Monique is an emancipated French woman who leaves home to escape a marriage of convenience to a man whom her parents have forced on her. She then succumbs to all sorts of carnal temptations including a lesbian love affair with a singer. The scandal provoked by Victor Margueritte's La Garconne (1922), here translated as The Bacheloress, led to its author having his legion d'honneur revoked, which only propelled this novel about a brazenly independent "new woman" to best-seller status. What was shocking then was not so much the reckless behavior of its heroine, who is depicted as the victim of...

Armand Lavarede is a penniless young journalist who inherits a fortune from a wealthy cousin on the condition that he must first travel around the world in under a year with only five "pennies" in his pocket. If he fails, the money will go his creditor, the rapacious M. Bouvreuil, but during his journey, Lavarede knows he can count on the help of the pretty Miss Aurett, the daughter of Sir Murlyton, in order to to help him successfully gain his inheritance. Les Cinq sous de Lavarede was a tremendous success, not only as a book--it has been constantly in print since its first publication in...

Originally published in 1896, The Missing Men of the Sirius tells the extraordinary adventure of three French sailors whose ship was sunk in the Mediterranean Sea. While everyone believed them dead, they are captives inside the sunken wreck; they escape and discover an underground Egyptian city and, through mazes and tombs, eventually manage to return to the surface unharmed. The Missing Men of the Sirius is pure entertainment, designed for amusement. Its Vernian component does add a special element with its determined celebration of maritime heroism, and steadfast championship of the virtue...

This is the ninth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique. The eight stories collected here were published between 1860 and 1928. They include two remarkable short novels: Charles Guyons's A Voyage to the Planet Venus (1888), a significant early "planetary romance" in which human explorers visit the colorful, prehistoric world of Venus, and Arnould Galopin's The Man with the Blue Face (1907), in which the author of Doctor Omega describes in frightfully realistic terms how a scientist driven mad by grief uses deadly germs to...

The Ultimate Pleasure (1925) is a dystopia that describes in stark, uncompromising terms a future tyranny and the struggle of its heroine, known only as B 309. In that world, a small technocratic elite use deliberate terror in a desperate attempt to preserve the last remnant of the human race from a worldwide disaster precipitated by a massive disruption of the San Andreas Fault. But what happens after the revolution?... Kaschmir (1925) is Renee Dunan's engagingly idiosyncratic variation on the exotic femme fatale, the beautiful but deadly Zenahab of Kashmir, inspired by H. Rider Haggard's...

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...

Odette Dulac's The War of the Sexes (1926) describes a strangely fanciful sexual biology, combined with insectile analogies and an astrological theory of evolution. It incorporates an idiosyncratic mysticism based on Buddhist and Hindu ideas, filtered through the reinterpretations of theosophist feminism. The result of that triple layering of fantastic notions produced a unique literary construct that has no parallel in literary history. It foreshadows, in many ways, such endeavors as Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Odette Dulac was one of the most popular cabaret singers in Paris...

This is the twelfth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique. The eleven stories collected here were published between 1832 and 1932. They include three remarkable tales about automata and homonculi, including one in which the manufacture of an artificial human being is credited to the 13th century scholar Albertus Magnus. Also included are The Uraniad (1844), a protest against Newton's theory of gravity, The Death of Paris (1892), an account of how Paris was destroyed by a new Ice Age, and The Nickel Man (1897) by military...