Brian Stableford: The Origins of Epic Fantasy

The modern marketing category of “fantasy” emerged and thrived with remarkable suddenness in the early 1970s under the initial inspiration of the steadily accumulating US paperback editions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in 1965, some time after their original hardcover publication in 1954-55. It is arguable that no other event in publishing history ever had as much impact on the pattern of future publishing and reader demand than the ballooning success of those paperback editions, which eventually provoked a flood of imitations and variants, including such runaway best-sellers as Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (1977) and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (begun 1977), sufficient to formulate and shape a highly successful marketing label within little more than a decade. The label in question is still thriving fifty years later, having expanded successfully into other media, most spectacularly television, which plays host to A Game of Thrones (begun 2011) adapted from George R. R. Martin’s novel sequence, A Song of Ice and Fire (begun 1996).

The success of the paperback Lord of the Rings prompted one of its publishers in that format, Ballantine, to issue a whole series of antique texts under the rubric of the “Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series,” whose editor, Lin Carter, gathered what he considered to be relevant texts into a history of the “fantasy genre” extending from nineteenth-century roots to the first publication of The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, as detailed in his book Imaginary Worlds (1973). Unsurprisingly, that history does not include Les Atlantes, aventures des temps legendaires [The Atlanteans: Adventures in Legendary Times] by Charles Lomon and Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi, of which Carter had never heard. He would certainly have reprinted it, though, and awarded it a highly significant place in his historical narrative had it ever been translated into English and fallen into his hands because it provides, in many ways, an archetype of what he considered the essence of late twentieth-century fantasy to be—as its recent translation for Black Coat Press, as The Last Days of Atlantis, will readily prove to anyone who cares to consult it.

In fact, Les Atlantes helps to fill in a notable gap in the evolutionary sequence of Carter’s narrative history between the highly stylized heroic fantasies of William Morris, James Branch Cabell, Lord Dunsany, and Eric Rucker Eddison, and the “sword and sorcery” subgenre of American pulp fiction, whose prototypes were provided by Robert E. Howard, especially the series featuring Conan the Barbarian, and which was further developed and elaborated by such writers as C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, and Jack Vance. Although the gap has an actual, if rather tenuous, evolutionary bridge provided by the influence of Dunsany on the pulp writers, Carter’s history could not include any substantial intermediate text although Les Atlantes is very obviously such an intermediate, being a flamboyant adventure story featuring swords, sorcery, and heroic barbarians in spectacular fashion, solidly rooted in existing literary tradition but without the elaborate quasi-archaic stylization contrived by the earlier writers that Carter had grouped together. In that sense, it is as significant within the Carterian theory of the evolution of fantasy as the discovery of what was initially called Pithecanthropus erectus was to the theory of biological evolution, for which Ernst Haeckel had long trumpeted as meeting the requirement of a “missing link” between apes and humans.

Les Atlantes was first published in volume form by Éditions de La Nouvelle Revue in 1905, the novel having previously appeared in La Nouvelle Revue as a thirteen-part feuilleton serial in 1904. One of its coauthors, Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi (1865–1943) was the magazine’s proprietor and editor-in-chief at the time; he and Charles Lomon (1852–1923) were both successful novelists, playwrights, and operatic librettists and also collaborated on a script for a new dramatic version of Charles Nodier’s Trilby (produced 1904; book version 1905), which similarly appeared in the pages of La Nouvelle Revue before its separate publication. The preliminary material of Les Atlantes also credits them both with the libretto for a lyrical drama set in Byzantium, Thekla, but it was never published and does not appear ever to have been produced although music based thereon by Antoine Mariotte was eventually performed in 1926.

Although Les Atlantes did not attract much attention at the time of its publication and has been forgotten since then, it can be seen with the aid of hindsight as a significant benchmark in the history of imaginative fiction. It is the first great epic fantasy novel of the twentieth century and arguably the first ever, although rival claims might be made on behalf of some nineteenth-century works, including one of its obvious precursors. At any rate, it is a direct and evident thematic ancestor of such spectacularly successful modern works as The Lord of the Rings and A Game of Thrones, not in the sense that J. R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin could ever have read it or been influenced by it but in the sense that it is a striking illustration of the gradual process of creative development ancestral to the genre of “fantasy” that emerged as a marketing category in the early 1970s.

In the event, Les Atlantes, being somewhat ahead of its time, does not seem to have left any direct descendants in the sense of imitations or works clearly showing its influence. The subsequent French work that has the closest apparent connection to it, Pierre Benoit’s L’Atlantide (1919; tr. as The Queen of Atlantis), almost certainly takes its inspiration directly from one of the obvious precursors of Lomon and Gheusi’s venture, H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), rather than from them, although it might seem surprising from a twenty-first century viewpoint that Benoit’s novel, which now appears quaintly old-fashioned, was a best-seller, while Les Atlantes, which now looks far more lively and modern, was not. Lomon and Gheusi doubtless viewed Benoit’s success with a certain amount of wry chagrin, probably feeling—not without some justification—that they had been more deserving of the success he attained. Les Atlantes does, however, serve to illustrate a process of conscious and careful development from its own precursors that was proved by subsequent events, albeit rather belatedly, to be natural, productive, and enterprising.

Lin Carter did not include She among the crucial works in his history of fantasy, mentioning it only in passing—it was presumably unavailable for reprinting in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series because it was still in print—but he did include one other work that is an obvious derivative of it, of which Gheusi, as the ambitious owner and editor of a middlebrow magazine, would surely have become aware while keeping track of what similar magazines were doing in England. That was C. J. Cutliffe Hyne’s Atlantean fantasy, The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis, which was serialized in Pearson’s Magazine in 1899—the year in which Gheusi bought La Nouvelle Revue—and reprinted as a book in 1900.

Hyne’s novel is a fast-paced and extravagant adventure story, which might well qualify as an “epic fantasy” if its rather slapdash plotting and offhand literary style were not a fraction too casual and its narrative too tightly focused. Hyne’s anti-heroine, Phorenice, Queen of Atlantis, is more down-to-earth than Ayesha, the spectacular femme fatale featured in She, but she and the storyline in which she features are closely akin to the equivalent character and plot in Les Atlantes. The sorceress and temporarily deposed Queen of Atlantis featured in Lomon and Gheusi’s novel, Yerra, might be regarded as a fusion of the two earlier characters and was probably calculated in exactly that fashion.

There is something archetypal about this series of characters, to the extent that when Carl Jung wrote his classic essay on “Psychology and Literature” (1930), seeking to distinguish between “psychological fiction” largely produced by a deliberate reflection of the concerns of the conscious mind and “visionary fiction” supposedly deriving its imagery more spontaneously from the “archetypes of the collective unconscious,” the principal example of the latter that he chose from prose fiction was She. Whether it is true or not that the image in question derives from an important aspect of the collective unconscious, She certainly became a highly significant literary archetype, prolifically copied in popular fiction, most nakedly and perhaps most revealingly in such spectacular American pulp fiction fictions as A. Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage (1932; most book versions corrupt the ending of the far superior magazine text), and its science-fictional pastiches, Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time (1938) and C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner’s The Dark World (1946; published under the signature of the latter author although primarily the work of the former).

It is worth noting that Ayesha, Phorenice, Yerra, and the key characters of the three pulp fantasies cited are parts of a more elaborate nexus than traditional femmes fatale—including Antinea in Benoit’s L’Atlantide—who generally operate in isolation as magnets drawing their hapless prey. Ayesha and her literary descendants are each, crucially, enmeshed in a triangular relationship that requires them to compete for domination of the hero with a far meeker female competitor: Ustane, Naia, and Soroé respectively. In each case, the hero’s preference for the submissive companion rather than the far more spectacular—and arguably much sexier—domineering one, occasions violent and vengeful jealousy with catastrophic consequences. Although the irresistible sexual magnetism of the femme fatale is a key element in stories of this type, the typical dynamic of the plot usually leads to her rejection rather than the surrender typical of more traditional femme fatale stories and to the subsequent proof of Congreve’s observation concerning the hellish fury of a woman scorned.

Les Atlantes begins with a long introduction in which a party of Parisian scholars taking a vacation trip to the north of Norway are blown off course by a storm and end up in a curious “lost fjord” absent from all maps and marine charts, none of which show the narrow and dangerous gap in the seemingly continuous cliff that allows access to it from the sea. There, with the aid of a new technology invented by one of the party’s scientists, they discover a book inscribed in runes on thin leaves of gold three thousand years before, which relates how a party of Norsemen, more than a thousand years before the Vikings known to our history, set forth to find the island kingdom of Atlantis from which Dahéla, the mother of one of them, Maghée, and adoptive mother of their leader, Argall, had been cast out as a child.

The daughter of one of the scholars, however, Annie Gironde, has dreams in which she “remembers” having seen the fjord before, and she knows the name of Argall before a translation of the runes reveals it; her intuitions lead her indirectly to cement a romantic relationship with the narrator of the introduction, Servières, a previously skeptical chemist who is drawn to share her thesis that he and she have been drawn to the fjord deliberately by supernatural forces in order to find the mysterious text.

The story told by the golden book is a stirring one. Atlantis is troubled by the climax of a long-standing religious war in which the adherents of the bloodthirsty gods of Gold and Iron, led by the evil Nohor, are nearing their objective of annihilating the rival cult of the “clement gods,” based in the Temple of Light, whose last high priest, Ruslem, is the guardian of the virgin Soroé, long represented as his granddaughter but actually the true heir to the throne of Atlantis. That throne has long been occupied by a supposedly immortal Queen of distinctive physical appearance, who has actually been surreptitiously replaced at regular intervals by the priests of Gold and Iron, employing children bought in a distant part of the world and carefully educated for the role.

The present queen, however, Yerra, has been taught far more than usual by her scholarly tutor, now deceased, and has become a considerable initiate and sorceress. Ambitious to rule in fact as well as in name and having made herself a real power in the land by outwitting the narrow-minded Nohor, she is desperate to get hold of a long-lost magic sword, even though legend claims that it can only be wielded efficaciously by a male hero with very special qualifications. The sword holds the key to the discovery of a fount of immortality, and Yerra is convinced that her magic will enable her to find the spring in question with the aid of the sword, even without the help of the requisite hero. Convinced that Ruslem knows where the sword is or that he can find it if given sufficient incentive, she puts heavy pressure on him by threatening him and Soroé. In the process of making her threats, however, all three of them are cornered by the Guardian of the Threshold, a giant monster escaped from the custody of the Temple of Gold and Iron.

The monster has Soroé helpless beneath its claw, and it seems that it will inevitably kill Yerra and Ruslem immediately after dispatching her—but at that moment, the blond giant from the north, finally having reached the goal of his long voyage, makes his spectacular entrance. He kills the monster and saves all three of them. The priests of Gold and Iron want his blood and that of all his companions as a punishment for the alleged heresy. Yerra has other plans and persuades Nohor to back off, offering him her consent to the complete obliteration of the rival cult and Soroé as a victim instead.

The naïve Norsemen are entirely out of their depth in the Machiavellian intrigues of the Atlantean court, but they soon demonstrate that they are a force to be reckoned with. When the day of the scheduled sacrifice comes, although they are vastly outnumbered, when Argall steps forward and refuses to permit the sacrifice of Soroé, it is obvious that he and his loyal followers will be direly difficult to kill. The order is given nevertheless, and the costly assault begins—but everything suddenly changes with the abrupt discovery of the magical sword and a seemingly divine intervention when it is placed in Argall’s hand. Both fearing the completion of Nohor and Yerra’s tyranny and hearing that a revolutionary army approaches the capital under the command of the ambitious Illaz, the Atlantean aristocracy and populace abruptly switch sides and, informed of Soroé’s claim to the throne, proclaim her queen and depose Yerra.

Unwisely, Soroé does not condemn her former enemies to the death to which they nearly subjected her, and her nascent reign soon runs into trouble when Illaz attempts to claim her hand in marriage and the regency of the realm. She has, inevitably, fallen in love with Argall and is only awaiting his declaration of reciprocal affection to choose him instead. This decision immediately prompts Illaz to transfer his allegiance to Yerra and to promise to reinstate her if she will grant him the desired regency. Having received what he takes to be a reliable contract—he is only slightly brighter than the Norsemen and no match for Yerra in terms of double-dealing—Illaz sets his army to march on the capital again.

Yerra, meanwhile, has ambitions far beyond simply getting her throne back and cunningly employs a magic potion to make Argall lose his memory of Soroé—after which he becomes exceedingly easy prey to her awesome physical attractions. She spirits him away to search for the fount of immortality, and the gods react to his fall from grace by unleashing a devastating storm on Atlantis. His absence causes considerable embarrassment to Soroé and to the army pledged to defend her realm, whose members consider him, in partnership with the magic sword, to be a guarantee of victory.

From then on, the plot thickens considerably as Yerra, Illaz, Nohor, Maghée, Ruslem, and Soroé all jockey for some degree of control over the situation from their positions of relative strength or weakness in a contest whose multiple stresses and strains—as the reader cannot help being aware throughout—will ultimately bring about the disintegration and disappearance of Atlantis although not necessarily the death of all the characters (and the introduction has revealed that Maghée at least will escape it).

Following the great battle of Lamb-ha, which topples Soroé but fails to fulfill Illaz’s ambition, thus provoking chaos and destruction on a massive scale, Yerra and Argall—after many challenges and tribulations—finally come within sight of the magic spring. Yerra’s treacherous and cruel disposal of Soroé has, however, reckoned without the supposedly clement gods’ authority over outrageous coincidence, and the valiant virgin finally contrives to break the spell that the evil queen has cast over her destined lover, thus effectively winning her duel with Yerra for the hero’s heart and soul, albeit in a distinctly Pyrrhic fashion.

In so doing, Soroé recapitulates the formula already standardized by this particular literary-mythical version of the eternal triangle in which the virtuous virgin can triumph over the wicked temptress in spite of the stacked odds of sexual magnetism but rarely lives to reap the material benefits of her triumph. H. Rider Haggard repeated that triangular motif incessantly, including a stylized version in his own best candidate as the first epic fantasy novel, The World’s Desire (1890; written in collaboration with Andrew Lang), and it is crucial to most of the novels directly or indirectly inspired by She although pulp versions tend to favor happier endings. Les Atlantes provides one of the most vividly striking versions of the essential conflict encapsulated within the formula, and Soroé is a far more active and elaborately developed character than Ustane or Naia—a modification from which the melodramatic tension of Lomon and Gheusi’s novel benefits considerably. The prologue of the story identifies Soroé in passing as “the Jeanne d’Arc of Atlantis,” and although the parallel is weak in the sense that Soroé never actually takes up arms, there is a definite echo of the Maid of Orléans in the melodramatic accounts of her trials and condemnations.

Although She and The Lost Continent are the most obvious precursors of Les Atlantes in terms of prose fiction, it must be remembered that prose fiction was not the medium in which modern epic fantasy began; that was the medium of opera, whose intrinsic melodrama was not only highly conducive to the exaggerations of fantasy but also hospitable to epic conceptual scale. Nineteenth-century opera was also extremely hospitable to femmes fatales, many of its great classics featuring central characters of that kind, often in narrow and specific focus, but sometimes set against an epic backcloth. It is at least arguable that the true origins of modern epic fantasy lie in the work of Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung providing its ultimate archetype. It is not a coincidence that the first epic fantasy novel written in France was the work of two librettists whose first and foremost love was opera.

Although there do not appear to be any nineteenth-century French operas set in Atlantis, Lomon and Gheusi would certainly have been familiar with Le Roi d’Ys [The King of Ys] (1888) by Édouard Lalo with a libretto by Édouard Blau, based on the Breton legend of a land catastrophically sunk as a result of the hellish fury of a woman scorned. Le Roi d’Ys was premièred at the Opéra Comique, the directorship of which was Gheusi’s great ambition and which he finally achieved in 1914—briefly, alas—after an eight-year stint as co-director of the Opéra de Paris. Gheusi’s dramatic works also include a three-act “idyll” based on Breton legend, Kermaria (1897) and a “lyric tragedy” written in collaboration with Victorien Sardou with music by Camille Sant-Saëns, Les Barbares [The Barbarians]. Lomon’s first significant production, Le Marquis de Kenilis (1879)—dedicated to Juliette Lamber, who, as Juliette Adam, was the founder of La Nouvelle Revue and sold it to Gheusi—was also set in Brittany, and his most famous libretto was for Charles Lefebvre’s Oriental fantasy opera, Djelma (1894).

Given these preexisting interests, it would not have been surprising if Lomon and Gheusi had decided to write a libretto for an opera set against the background of the sinking of Atlantis, but the fact that they were unable to bring Thekla to the stage, whereas La Nouvelle Revue was a captive market, might well have encouraged them to think in terms of a feuilleton instead. Although the dialogue in Les Atlantes would not be at all conducive to being sung, the novel is exceedingly stagey, built around a series of melodramatic confrontations—it would be ideal material for cinema, which was still in its early infancy when it was written—and might well have been drafted initially as a play. At any rate, it certainly seems to have been imagined in the authors’ minds as a sequence of overwrought theatrical scenes. It owes the epic quality that distinguishes it sharply from The Lost Continent to the extravagant elaboration of its dramatis personae, which permits the evolution of the disaster that overwhelms Atlantis to be seen from multiple viewpoints, the only way to do justice to its complexity and scale. Its formulation as prose fiction also allows its more expansive scenes—the conflict of the Bloody Day, the Battle of Lamb’ha, and the sacking of the Temple of Light by a riotous mob—to be detailed in a fashion impossible on stage.

The novel has its faults. Its use of a framing device to introduce the story is awkward, partly because there is no way that the story as told could possibly be the work of the hypothetical narrator to whom it is credited and partly because the story told in the frame narrative is ultimately irreconcilable with the main narrative. The main narrative’s chronology is direly confused, the pattern of time elapsed in scenes supposedly unfolding simultaneously but described in separate chapters often impossible to reconcile. The ending is hurried and drastically clipped, leaving numerous loose ends. New characters and dramatic devices are continually introduced without any narrative ground being prepared for them.

All these defects tend to be commonplace in feuilleton serials, deriving from the fact that serialization of the stories routinely began long before the texts were completed, and their final shape was largely determined by improvisations and deviations made along the way. If that was the case with Les Atlantes, however, the improvisations of the plot show a remarkable ingenuity in spite of their inconsistencies, preserving a far greater cohesion and intricacy than is routinely feasible in stories made up while in groping progress.

Modern lovers of heroic fantasy might feel disappointed in reading Les Atlantes by the fact that the blond barbarian giant initially established as the central character of the main narrative has no sooner acquired the magic sword that gives him superheroic status than he is sidelined from the central plot strand by the wicked queen’s amorous sorcery, leaving less capable characters with inferior weapons to occupy center stage by turns. He does, however, get other opportunities to battle monsters while pursuing Yerra’s subsidiary agenda in the interval before he can bring his own personal narrative to a conclusion. The narrative move is not inappropriate in any case, given that the real dramatic core of the story is the moral conflict between the wicked queen and the chaste martyr with the “hero” as their pawn and prize.

Some of the other plot elements thrown into the mix, including the monstrous Guardian of the Threshold, the evil priesthood avid for human sacrifices, and the Fount of Youth, now seem like standard props of generic fantasy, but it is worth remembering that, long before the genre became a marketing category, it had no standard props, and the fact that so many aspects of Les Atlantes have become commonplace is a tribute to the selective process by which its two authors fitted their legendary raw materials together to produce their new stereotype. It is notable that although the novel was published as a single long narrative, it does foreshadow the three-phase structure whose standardization resulted in the trilogy becoming the most common form of modern generic fantasy: the “N-shaped plot” in which an initial phase of success is followed by a catastrophic series of disasters, prior to a challenging struggle for recovery.

In fact, there is a sense in which Les Atlantes cries out for a sequel itself and perhaps two, not only by virtue of the fact that the authors left so many loose ends dangling but by virtue of the fact that there is something essentially incomplete about the particular version of the eternal triangle that provides its fundamental structure—as evidenced by the fact that Rider Haggard could not let Ayesha lie and brought her back repeatedly to renew her own two-sided quest for immortal love. Nor is it merely the main narrative that leaves unasked and unanswered the question of what Yerra might do next once she has Argall all to herself again, given that the fount of youth snatched away from her grasp surely cannot be the only one in the great wide world. The frame narrative, too, cries out for continuation.

In the introduction, Annie Gironde attributes her mysterious insights to some kind of ancestral memory, and her apparent foreknowledge of the geography and contents lost enclave seems to endorse her claim to have lived there before. However, since Soroé died a virgin and had no descendants, no memories inherited by ancestry could be hers. The logical assumption is, therefore, that they are Dahéla’s—although it is perhaps puzzling, in that case, that Annie does not recognize Maghée’s name, whereas Argall’s strikes a distinct note. Nor does what happens in the mysterious fjord look like a straightforward case of belatedly surfacing memories induced by locality; it bears more resemblance to an answer to a summons—and presumably, given the way it works out, one with a certain amount of urgency attached to it. If so, why did Dahéla’s spirit, if it really was hers, issue the summons?

The immediate answer is obvious: in order that her “book” might be found and read. But the object itself is of purely antiquarian interest, which cannot have any weight with Dahéla or any other interested party from the remote past. There must be some further purpose. Bringing the chemist Servières and Annie together is presumably part of that but can hardly be an end in itself. We are, however, informed obliquely that their alliance is a necessary prelude to a further mission; that, surely, must be the real purpose of the entire enterprise from the summoner’s point of view. As Dr. Gironde says, “It’s down there that we need to go, isn’t it, Annie?”—down there being Atlantis. And the hint is also dropped with leaden weight by the runic expert’s significant glance as he begins to read Dahéla’s story—if any doubt remained by that point—that there is a mysterious connection between Servières and Annie on the one hand and Argall and Soroé on the other

Even though Soroé never lived in the lost enclave, it does seem, given the pattern of Annie’s yearnings and the eventual result of the summons, that she might well have played some part in the summoning of Annie and the cementing of the union between Annie and Servières, which relates somehow to the union in the Beyond of the spirits of Soroé and Argall anticipated at the end of the main narrative. It seems probable if not definite that the spirit of Soroé, still separated from Argall, is somehow haunting the Norwegian fjord. Perhaps while waiting for Argall to join her in the Beyond, not knowing how long she might have to wait, she decided to wait for him there rather than in Yerra’s baleful presence, sure that he would eventually return home, alive or dead, whatever might happen to him in the interim.

If that is the case, she seems to have been forced to wait for a long time. Perhaps, in fact, she is still waiting and requires Servières and Annie to get together in order finally to achieve that union, presumably not simply by marrying one another but by going in an unwritten sequel to the story down there: to drowned Atlantis, which Annie would presumably have no difficulty locating in the Atlantic tropics. If that is really is the reason for the mysterious summons, however, why has the seemingly predestined union of Soroé and Argall in the Beyond been delayed for three thousand years?

We do not know what happened after the authors brought the existing text to an end, leaving Yerra and Argall alone, waiting for the last fragment of Atlantis—the peak of the magical mountain Bol-Ghô—to disappear, but we do know that Argall had made the decision, keeping a promise that he had made to share in Yerra’s expiation of her crimes, and we can probably take it for granted that Yerra, once she had recovered from her momentary despair, would have her own ideas about the course of that expiation. Surely, Yerra would have had no trouble at all in reexerting her dominion over Argall and every reason to do so even if he could never truly reciprocate her love now that he has remembered Soroé, and she could never forgive him for that inability. It would presumably be child’s play for her to numb his memory again and reduce him to putty in her obsessively lustful hands. But what might have become of them after the last remnant of Atlantis sank? There lies the potential substance of the main narrative of the sequel to Les Atlantes that was never written ... and might perhaps have extended for two more volumes to complete the trilogy that every true epic fantasy now seems to require.

Perhaps it is not too late; we now have several examples of epic fantasy series being taken up by other hands after the death of the original creator and brought to a belated completion. At any rate, whether it is ever augmented or not, Lomon and Gheusi certainly provided a beginning, a point of origin from which in time an entire subgenre of fiction had the potential to grow.

It is perhaps also worth calling attention to one element of the story told in Les Atlantes that did not become part of the standard apparatus of generic fantasy—an eventuality that derives from its specific cultural origins. Once the superhero’s indomitable force is removed from the plot, the main storyline becomes an intricate power struggle between several contending forces, all of whose alliances are temporary and fragile because they all have different personal agendas: the wicked queen, the chaste martyr, the ambitious pretender, the veteran general, the evil high priest and the virtuous sage are all familiar enough and follow now-standard scripts, but they do not only have to contend with one another, and it is not their own more-or-less Machiavellian ploys that ultimately determine the outcome of their power-struggle. The real power within this version of Atlantis—which is anything but a Platonic Republic—is the proletariat, ever ripe for revolution, initially envisaged by the contenders for power as something malleable, manipulable, and maneuverable but which ultimately proves uncontrollable and, more importantly, devoid of any possibility of self-control.

It is by no means the case that such revolutionary forces only feature in works produced in France, but it is surely only in France, with its particular history of multiple revolutions and its expectation in 1904 that another might be imminently due, that the element in question would be built into the plot of an epic fantasy with the urgent and ominous ambivalence in which it is featured in Les Atlantes. Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi was a cousin of the radical politician Léon Gambetta—with whom Juliette Adam was closely associated—and in the 1880s he was an active supporter of the future socialist leader, Jean Jaurès, as well as an active participant in the literary society of the Hydropathes and the Decadent Movement, where he first became acquainted with Charles Lomon. It is impossible to weigh up the different contributions to the novel made by the two collaborators although there are noticeable stylistic differences between some of its sections, and the role of the “mineurs, forgerons, et bûcherons” [miners, ironworkers, and woodcutters], as the story repeatedly qualifies them, in leitmotif fashion, with minor variations, was obviously agreed to and designed by both writers, but it also has a quality of obsession especially in the later phases of the story that seems both individual and idiosyncratic.

From the viewpoint of the history of imaginative literature, it is regrettable that Gheusi’s tenure as proprietor of La Nouvelle Revue only lasted from 1899 to 1906 because Les Atlantes was by no means the only innovative work of fantastic fiction published in its pages during those years when the magazine was extremely hospitable to such experiments, and although Gheusi passed it on to Henri Austruy, whom he initially hired as managing editor and who was one of the boldest of the innovators in question, its editorial policy became less audacious thereafter. While it lasted, however, Gheusi’s hospitality to fantastic fiction produced several results that seem, at least with the aid of hindsight, to be spectacular—none more so than Les Atlantes, which surely warrants attention now, however belatedly, as a classic of fantasy fiction.

Brian Stableford lives in an island kingdom in the Atlantic, home of a fallen empire.