The Boar Men”), and its concluding section is more ambitious than either. La Sauvage aventure (1935; tr. in vol. 5 as “Adventure in the Wild”), although it is a straightforward exercise in pulp fiction, is actually a transfiguration of “Les Hommes-Sangliers,” but I thought it important to include “The Boar Men” here rather than placing it in the same volume as the expanded text, along with a translation of “Dans le monde des Variants” (as “In the World of the Variants”) in order to illustrate the continuity between Rosny’s lost land stories and certain other elements of his work.
It is difficult to determine when the stories included in this volume were originally written, because some of them were almost certainly begun, if not actually finished, long before they were published. Although he never mentioned the title under which the story actually appeared, it seems likely that “Nymphée” (1893) was derived from one of the numerous fragmentary manuscripts that Rosny brought to Paris when he moved his family from London at the end of 1884. It certainly bears all the indications of having been completed in great haste, and very awkwardly, for its two-part publication in Le Bambou. The manuscripts he did mention having worked on in 1885 included a putative novel called Cavernes, which was presumably never completed; it seems likely that “La Contrée prodigieuse des cavernes” (1896; tr. herein as “The Wonderful Cavern Country”) is derived from that manuscript, even if “Nymphée” was not. Whether “Les Profondeurs de Kyamo” (1896; tr. herein as “The Depths of Kyamo”), which features the same protagonist as the latter story, dates from the same period is unclear, although appearances suggest that it did not emerge from the same manuscript source. “Le Voyage” (1900; tr. herein as “The Voyage”) is similar in theme, if not in tone, and obviously takes its inspiration from one of the prose poems included in “La Légende sceptique,” another piece that Rosny reported working on in 1885, although it did not see print until 1889; appearances suggest, however, that “Le Voyage” was probably written some time after the earlier lost land stories.
A long gap in publication dates separated these early stories from “La Grande énigme” (1920; tr. herein as “The Great Enigma”), a brief quasi-poetic piece whose substance was expanded into an adventure story as Le Trésor dans la neige; it seems probable that the belated recruitment of the name of the protagonist of “Les Profondeurs de Kyamo” and “La Contrée prodigieuse des cavernes” to the latter story was a sudden afterthought, but it is not impossible that they too are based on earlier materials. Some bibliographical lists give the date of Le Trésor dans la neige as 1910, while others have 1922, but it seems unlikely that it appeared in a periodical before its appearance in the Flammarion booklet series Une heure d’oubli, and the copy of that booklet recently scanned by Google is dated 1920—the date universally credited to another booklet by Rosny issued in the same series—so that seems to me to be the likeliest alternative.
Although it deliberately recapitulates the basic formula of “Nymphée” and its companion-pieces, “Les Hommes-Sangliers” has a markedly different focus of concern, and a markedly different tone, which links it more significantly to such late works as “Dans le monde des Variants” than to the novel more explicitly derived from its plot. In “Les Hommes-Sangliers” the plausibility of the lost land theme is not really an issue, as the framework merely serves to support a cruel parable.
“Dans le monde des Variants” (1939) is also a new variant of a much older story—“L’Autre monde” (1895; tr. in vol. 1 as “Another World”)—but, as with “Les Hommes-Sangliers,” it focuses on a very different central concern. It was published in 1939, only a few months before Rosny’s death, but might have been written some time before publication; the nature of its thematic adjustments suggest that it might have been written not long after Les Navigateurs de l’infini (1925; tr. in vol. 1 as “The Navigators of Space”) and before “Les Hommes-Sangliers,” but that is pure speculation. The story does, however, serve to round off this volume nicely by extending the scope of “strange lands” to illustrate the wider range of Rosny’s concerns.
The version of “Nymphée” translated here is that in the book bearing that title, published by the Societé Française d’Imprimerie et de Librairie in 1909 (which also includes another novella). The versions of “Les Profondeurs de Kyamo” and “La Contrée prodigieuse des cavernes” are those in the 1896 Plon collection bearing the former title. The version of “Le Voyage” is from the Plon collection L’Epave (1903).
The version of “La Grande énigme” is from the 1985 Laffont omnibus of Rosny’s Romans préhistoriques. The versions of “Le Trésor dans la neige,” “Les Hommes-Sangliers” and “Dans le monde des Variants” are from the 1975 Marabout omnibus of Rosny’s Récits de science-fiction. I have no reason to think that these versions differ substantially from any other extant versions of the stories.
Brian Stableford