Theo Varlet

The Great Cataclysm

marzaat3 Comments

This was another book I sought out since it was listed as a possible inspiration for Théo Varlet’s The Xenobiotic Invasion.

Review: The Great Cataclysm, Henri Allorge, trans. Brian Stableford, 2011.

Cover by Grillon

Brian Stableford says in his “Introduction” that not much is known about Allorge. He published poetry which included poems on mathematical and scientific subjects. He may have been a teacher. He wrote mostly for juveniles after World War One. That includes some possibly juvenile science fiction. Published in 1922 as Le Grand Cataclysm, roman du centième siècle, this work won the prestigious Prix Sobrier-Arnould very probably, says Stableford, because of its pacificist message, but its more notable today for its ideas concerning resource depletion.

Like J. -H. Rosny Âiné’s The Mysterious Force and Théo Varlet’s The Xenobiotic Invasion, this is a story of what happens when the power goes out in an electrified civilization.

But the lights don’t go out here in a contemporary society but in a far future utopia, the city of Kentropol in the year 9978.

Allorge’s novel wasn’t at all what I expected. It’s funny at times, not at all a humorless and stern screed against militarism and industrial civilization.

The furnishings of Kentrepol are mostly what you would expect from a utopia of the time.  

Electricity powers a number of labor-saving devices including electrostatic removal of dust and provides beamed power for aviation. Confirming national stereotypes, French romans scientifiques are often concerned with synthetic foods. Here custom-made pastes and liquors provide all the nutrition an individual needs. Here you don’t take a coffee or tea break but “have a bottle of perfume”. The government is a mixture of elected assemblies and academics. Weather can be precisely predicted. People have odd names. Here they are all derived from geometric shapes. Births are regulated to maintain an optimum male-female ratio. All surnames are derived from geometric shapes.

There are some not so standard elements. All that electricity comes from generating plants using solar or tidal energy. Money is radioactive to increase its velocity and to discourage its accumulation. A large part of medicine is the removal of organs and washing them or replacing them with animal ones. Here you can get a literal brainwash. A minor motif in French science fiction are intelligent simians, here chimps and orangutangs. They are slaves and smart enough to even pilot aircraft. There are also sentient Martians, and the residents of Earth and Mars are attempting to work out an interplanetary alphabet.

Continue reading →

The Castaways of Eros

marzaat1 Comment

My look at the fiction of Théo Varlet concludes.

Review: The Castaways of Eros, Théo Varlet, trans. Brian Stableford, 1943, 2013. 

Cover by Jean-Felix Lyon

In the 1936 second edition of The Xenobiotic Invasion, Varlet mentioned a sequel to that novel. However, that sequel, titled Aurore Lescure, pilote d’astronef, wouldn’t be published until 1943, five years after Varlet’s death.

In his “Introduction”, Brian Stableford speculates Varlet may have hoped this novel would be picked up in translation in America. Varlet was almost alone among roman scientifique authors of the time in his interest in advances in rocketry. While Varlet’s style probably wouldn’t have been amenable to an American pulp audience, if he had managed to place it in that market before he died, it might have been fondly remembered as the first pulp story to feature sentient dinosaur-like creatures. Instead, that distinction goes to Norman L. Knight’s “Saurian Valedictory”.

This novel is Varlet’s least ambiguous and most explicit attack on modernity, specifically industrial civilization.

It’s two years after the events of The Xenobiotic Invasion. The great powers of the world, still fearing infection from more alien fungi, are still maintaining a moratorium on rocket flights exiting the atmosphere.

But what are they doing behind the scenes? Well, young reporter Oscar Frémiet has discovered, working undercover, that the German military is very interested in rocketry and has been doing secret launches. (Varlet even mentions Hermann Oberth, one of the future inventors of the V-2.) He plays a minor, but important, role in the preceding novel and is narrator Gaston-Adolphe Delvart’s nephew.

Oscar, not so coincidentally, shows up at his parents’ house to see Delvart and his wife, Aurore Lescure. He’s trying to sniff out why Aurore Lescure is meeting with the famous Madame Simodzuki. She’s a billionaire and a very famous philanthropist who inherited her dead husband’s industrial fortune.

Gaston, Oscar’s father, argues with the narrator and Oscar that each nation developing rocket technology will, inevitably, lead to an arms race as it did before World War One. Delvart argues that many nations possessing rocket powered weapons could achieve peace through deterrence.

Continue reading →

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: The Golden Rock

marzaatLeave a comment

I continue with my look at the romans scientifique of Théo Varlet.

Review: The Golden Rock, Theo Varlet, trans. Brian Stableford, 2012.

Cover by Mandy

Varlet’s firsr science fiction novel mixes astronomy with the “dismal science” of economics for a tale of international intrigue, French post-World War One woes, impending war, and romance while also managing to be somewhat prophetic.

Published as Le Roc d’or in 1927, Varlet’s novel is, as Stableford notes in his “Introduction”,  a takeoff on a posthumous Jules Verne work from 1908, La Chasse au météore. While’s Verne’s tale was an amiable comedy involving the families of two American astronomers and how the discovery of a near-earth object made of goal – and attendant plans to bring it down to Earth with a ray – causes growing acrimony and threatens the marital plans of two of the families’ members, Varlet’s tale is much more serious.

The story begins with narrator Antoine Marquin, a medical doctor, attending a party the day before he is to leave on an expedition to the Antarctic. There he meets the Kohbulers of Switzerland. He doesn’t much like the pushy Dr. Kohbuler, but he is immediately smitten with his beautiful daughter Frédérique-Elsa, an accomplished mathematician.

A radio broadcast announces a great storm in the North Atlantic with the loss of many ships. (As in The Xenobiotic Invasion, Varlet uses mass media to do a lot of his exposition, but here it’s not only newspapers but radio.) Here Varlet raises early his theme of the changes modernity has brought and humanity’s dangerous character. Marquin remarks to Dr. Kohbuler that

The rhythm of life on our planet has accelerated, and humankind is increasingly forming a whole, a single organism palpitating all at once with the same reactions.


Varlet, Theo. The Golden Rock (French Science Fiction Book 86) (Kindle Locations 161-162). Black Coat Press. Kindle Edition.

If this storm had happened 13 years ago, it would have taken three or four days to learn about the loss of life. (That interval, incidentally, would take us back to the sinking of the Titanic.) Dr. Kohbuler says the Great War showed humanity was not a homogenous mass, that the races are irreconcilable.

Continue reading →

The Xenobiotic Invasion

marzaat7 Comments

And so I return to the work of Théo Varlet, this time for his second roman scientifique.

Review: The Xenobiotic Invasion, Théo Varlet, trans. Brian Stableford, 2011. 

Cover by Grillon

Published in 1930 as La Grande Panne, this is a charming science fiction novel that succeeds as a romance and a treatment of alien invasion and social upheaval. It also has some surprisingly modern resonances.

Our narrator is Gaston-Adolphe Delvart, a fairly successful painter. The book opens with him visiting his friends, Géo de Ricourts and his sister Luce. The subject turns to a rather rare topic in French romans scientifique – rocket powered space travel. Varlet was one of the few authors of French speculative fiction to use the idea before 1950.

It seems that it’s a potentially a big day for the advancement of aeronautics and rocketry. The American Moon Gold Company is launching, from Columbia, Missouri, a rocket ship to the moon. It’s part of a well-publicized attempt to bring back gold from Luna. The ship was developed by Professor Lescure and to be piloted by his famous daughter Aurora.

Alburtin, a medical doctor also visiting the de Ricourts, says he’s seen Aurora in the newsreels and found her “very pretty”. Delvart admits he does too. But what he tells us is that he is really fascinated with her. His disdain for famous film actresses is inverse to their popularity, but Aurora . . .  And why he wouldn’t he be attracted to Aurora? She’s beautiful, has several doctorates in math and science, and is a skilled pilot and, now, a rocket test pilot.

Luce asks why anyone would find a bespectacled American scientist attractive. Luce herself is quite attractive and knows it and flirts with Delvart. But, despite her beauty, Delvart knows there’s an “undeniable moral incompatibility” between the two of them. Besides, Luce has made no secret of her plans (to the horror of her mother) to marry a rich American when she can find one.

Wanting a break from the de Ricourts, Delvart accepts a ride back to Cassis with Dr. Alburtin. And, along the way, the woman of Delvart’s dreams falls from the sky.

The men pull the unconscious Aurora from her rocketship after a controlled landing, and they also grab a bag of meteorites collected in Earth orbit.

Continue reading →

The Germans on Venus and Other French Scientific Romances

marzaat1 Comment

Timeslip Troopers and The Martian Epic got me interested in the works of Théo Varlet. So, as I usually do when reading more deeply in an author’s work, I sought his short fiction first.

Review: The Germans on Venus and Other French Scientific Romances, ed. and trans. Brian Stableford, 2009. 

Cover by Gil Formosa

As laid out in his “Introduction”, this is the second anthology of French science fiction or, more properly, roman scientifique that Stableford has done for Black Coat Press.

Unlike the first, which attempted to define and show the “fundamental pattern of development” of the French roman scientifique, Stableford merely seeks to come up with representative samples from the entire period of the genre. Unintentionally, it ended up being somewhat biased towards humorous stories, he says. When authors defend themselves against the charge of absurdity by being absurd, their narratives are pushed to the limits.

Following the turmoil of the French Revolution, propagandizing for progress was harder. The skepticism about the benefits of progress and the perfectibility of human society was a common theme. Many of these stories have the theme that Isaac Asimov dubbed the “Frankenstein complex”: no good can come from technological progress. Stableford’s “editorial sieve” wasn’t interested in the “more pragmatic aspect of antitechnological sentiment” because that’s rather mundane in the context of science fiction. He opted for the more extreme and interesting cases. And, of course, some stories touch on the growing conflict between society and religion which, in the roman scientifique, played out in two distinctive ideas not seen much in American science fiction or the British scientific romance: the “plurality of worlds” and cosmic palingenesis – the transmigration of souls.

I’m not going to mention much about the background of each writer, but Stableford does introduce each story with a useful literary biography of its author, their place in the roman scientifique, and any probable influences on their work.

Continue reading →

The Martian Epic

marzaat3 Comments

It’s backward in time to cover my reading of the past five months.

And it’s back to Brian Stableford though, this time, only to one of the works he translated and annotated for Black Coat Press. After reading his co-authored Timeslip Troopers, I wanted to read more Théo Varlet.

Review: The Martian Epic, Octave Joncquel and Théo Varlet, trans. Brian Stableford, 2008.

Cover by Arnaud Demaegd

The two novels in this omnibus, Les Titans du ciel [The Titans of the Heavens] and L’agonie de la Terre [The Agony of Earth], were originally published in 1921 and 1922. Stableford notes they were some of the most important works of roman scientifique published in France between the wars.

They certainly are remarkable, especially for an Anglo reader. That isn’t just because they are, as Timeslip Troopers was, a sort of sequel to an H. G. Wells’ work, but because they feature a significant strain of French cultural and scientific thought in the 19th and early 20th century: spiritualism, the idea of discarnate souls not only on our planet but others, souls capable of travel by thought.

There certainly are plenty of thrills in the wake of a Martian invasion in the year 1978, an invasion which the genius Wells’ had a sort of cloudy precognitive vision of: massive destruction social collapse with strange new cults and political movements springing up.

The Titans of Heaven is a compelling novel told as sort of a memoir as it happens by the narrator, Léon Rudeaux, Besides the intended echo of The War of the Worlds, the work is almost precognitive itself in anticipating H. G. Wells’ later The Shape of Things to Come. Like that work, Joncquel and Varlet give us a world state created out of war.

Ironically, it comes into existence when at the very moment the idea of a “yellow peril” is maligned. China and Japan set out to establish an empire by conquest. Fortunately, a secret committee of scientists thwarts them by the Great Discovery, an electromagnetic device that renders metal weapons dangerous to use.

Continue reading →

Timeslip Troopers

marzaat7 Comments

In keeping with the World War One theme I started with The Russian Origins of the First World War, I picked this book off the shelf.

Review: Timeslip Troopers, Théo Varlet and André Blandin, trans. Brian Stableford, 1923, 2012. 

Cover by Mandy

When Lieutenant Renard rotates into command of a group of poilu defending on a small French village, he finds out that the officers have a very well-stocked wine cellar. But the Englishman who left it – he was shot as a German spy — also left behind a time machine and his journal. While the tone of the book is closer to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, it is explicitly a sequel to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine since that Englishman is Well’s time traveler.

When Renard discovers the journal and machine, he shows it to Sergeant Dupuy, the unit’s clever radio man and a mechanic before the war in the factory owned by Renard’s father.

When an accident with a time machine transports a group of French soldiers from the Western Front of World War One to the Spain of 1321, we get a wry, entertaining novel. It’s the first science fiction work I know of in the tradition of radically displacing earthly soldiers in time and space. It blazes – without, presumably, any influence on those later works – the path followed by Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade, David Drake’s Ranks of Bronze, Jerry Pournelle’s Janissaries, and Pat Kelleher’s No Man’s World series.

The two take it out on some test flights for a bit of R & R in Paris before and during the war. Both trips are near disasters, and the Germans unexpectedly attack the unit during one, and Renard has to come up with an unconvincing story about why he and Dupuy were gone at such a critical time.

Continue reading →