The Dominion of the World (1900) represents a transition from classic Vernian anticipation to the pulp serials of the 1920s and 1930s. It is also the only science fiction work that sought to dramatize the "Transatlantic Peril," positing a fundamental difference of culture and attitude between the United States and Europe. Despite some of its outlandishness, hindsight has lent the world imagined by Gustave Guitton and Gustave Le Rouge (The Vampires of Mars) a certain prophetic quality. In the second volume of the series, as France seemed headed for war with England over colonial disputes in...

The Dominion of the World (1900) represents a transition from classic Vernian anticipation to the pulp serials of the 1920s and 1930s. It is also the only science fiction work that sought to dramatize the "Transatlantic Peril," positing a fundamental difference of culture and attitude between the United States and Europe. Despite some of its outlandishness, hindsight has lent the world imagined by Gustave Guitton and Gustave Le Rouge (The Vampires of Mars) a certain prophetic quality. In the fourth and final volume of the series, Harry Madge's brigade of psychic spies sent to infiltrate...

Joseph Mery (1798-1866) was the nearest French equivalent to Edgar Allan Poe as a ground-breaking pioneer of speculative fiction. The title piece is a significant exercise in alternate history, in which Mery imagined that Napoleon's life took a different turn in Egypt in 1799. The Truth About Creation argues in a mock-serious manner that there is nothing supernatural about God's creation of the world.The Lunarians, inspired by the New York Sun's famous "moon hoax" of 1835, offers a colorful picture of a Selenite civilization. The Explorations of Victor Hummer describes the rediscovery of a...

The Future City signed "Alain le Drimeur" (a Frenchification of "Alan the Dreamer") was published in 1890, probably inspired by Edward Bellamy's best-selling Looking Backward, 2000-1887. The Future City postulates that the Conservatives left France in 1891 to emigrate en masse to the island of La Reunion, where they established a Roman Catholic kingdom that deliberately cut itself off from the homeland for a century. The book begins in the early years of the 21st century when two young men from the island decide to discover what happened to France since it was abandoned to secularist...

Felicien Champsaur's Ouha, King of the Apes (1923) is the thematic "missing link" between Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and Edgar Wallace's King Kong (1933). In it, Ouha, an exceptional ape from the jungles of Borneo, is educated and transformed into the "Napoleon of Apes" by a well-meaning American scientist. But tragically, Ouha eventually falls victim to a "Beauty and the Beast" doomed romance. There is an archetypal quality to the character of Ouha, as there is to Tarzan and King Kong; if he is no more plausible than Jules Lermina's To-Ho, he is no less relevant as a...

They call it Asgard, the Home of the Gods. Beneath its artificial shell are at least three vast cave-systems, each one the size of an Earth-like world; and beneath those, possibly many more. No one knows how many layers there might be, and no one knows what secrets might be buried down at the "center"--if there is a center. At some time in the distant past, Asgard had suffered a terrible catastrophe. Now its outer layers are cold, its builders presumed dead. Explorers and exploiters from a hundred different worlds and races are scavenging among the ruins--but deep down, there might still be...

In The New World, the Arctic Utopian community founded at the end of The Human Microbes by Dr. Gael, comprised of the victims of tyranny rescued by Captain Josiah and his "phantom brig," is threatened by the evil Judge Roll Wolff, intent on destroying it to cover his crimes... In 1883, the notorious anarchist Louise Michel (1830-1905) was sentenced to six years of solitary confinement; effectively deprived of communication, she had had no refuge but writing. It is during that time that she penned The Human Microbes (published in 1887), as a distraction from her awful circumstances. It was...