Captain Cap was the fictitious mouthpiece that Alphonse Allais used to tell the tallest of his tall stories and develop his most exotic story ideas, including the majority of those that would nowadays be considered science-fictional. Allais liked to keep up with contemporary developments in science, and was ever ready to adapt ideas therefrom -- especially ideas that seemed to pose a challenge to common sense -- into the humorous newspaper articles with which he made his living and his reputation. By virtue of this habit of picking up such trifles, and adding absurd twists to them, Allais...