Three exciting novels by the author of ETHEL KING, THE FEMALE NICK CARTER An International Mission to the Moon (1926) is one of a group of novels produced in different countries in the 1920s that attempted to produce realistic accounts of a voyage to the moon effected by means of rocket propulsion. It boasts the most substantial literary pedigree, and is the most realistic, far closer to that eventual reality than other, more primitive efforts. Petithuguenin's interest in technological advancement and the possibility of space travel are real and well-informed; he became one of the first...

The Second Life of Doctor Albin (1902) belongs to a set of fictions that explore the supposed psychology typical of scientists with considerable analytical intensity. One of the central tenets of these is that scientific genius is incompatible with, and perhaps antithetical to, love between the sexes. The novel provides what is perhaps the most searching analysis of that allegedly-perverse emotional involvement with science to be found in the genre. Raoul Gineste (1852-1914) was a scientist as well as a poet, and his attitude is far more balanced than some, infused with a genuine puzzlement...

This is the thirteenth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique. The seven stories collected here were published between 1784 and 1928. They include two remarkable tales about Future Paris, the first story to seize upon the potential of air balloons as imaginative devices, and an extraordinary pseudo-case study in magnetism by Nobel prize-winning physiologist Charles Richet (writing as "Charles Epheyre"). Also included are a novella about the "death" of iron and how it changed the fate of the Great War, mind-reading technology...

The Chimerical Quest (1932) deals with an eccentric scientist, crippled during the Great War, who has discovered a method of converting lead into gold but wishes to give his secret away as soon as he has perfected it, so that anyone will be able to make gold, thus fulfilling his dream of turning society upside down by obliterating wealth. The Black Sun (1921) offers an account of the planet-wide catastrophe that overwhelms the world when a collision with an errant dark star causes the sun's radiation to flare up dramatically, and tells of the heroes' battle for survival, hiding deep...

Forty-three years before Jules Verne, and ninety-three years before Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jacques Collin de Plancy, remembered today for his Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology, penned Voyage to the Center of the Earth (1821), which is both an adventure story and a utopian fantasy in the Voltairean tradition. An expedition is mounted to discover the hypothetical opening at the Earth's pole, the existence of which was popularized by Tyssot de Patot's Pierre de Mesange (1720), Ludwig Holberg's Nils Klim (1741) and Casanova's Icosameron (1788). There, they discover an alien world located...

The Mirror of Present Events (1790) is an irreverent political allegory in which a Syracusan beauty, following Archimedes' death, offers her hand in marriage to the inventor who can produce the most innovative homage to the great man's mechanical genius. A series of suitors comes forward, each offering a mechanical device ostensibly more marvelous than the last. Also included are an 1887collection of six futuristic stories by Jean Rameau featuring electric guns, automata and a striking vision of a future Paris in which people have become dependent on industrial pollution; The Immortal (1908)...

The Virgin Orient, an Epic Novel of the Year 2000 (1897) is the account of a preventive strike by Europe, united under the government of Anarchism, against the perceived Yellow Peril. Even though his accounts of two crucial battles fought in India are extended and bloody, Mauclair's primary purpose is not to detail the war but rather to analyze the crisis of conscience suffered by the Anarchist "dictator" once it is won. Included in this volume are nine other fantasy stories, including Crown of Clarity (1895) and The Poison of Precious Stones (1903), written in the Symbolist style, remarkable...

British, French and American traditions of speculative fiction developed separately for more than a hundred years, with only slight overlaps prior to 1926, and continued to develop thereafter in accordance with different foci of interest and narrative methods, until the importation of the American label of "science fiction" initiated a process of fusion that was still not complete even at the end of the twentieth century. Like its closest English language analogue, "scientific romance," the phrase roman scientifique first made its appearance in the French language in the latter half of the...

The French Fantasy Treasury serves as an introduction to French fantasy, which has a long and noble history, quite distinct from its British and American counterparts. Its three volumes chronicle the history of the genre, from its origins through modern times, and include stories, excerpts and novellas by some of the most prestigious authors in French literature. A must for fantasy lovers everywhere. This first volume begins in the 11th century when fantasy helped the medieval people to illuminate the fearsome darkness in which they lived. We meet the brave Lancelot and the doomed Knight...