Meet Dr. Marc Vanel, son of a scientist and a beautiful exotic spy, polymath, engineer, gifted with prodigious strength and intelligence, trained by the Brahmins of India. When Vanel acquires the power of invisibility, he becomes Homo-Deus, invisible but for his emerald green eyes, haunting the dreams of evil men and lovely women alike. Felicien Champsaur's Homo-Deus (1924) is a ground-breaking novel which combines biomedical and superhero speculative fiction. It is a milestone in the evolution of the superhero, dealing with its fundamental problem: to what extent a person who can act with...

Felicien Champsaur's Nora, The Ape-Woman (1929) is a sequel to both Homo-Deus and Ouha, King of the Apes. Nora is the story of two hybrids: a beautiful dancer sired by an orangutan and a human scientist, further humanized by surgery, and the son of a native woman and the part-human orangutan Ouha, King of the Apes. It is concerned with evolutionary history and the true nature of the simian and human species; it deals with the scientific modification of such species by means of surgery, thus enhancing the human condition, ultimately leading to the creation of supermen and the conquest of...