In The Murderer of the World (1910), Gaston de Wailly imagined that the Earth is a living being, whose surface we inhabit as parasites. Moved by revenge against the "evil beast" which destroyed his family, a mad scientist schemes to literally murder the world by striking one of its vital organs. The novel may seem primitive to a modern eye but its mind-boggling scope and action-packed plot gives it a certain reckless bravado.

Jules Gros' The Fossil Man (1882) is a mildly satirical comedy describing the progress of an 1876 international scientific expedition to a fictitious island south-west of New Zealand, which comes across the existence of fossilized human remains. The theme was still very controversial when the story was set, especially in Catholic France, where religious opposition to the idea of the great antiquity of the human species, making nonsense of Biblical chronology, had been forceful. The notion that the human species had undergone a long, slow process of evolution was anathematized, and the gradual...