FRENCH SCIENCE-FICTION...

 

French science-fiction are words that sound like an oxymoron, something like French Navy or English haute-cuisine.

France is essentially a land power, like Germany, Russia, China, or the Roman Empire, not a sea power, like England, Japan, Carthage, or America (to be fair, that last one was a bit of both in its past, and might become again in its future, but it really isn't now, since Mexico and Canada are not exactly big threats to its supremacy). As a land power, its political and military interests are mainly of a land nature, turned towards its neighbors. The Marine nationale is not as powerful as the U.S. Navy, as a consequence, and that will not surprise anyone. The British Royal Navy used to be as preeminent as the U.S. Navy now, compared to the Marine nationale, but it is a shadow of itself, to say things as they are, and today, it's probably about equal to it in terms of its capacity to project power.

With science-fiction, it is about the same thing. French language science-fiction never was able to compete much with English language science-fiction, in its impact. Science-fiction is really an American cultural phenomenon. Its roots can be found in the past of the western world, sometimes in the quite distant past, but it flourished mainly in the XXth century, in America, and it's still going strong, probably because humankind need fantasy and dreams, since rationality is somewhat cold and dry. Science can't probably explain everything there is in the world. We have stopped to believe in angels and ghosts, fairies and giants living in caves, and, to be honest, something is missing in our societies. Organized religion is handicaped by its supernatural nature, but philosophy is not. Spirituality fills a need and is sometimes necessary to feed and consolidate the human soul, so often battered and shaken. We want (and need) to believe in something, as the famous X-Files poster said, in Fox Mulder's basement office.

Science-fiction is an answer to the need of believing in a better future. In my view, two French writers are paramount in that domain, one well-known, the other almost totally unknown, especially in the english-speaking cultural universe, since he was never translated, as much as I know. Jules Verne is known all over the world as one of the main proponent of anticipation scientifique. He is sometimes quaint, especially when he talks about out-of-Earth trips. He did write many works that were read, and are still read, all over the world, full of dramatic events and ingenious plots.

One large theme dominates most of his writing, though, and it is science and technology. It is everywhere in what he writes: submarines, ships, rockets, balloons, giant bullets shoot by a giant Texas gun to bring people around the Moon and back, etc. He is clearly fascinated by things, in an age that was fascinated by things, by everything that was material. The Industrial Age was a great era, but also a difficult and troubling time, full of giant factories with thousands of underpaid, overworked employees, social inequities, blatant injustice, kids working for almost nothing, families living in the deepest of misery. England, at that time, was the most powerful country on Earth, but it was also, at the same time, the object of Charles Dickens denonciations of all that what was wrong about English society of his time. A brilliant foreigner, Karl Marx, born in Trèves, in western Germany, spent his last years in the heart of what he saw as an evil system, right in London, describing and criticizing the excesses of capitalism.

Another writer is remarkable in the field of french-speaking science-fiction, and it is Joseph Henri Honoré Boex (born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1856, died in Paris, France, in 1940). Unknown in the english-speaking universe, he is only marginally known in the french-speaking universe, as J.-H. Rosny aîné. Here, ''aîné'' means oldest, to distinguish him from his younger brother, Séraphin-Justin, labelled ''jeune'' (younger, as opposed to puîné - youngest). Some of their works were written together, before 1908, but Joseph Henri Honoré was the dominant brother in terms of creativity and substance, and he is the one who is usually credited with the dual works they produced together.

J.-H. Rosny aîné wrote many books, and contrary to Verne, he didn't centered his interest upon material objects, but around living beings. His insight in humanity and in human nature, also in non-human life, is remarkable and deserves to be better known. Like the Belgian George Simenon, the creator of Maigret, the French policeman that was french-speaking Europe answer to the developing trend of ''cop litterature'', J.-H. Rosny aîné did no want to know how things work, but how the human mind thinks, how the human heart feels, and how the human soul suffers. Simenon wanted to understand why people kills and robs, why they do whatever it is that they do, and why crimes are commited.

He was not interested in the nitty-gritty of material details, but in the workings and the mysteries of the human mind. Maigret never used his fists (as in never, never, never, not ever, not even once), contrary to too many American fictional police 'heroes', but always his mind. Simenon knew that a good cop doesn't have to use his gun, doesn't want to, and, preferably, never will have to. Like Sherlock Holmes, he does not believes in the power of muscles and physical strenght, but in the power of deductions and reasoning, of guessing the truth and understanding it, of redemption and second chances in life. Like the ex-U.S. president Bill Clinton, he can 'feel the pain' and the torments of his protagonists, and he use that capability  as the engine of his writings, and plots.

Many novellas of J.-H. Rosny aîné are short but poignant. They leaves a deep and persistent impression upon the reader. Like Maupassant, the author perceives things in a different manner than most people, and it shows in his writing. Les Xipéhuz, for instance, tell the story of the apparition of a new form of intelligent life in the distant past, a form made of colored creatures, some triangular, some round, some cubic, with curious lights, all living in a deep forest, and the novella explain and describe the confrontation between those strange lifeforms and a good number of different tribes of humans, united to save the Earth for the children of men and women, till the eventual extinction of the 'aliens'.

Other works are as interesting. La guerre du feu, written in 1909, is probably the best-known novel of the author. A first movie adaptation was made of it in 1915, and another one in 1981, both of them in French. Those movies suffers from the limitation of movies in general, since the heroes discovers fire, language, sex, and a lot more about human life in the span of a few minutes... Yes, of course, why not? It reminds one of too many recent movies or TV series where the heroes save civilization, mankind, apple pie, the Earth, and the United States of America in about 45 minutes flat, which is to say in an hour minus the required time for ads. Those kind of works, I admit, are made with a teenager audience in mind, not an adult one.

Maybe the best novella of J.-H. Rosny aîné is Les navigateurs de  l'infini. It is a magnificient piece of work, written in 1925, where the three heroes, three young Frenchmen going to the Moon in a manner that is not precised, finds a civilization of strange, evanescent beings, whose existence is based on the number three: three legs, three eyes, three arms, three ears, three noses, etc. They also reproduce in trios, in a manner that the author, of course, leave decently obscured, but that require essentially three sexes, a male one, a female one, and a third one, whose exact nature is left in the dark. One of the Frenchman fell in love with a female alien, and both choose to live together, even though they can't have offspring, and their love must remain non-consommé, like a meal that you can't eat: un mariage blanc, a blank marriage. It is an illustration of pure love, unsexed but real. The nearest equivalent, among human beings, might be in a love between ex-lovers, somewhat like divorced people that are still attached in a physical way but do not couple anymore.

For an older man like me, coming year after year closer to his demise, the most interesting novella of J.-H. Rosny aîné remains La mort de la Terre. It was written when the author was still relatively young, in 1910. It tell the story of the last humans, trapped on a Earth where a new form of life has taken the upper hand, the ferro-magnéteux. Essentially, it is a form of metallic life, animated by magnetism. It is mortal to human life, the essence of men and women being drawn to it, when too near, leaving dead shells.

Mankind lives in isolated colonies, all over the planet. Those colonies disapears one by one, slowly, in an inexorable manner, like the last cities of human life in the novel (and movie) On The Beach, by Nevil Shute Norway. In that work, it is a front of nuclear radiation that goes south and extinguish the last of humanity, in a manner that can't be prevented. In Rosny's work, it is simply the end of a long process of exhaustion, the end of impetus, the end of impulsion, the end of erosion, like when the wind finish to erode a piece of stone, after a not-precised number of millenias. All the knowledge and power of the human world is insufficient to counter the dreaded advance of ferro-magnéteux, who progress the way glaciers does, slowly but surely, like a cancer eating up someone from the inside out...

At the very end, the last representatives of the last colony finally surrenders to the inevitable, and let their essence, their life, be eaten up and absorbed by the new dominant form of life, joining their souls to the souls of the new masters of the planet. It is a sad and poignant novella, moving and troubling at the same time, like a funeral,  but also joyful, in its own strange way, because it is also a renewal, a new lease on life, a new beginning, under a new form, a form more able to continue to transform itself, evolution choosing a new champion, better able to carry on the flame of conscious existence. Longue vie aux ferro-magnéteux...

What matters are not things and technology, but people. What matters is not Verne, but Rosny. What matters is not old life but new one. What matters is not science and technology, but politique and biologie. What matters are not countries, existing (Canada) or to be born eventually (Québec), but human societies, live societies, moving and evolving all the time, this way or that way. Political structures are fabricated, constructed, created in an artificial manner, over a long or short period of time, but they do not really matter, because living beings are born and bred, generation after generation, like waves upon a shore. In a societty, any society, whether a large one (Han / China) or a minuscule one (Fon / Bénin), the olders (the adults) must help the youngers (the children) find their own way in life, then they should accept to fade away and slowly die, MacArthur-like, leaving the planet to those who will continue to inhabit it... Life must goes on, one way or another. After Louis the XIIIth, must come Louis the XIVth, the all-powerful Sun-King.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi.