Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Many discussions of “the origins of sf” automatically take the form of combative attempts to identify “primal texts” that present significant analogies with the body of work (however defined) that later came to be identified as the genre’s principal constitution. Plausible examples for that honor include John Kepler’s Somnium (1634), Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but many others have been suggested, depending on the particular identification made of the key features of sf.
That approach is, however, limited to pointing out coincidences. None of the these “primal texts” can actually said to have spawned a genre, and it is arguable that no individual work could ever do so; the minimal requirement for a genre is surely a group of texts that are known and seen to have something significant in common—preferably something reaching beyond common authorship. If we look back to consider past identified genres that had something in common with sf, it is easy enough to pick out a few that anticipated some of its key motifs and devices, the most obvious being the genres of Utopian satire, the traveler’s tale, and contes philosophiques. But precisely because they were perceived genres in their own right, they can only be regarded as more-or-less distant relatives, not even as direct progenitors.
The first group of texts that looked something like a genre to its contemporary readers and that has some significant aspects in common with twentieth century sf arose in France in the 1860s in connection with a boom in the popularization of science. The best-known inclusions in the group are some early works by Jules Verne, most notably Voyage au centre de la terre (1863; revised 1867; tr. as Journey to the Center of the Earth), De la terre à la lune/Autour de la lune (1865/1869; From the Earth to the Moon, and a Trip round It), and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; tr. as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea).
Several popularizers of science who participated in the educational crusade that reached fever pitch at the time employed fiction as a popularizing device, including Camille Flammarion, the author of the items collected in Récits de l’infini (1872; tr. as Stories of Infinity) and many others; Henri de Parville, author of Un habitant de la planète Mars (1864; tr. as An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars); and Samuel Henry Berthoud, who collected four volumes of relevant short stories as Fantaisies scientfiques du docteur Sam [Dr. Sam’s Scientific Fantasies] (1861–62) as well as issuing other collections in the same vein.
Contemporary writers with different agendas, such as Achille Eyraud in Voyage à Venus (1865; tr. as Voyage to Venus), George Sand in Laura: voyages et impressions (1865; tr. as Laura; or, Voyage in the Crystal), and “Aristide Roger” (Jules Rengade) in Aventure extraordinaire du savant Trinitus (1867–68) took obvious inspiration from the boom, sometimes embarking on scientific and technological speculations of their own, as in Eyraud’s case, and sometimes simply rejoicing in what seemed to them to be a kind of narrative liberation, as in Sand’s.
These works were sometimes referred to by contemporary commentators as examples of roman scientifique—a phrase that can be translated, because of the flexibility of the first word’s range of reference, as “scientific fiction,” “scientific romance,” or “the scientific novel.” Verne’s work in particular attracted numerous imitators because of its enormous popularity, and eventually inspired the founding of a specialist periodical, the Journal des Voyages, in 1877, dedicated to fiction in that vein. Verne’s work was, however, much broader in scope than the handful of works nowadays considered to be key texts of proto-sf, and the primary feature of “Vernian fiction,” as conceived by many of his imitators, including the editors of the Journal des Voyages, was that it consisted of adventures set in remote parts of the globe. The fact that exotic means of transport were sometimes used to facilitate the necessary voyages was seen as a peripheral issue. Submarines and flying machines were often featured in subsequent Vernian fiction, and various kinds of hypothetical exotica were routinely discovered in the course of adventures in terra incognita, but the core of the “Vernian genre” in the 1870s and 1880s was far displaced from the speculative heart of modern science fiction.
That situation was significantly modified, however, in 1888, when Louis Figuier, the editor of the weekly popular science magazine La Science Illustrée, began running a regular feuilleton section under the roman scientifique rubric. (The feuilleton was a common feature of French newspapers and magazines, a short section devoted to short stories or serialized fictions.) Figuier never wrote any fiction of his own, but he was well aware of the fact that one of his early works of popularization had been the basis for Voyage au centre de la terre, to such an extent of dependency that when he published a revised edition of the book in question, Verne had felt obliged to revise his novel to take aboard a significant change of mind on Figuier’s part. (All the translations are of the revised version, which added the discovery of a humanoid fossil and Axel’s vision of the giant herdsman.) Voyage au centre de la terre would probably have been one of the first works that Figuier reprinted in La Science Illustrée had it not been too easily available—and if he had been able to get permission to do so—but he did reprint two shorter stories by Verne in order to identify his centrality to the new genre (thus illustrating that he clearly intended “roman scientifique” to be understood as “scientific fiction” rather than more narrowly as “the scientific novel”).
Over the next decade and a half, Figuier published dozens more works, which extracted a whole series of exemplars from the past, and mingled them with new works in order to lay out a kind of tacit map of what he considered the genre of roman scientifique to constitute. From the 1860s boom, he also reprinted Rengade’s pre-Vernian submarine story under the author’s real name, but he mostly focused on more recent materials. He obtained a sequel to Albert Robida’s Le Vingtième siècle (orig. 1882; tr. as The Twentieth Century), La Vie électrique [Electrical Life] (1891–2) before reprinting the original in 1896. He also obtained Camille Flammarion’s latest, and most far-reaching work of fiction, La Fin du monde (1893–4; tr. as Omega: The End of the World). Keen to publish work by practicing scientists, he reprinted two stories by “Charles Epheyre” (the psychologist Charles Richet, who was also the editor of a scientific journal): “Le Microbe du Professeur Bakermann” (orig. 1885; 1892 tr. as “Professor Bakermann’s Microbe”) and “Le Mirosaurus” (orig. 1890; 1893 tr. as “The Mirosaurus”).
The principal emphases of these works and the others interleaved with them were near-futuristic speculation and technological discovery, although Figuier did not neglect the more adventurous aspects of Vernian fiction, recruiting the enthusiastic voyager Louis Boussenard to produce Les Secrets de Monsieur Synthèse [Monsieur Synthèse’s Secrets] (1888–9) and its sequel Deux mille ans dans un bloc de glace (1889; tr. as Two Thousand Years in a Block of Ice). The popular Vernian writer Alphonse Brown—a stalwart of the Journal des Voyages—wrote Un Ville de verre (1890; tr. as City of Glass) for him, as well as two shorter stories. There was also an element of humor in much of the fiction that Figuier published, the influence of Albert Robida’s satirizations of Verne having been carried forward along with that of their model. That element of humor enabled Figuier to feature more extravagant speculations alongside more earnestly restrained expectations, one of his chosen reprints being Didier de Chousy’s wildly improbable but fabulously graphic Ignis (orig. 1883; 1895–6; tr. as Ignis: The Central Fire).
Figuier also introduced new themes into the emerging genre. Albert Bleunard, the author of La Babylone Électrique (1888; tr. as Babylon Electrified) produced three new stories for him, including “Toujours plus petits” (1892; tr. as Ever Smaller), a pioneering microcosmic romance whose protagonists go through several phases of shrinking in order to visit the world of insects, the world of protozoa, and the world of pre-Rutherfordian atoms. He fought shy of stories of space travel, however, although he published the occasional modest work featuring interplanetary communication, including “Une message de la planète Mars” (1897; tr. as “A Message from the Planet Mars”), one of three original stories signed “C. Paulon” (Paul Combes). On the other hand, he recognized that there was a significant link between the scientific method and a certain fraction of crime fiction, and he offered several notable examples of “scientific detective stories,” reprinting two remarkably early examples in Victorien Sardou’s “La Perle noire” (orig. 1861 as “Le Médallion”; 1892; tr. as “The Black Pearl”) and Jules Lermina’s “Le Clou” (orig. 1870; 1895; tr. as “The Nail”), and adding Alphonse Brown’s “Les Insectes révélateurs” (1889; tr. as “The Tell-Tale Insects”), a story about the utility of insect evidence in forensic science.
By mingling new works and reprints in this fashion, Figuier was able not only to identify the pre-existence of the genre he was endeavoring to promote but to flesh it out and augment it, forming a core group of writers who were conscious of the existence of the genre and interested in its extension. This endeavor was not confined to Figuier’s magazine. Émile Gautier, the editor of La Science Illustrée’s chief rival, La Science Française and who had published one item of roman scientifique of his own in La Science Illustrée, “Le Désiré” (1892), also began publishing a feuilleton under the same rubric. Figuier mostly avoided fiction dealing with future wars, even though it was a popular theme of futuristic fiction at the time—although he did publish Maurice Leloir’s “Batailles navales de l’avenir” [“Naval Battles of the Future”] (1895)—but Gautier seemed to like them much more, publishing, among other items of that kind, an exceedingly long serial by “Captain Danrit” (Émile Driant), the jingoistic doyen of French future war fiction.
The other two serials that Gautier used were both reprints signed “Pierre Ferréol.” In 1896, however, Gautier seems to have felt that a change of policy was in order—perhaps because reader reaction to the Danrit serial, which had stretched over two years, had been negative—and abruptly switched to much shorter stories, including “Scrupule professionale” (tr. as “A Professional Scruple”), bearing the signature “Claude Manceau,” and “Cataclysme” (tr. as “Cataclysm”), signed “G. Bethuys.” In fact, “Manceau,” “Bethuys,” and “Ferréol” were among the many pseudonyms employed by Lt. Col. George-Frédéric Espitallier, a prolific writer on military technology, who went on to publish more items of roman scientifique under the Bethuys by-line, marketed for children.
Figuier was presumably limited in the permissions he could obtain to reprint works, and the supply of new works written for him must have been more akin to a trickle than a flood; in reprinting three stories each from collections by Camille Debans and Jules Lermina, he seemed to be stretching somewhat in quest of work that could be accommodated to his notion of what the genre ought to contain. In 1898, however, he discovered a new source of useful material in the works of H. G. Wells, twelve of whose stories—including one novel—he published over the next five years, beginning with “L’Île de l’Aepyornis” [“Aepyornis Island”] (1898), “Les Pirates de la mer” [“The Sea Raiders”] (1899) and “L’Étoile” [“The Star”] (1899).
Figuier was not the only editor who conceived a sudden and extravagant interest in Wells, however. Wells’ principal translator was Henry Davray, who was on the staff of Mercure de France (“MF”), edited by Alfred Vallette, and that publication began to take an equally intense interest in the British writer. The conspicuously literary Mercure, which had been launched as an organ of the Symbolist Movement with the collaboration of Remy de Gourmont—who became that Movement’s leading ideologist, critic, and propagandist when Stéphane Mallarmé died in 1898—was not at all similar to La Science Illustrée (“SI”) in terms of its interests or audience, and it probably had an entirely different set of readers. Figuier must have thought so, at least, because when the Mercure began publishing Wells translations in great profusion, he began reprinting them with remarkable rapidity.
Mercure began publishing Wells late in 1898 with a serialization of La Machine à explorer le temps [The Time Machine]—which was followed in the very next issue by “Commentaire pour le construction pratique de la Machine à explorer le temps” signed “Dr. Faustroll”; a key work of “pataphysics” by Alfred Jarry. It continued with “Une Orchidée extraordinaire” [“The Flowering of the Strange Orchid”] (1899), which Figuier also let alone. The next four Wells items that appeared in Mercure, however, were very rapidly reprinted in La Science Illustrée: “L’Homme qui peut accomplir des miracles” [“The Man Who Could Work Miracles”] (MF 1899; SI 1900); “L’Oeuf de cristal” [“The Crystal Egg”] (MF 1899; SI 1900); La Guerre des mondes [The War of the Worlds] (MF 1899–1900; SI 1900–01); and “Un étrange phénomène” [“The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes”] (MF 1900; SI 1900).
This astonishing echoing, in very different sectors of the marketplace, was an unprecedented phenomenon—as, for that matter, was the infatuation of each editor with the work of a single writer. The process then paused; Figuier did not reprint either “Récits de l’âge de Pierre” [Stories of the Stone Age] (MF 1900) or L’Île du docteur Moreau [The Island of Doctor Moreau] (MF 1901–02), perhaps because he was now endeavoring to concentrate on shorter works. He did reprint “Les argonautes de l’air” [“The Argonauts of the Air”] (MF 1902; SI 1903)—but not until he had published four more translations of shorter Wells stories that had not previously appeared in the Mercure, most notably “Dans l’abîme” [“In the Abyss”] (SI 1902).
Shortly after finishing his series of Wells reprints, however, Figuier gave up publishing fiction altogether. The feuilleton section of La Science Illustrée bearing the roman scientifique label had run continuously from #8 (21 January 1888) to #913 (27 May 1905), although one previous item of fiction had appeared in issues 4–5 labeled a “humorous fantasy.” Most of the individual episodes are between 1,500 and 2,000 words long, only a few being longer (and a few shorter), so that adds up to a total of more than one and a half million words of fiction, constituting 68 separate items. The Science Française feuilleton was of considerably shorter duration and included less than ten items in total (one of them being very long), but its amplification of the genre identified and supplemented by Figuier was nevertheless of some significance.
As to why Figuier gave up the feuilleton we can only speculate, although the fact that his most immediate rival had abandoned it with such alacrity suggests that it was not as big a hit with his readers as he had hoped. It is, however, possible that he felt that the genre he had defined and nurtured had simply escaped him by migrating to the upper strata of the literary marketplace, and he may have thought that the Mercure de France might be better-equipped to promote and support it. In any case, Wells had changed direction sharply himself, and the next Wells translation to appear in MF after “Les Argonautes de l’air” was L’Amour et M. Lewisham [Love and Mr. Lewisham] in 1903.
There is a sense in which Alfred Vallette did pick up the torch dropped by Figuier; although Mercure de France itself rarely featured speculative fiction after concluding its Wells series, the press associated with it played a significant role in promoting domestic material of that sort. Even before Vallette began publishing Wells, he had published a book reprinting two relevant stories by J. H. Rosny aîné, who soon became identified as a significant anticipator of Wells, largely because of “Les Xipéhuz,” which was the second story in Le Cataclysme (1896). Mercure’s press also published Charles Derennes’ Le peuple de la pôle (1907; tr. as The People of the Pole)—the magazine published an article by Derennes on Wells in the same year—and Maurice Renard’s Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908; tr. as Doctor Lerne, Subgod), and the collection Le Voyage immobile (1909; tr. in A Man Among the Microbes and Other Stories).
This evident interest was doubtless encouraged by the fact that Alfred Vallette and his wife Marguerite, alias “Rachilde,” were among the regular attendees—along with Rosny—at a salon hosted by Maurice Renard, who became the principal French propagandist for speculative fiction after 1905. Given all that, it is perhaps surprising that Mercure itself did not publish more speculative fiction after 1903, and the omission suggests that a significant fraction of the magazine’s readership must have protested against it. Renard and Rosny both appeared in the magazine’s pages thereafter but not with items of speculative fiction.
Perhaps equally significantly, Vallette did not use the label roman scientifique, either to describe the Wells stories he reprinted in such profusion in the magazine or the other works reminiscent of British scientific romance that he published in book form. By 1905 Maurice Renard was desperately trying to drum up support for what he called, rather awkwardly, the roman merveilleux scientifique [“scientific marvel fiction”], having sought a new label because he wanted to draw a distinction between Vernian fiction and Wellsian fiction, and he might well have appropriated the term from Mercure, whose first critical survey of Wells’s work, by Marcel Reja, was entitled “H. G. Wells et le merveilleux scientifique” (1904)—but that label never caught on, and it is possible that its advent and attempted popularization merely served to confuse the issue.
Had Vallette chosen to adopt the label that Figuier had spent so long nurturing and elaborating, it would surely have become more widely familiar and more widely used. As things worked out, however, the work that Louis Figuier had done in defining and detailing a labeled genre went partly to waste, and the brief surge in French speculative fiction that Figuier had initiated and that had been further stimulated by the example of Mercure’s Wells extravaganza remained somewhat disparate. The dearth of specific labeling might seem to be a minor issue, but the absence of that guidance for contemporary and future readers (and writers) probably caused some of the finest contributions to the renascent genre—the futuristic fantasies that Edmond Haraucourt serialized in Le Journal between 1904 and 1910, for example—to be effectively lost, never being evidently connected to the contemporary works of Maurice Renard and J. H. Rosny aîné, let alone the wider field that Figuier had attempted to enclose.
We have no way of knowing, now, why Alfred Vallette did not use the label roman scientifique with respect to Wells’s work, but it might have had something to do with the fact that it was not just Vernian fiction and other material derived from the 1860s boom in the popularization of science that had been described as examples of the roman scientifique. The label had also been co-opted into commentaries on Émile Zola’s Naturalist fiction, which had attempted to make the novel itself into a form of quasi-scientific enquiry—or, at least, social-scientific enquiry. That alternative use of the term roman scientifique had not gone away in the meantime, having been transferred by some commentators from Zolaesque enquiries into the mysterious effects of heredity in determining character to the more psychologically sophisticated, neo-Naturalistic analyses of Paul Bourget and others (including Rosny).
Perhaps significantly, there were two members of Mercure’s staff who thought that they, too, were writing “scientific fiction” of a sort, and who, although they did not use the term roman scientifique for their own work, nevertheless might not have wanted it confined to use in connection with Figuier’s notion of the genre. Remy de Gourmont and Gaston Danville were both intensely interested in the psychology of sex, and both attempted to use fiction as an analytical tool in its dissection. The preface to Danville’s first novel, Les Infinis de la chair [The Infinities of the Flesh] (1892), is a remarkable essay on the potential scope of what he chooses to call the roman d’analyse, in which he represents the evolution of literature as an instance of Haeckel’s Law (the belief that a creature’s gestation repeats the evolution of the species, known by its summary “Ontogony recapitulates phylogeny”). Danville hails some of the roman d’analyse as sophisticated tools for the understanding of human relationships.
On the other hand, that explanation might be a trifle over-subtle, and Occam’s razor suggests that the principal reason why Figuier and then Vallette more-or-less gave up on the roman scientifique was that experience had taught them an important marketing lesson: that some people, including significant fractions of the readerships of both their periodicals, were markedly averse to that kind of fiction. Some people liked it a lot, but as every politician knows, even though you can’t please all of the people all of the time, success is dependent on pleasing as many of them as possible, and not inciting too much ire on the part of the others. In brief, the roman scientifique never fully took off, even though it had gotten off the ground, because its appeal was too specialized, both in terms of its scientific and its literary components. In trying to build a sturdy bridge between two different spheres of interest, it fell into the abyss of incomprehension or at least uninterest.
When Hugo Gernsback began to promote “scientifiction” in the 1920s, initially in popular science magazines not dissimilar to La Science Illustrée, he followed exactly the same strategy as Figuier for some years and continued to follow it for some time after he made the one crucial move that no one in France had made: founding a magazine specifically devoted to the genre. Had Figuier, Vallette, or anyone else tried that in France prior to the Great War, however, the infant would surely have died in its cradle. Amazing Stories and its immediate successors very nearly did die out as well, in spite of their time being somewhat riper. What really saved science fiction was not so much the greater social relevance of the scientific context whose shadow Gernsback tried to retain, but the fact that the American pulp magazines began a spectacular generic radiation in the early 1930s, in the cause of aggressive marketing. They embraced every existing generic label and tried out many new ones unsuccessfully and demonstrated, en passant, in the experimental process that there was something in that particular genre that could hang on to a specialist niche in a marketplace briefly but crucially rich in specialist niches.
The one device that allowed the bulk of sf to become a species of pulp costume drama like any other, modeled on America’s principal native genre of adventure fiction (the western) and thus to thrive in the pulp medium, was the spaceship: a device that Figuier, Gautier, and Vallette had all played down, not really considering space travel plausible. Neither Figuier nor Vallette had serialized a translation of Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, and Figuier had scrupulously avoided Verne’s accounts of space travel as well as similar exploits by other Vernians and such addenda as Eyraud’s Voyage à Venus. The American sf pulps, by contrast, wholeheartedly embraced the myth of the Space Age, which made space into a “new frontier” to replace the western one that history had used up.
If one adopts a mock-Darwinist perspective on literary evolution rather than the mock-Haeckelian one favored by Gaston Danville, then there are grounds for asserting that the mere survival of American sf and its label proved their “fitness” and entitled them to unique consideration in the construction of the myth we call history. If we are more realistic about it, though—as Hugo Gernsback was himself, in insisting that “scientifiction” was an attempt to consolidate and continue a noble existing tradition—then there is no doubt at all that the person who first attempted not only to identify and map a genre of scientifically based speculative fiction but to nurture it, promote it, and help it to expand was Louis Figuier. The principal reason why none of the people who have so far set themselves up as “historians of science fiction” have been aware of that fact is that he received less help than he might have done in establishing the label as a commonplace descriptor—and many of its inclusions went astray, in a sense, for want of viable ID.
It was, of course, exceedingly difficult to find out about this until very recently, especially for Anglophone students of sf. Almost the entire tradition of the French roman scientifique remains essentially invisible, even in France, for lack of physical copies as well as a label. Pierre Versins’s 1972 L’Encyclopédie de l'utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (The Encyclopedia of Utopias, Extraordinary Voyages, and Science Ficiton), which began the work of collating the relevant information, was a magnificent tour de force, but Versins did not possess a run of La Science Illustrée and was thus only partially aware of Figuier’s endeavors. Now, however, there is gallica, the Bibliothéque Nationale’s invaluable website, which is assisting a new generation of assiduous French collectors and bibliographers, including Guy Costes (whose bibliography of La Science Illustrée’s feuilletons can be found on a website entitled Sur l’autre face du monde), Marc Madouraud, Joseph Altairac, Jean-Pierre Moumon, and Francis Valery, to continue where Versins left off in constructing a true history (in the literal rather than the ironic sense) of the French roman scientifique, and enabling much wider translation of the key works of that tradition than has ever been possible before.
It is now not merely possible, but relatively easy, to see that the French tradition of speculative fiction was more prolific, more wide-ranging, and considerably more sophisticated than its English-language counterpart from the era of its effective origin in the 1860s all the way through to the mid-1930s, when the American genre became amenable to a sophistication of its own and was caught up in the merry whirl of world-conquering cultural imperialism. Now that we in the English-speaking world are no longer imaginatively dazzled by the gloriously optimistic but fundamentally stupid myth of the Space Age and know full well what Louis Figuier already understood—that cosmic distances constitute a barrier which cannot plausibly be overcome by human beings—we are surely better equipped to appreciate the wealth of that alternative tradition. No one who has a interest in the history of the genre any longer has an excuse for continuing to turn a blind eye to it. *
Brian Stableford lives in Essex, overlooking the ruins of Hadleigh Castle, the last residue of William Booth’s Salvation Army colony, and other poignant reminders of the vanity of Earthly things. He apologizes for the fact the some of the works cited in this article have not yet been translated into English, but he is working as fast as he can.
A PDF copy of the NYRSF issue in which this article first appeared is available for purchase at Weightless Books.
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