French Science Fiction Authors
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Guttersnipe
mortal ally
I also enjoyed The Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle. As much as I thought the Tim Burton adaptation was inferior, he was more faithful to the penultimate scene in the novel.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
I'm pretty sure that was a reworking / remake / reimagining - or whatever they call a blatant steal these days - of a Spanish film called Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Vanilla Sky is better than its reputation. I liked it.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Evolution magnetique by Pierre Barbet (1968 Fleuve Noir #350)
- The magnetic field around the fourth planet orbiting the binary (sic) Barnard's Star suddenly vanishes, stripping away the planet's equivalent of the Van Allen Belt and exposing the surface to deadly solar radiation. The dominant species (giant bipedal beings who have never made contact with any other alien species and are, as far as they - or we - know, the only sentient life in the galaxy) hastily shelter as much of their population as possible underground.
Within an unspecified period of weeks (or months but certainly not years) nearly all plant and animal life on the planet is dead. Lichens and insects survive and suddenly grow to humongous size. (How insects survive at this size given the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere would have dropped drastically when all the plants died is a mystery.)
On an unexplored continent a bunch of monkey-like creatures also survive the sudden increase in radiation and heat and, within one generation, go from being tree-dwelling frugivores to ground-living hunter gatherers. As the heat increases, a Moses like character emerges from their ranks: invents fire, and the wheel, then leads them across the encroaching desert to the sea he knows (somehow) is beyond. On the way the caravan bumps into the remains of an exploratory expedition of the now near extinct giant bipeds. After a quick poke about in the debris the monkey boys teach themselves to read, use sophisticated weaponry, and celestial navigation.
Reaching the sea they quickly knock up a flotilla of sea-going boats - after having taught themselves metallurgy, tool manufacture, and boatbuilding in under a week - and set sail. After storms, attacks by giant flying sharks and glow-in-the-dark killer jellyfish, they just happen to bump into the exploratory expedition's relief vessel. They board it and, since it is a scientific research boat stuffed full with science stuff, this allows them to hit the ground running with biology, chemistry, radio engineering and gods knows what else.
In alternating chapters to all this monkey boy stuff life underground at the refuge is all going a bit sh*t. People are dying from cave worms and claustrophobia. Daytime expeditions from the shelter bring back precious resources and let our heroes have fistfights with giant spiders, scorpions and other 'nauseating monsters'.
The underground dwellers pick up strange radio signals from a boat at sea and soon both monkey boys and giants are shooting it out in the ruins of a once great dockside city. The monkey boys discover air-planes and soon the giants realise their days are numbered. They cannot survive! Their race is doomed! BUT! Secretly their scientists have been working on 'Anti-G' and they can build a space ship (underground.... while under constant aerial bombardment... ok...) The race is on! But a snag! The ship can only take two passengers ! (Mass groans from the readership who can't believe that even as late as 1968 the audience is being asked to be surprised at the 'twist' the story is laboriously working towards...)
The monkey boys discover a way of wiring the brains of boring insects and radio controlling them. They strap BIG BOMBS to the insects and set them digging. The ship is complete. As no surprise to anyone the hero and (pregnant) heroine of the book are nominated to board the ship and are blasted off towards a nearby star system with nine planets...
The city is destroyed and all the giants die. Monkey boys all die the next day when... for reasons... a lot of volcanoes explode and a tidal wave wipes them all out.
The space ship reaches a habitable ('our') planet... Oh mon Dieux! C'est la Terre!
Quote from Genesis.
Fin.
Pretty dire stuff.
- The magnetic field around the fourth planet orbiting the binary (sic) Barnard's Star suddenly vanishes, stripping away the planet's equivalent of the Van Allen Belt and exposing the surface to deadly solar radiation. The dominant species (giant bipedal beings who have never made contact with any other alien species and are, as far as they - or we - know, the only sentient life in the galaxy) hastily shelter as much of their population as possible underground.
Within an unspecified period of weeks (or months but certainly not years) nearly all plant and animal life on the planet is dead. Lichens and insects survive and suddenly grow to humongous size. (How insects survive at this size given the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere would have dropped drastically when all the plants died is a mystery.)
On an unexplored continent a bunch of monkey-like creatures also survive the sudden increase in radiation and heat and, within one generation, go from being tree-dwelling frugivores to ground-living hunter gatherers. As the heat increases, a Moses like character emerges from their ranks: invents fire, and the wheel, then leads them across the encroaching desert to the sea he knows (somehow) is beyond. On the way the caravan bumps into the remains of an exploratory expedition of the now near extinct giant bipeds. After a quick poke about in the debris the monkey boys teach themselves to read, use sophisticated weaponry, and celestial navigation.
Reaching the sea they quickly knock up a flotilla of sea-going boats - after having taught themselves metallurgy, tool manufacture, and boatbuilding in under a week - and set sail. After storms, attacks by giant flying sharks and glow-in-the-dark killer jellyfish, they just happen to bump into the exploratory expedition's relief vessel. They board it and, since it is a scientific research boat stuffed full with science stuff, this allows them to hit the ground running with biology, chemistry, radio engineering and gods knows what else.
In alternating chapters to all this monkey boy stuff life underground at the refuge is all going a bit sh*t. People are dying from cave worms and claustrophobia. Daytime expeditions from the shelter bring back precious resources and let our heroes have fistfights with giant spiders, scorpions and other 'nauseating monsters'.
The underground dwellers pick up strange radio signals from a boat at sea and soon both monkey boys and giants are shooting it out in the ruins of a once great dockside city. The monkey boys discover air-planes and soon the giants realise their days are numbered. They cannot survive! Their race is doomed! BUT! Secretly their scientists have been working on 'Anti-G' and they can build a space ship (underground.... while under constant aerial bombardment... ok...) The race is on! But a snag! The ship can only take two passengers ! (Mass groans from the readership who can't believe that even as late as 1968 the audience is being asked to be surprised at the 'twist' the story is laboriously working towards...)
The monkey boys discover a way of wiring the brains of boring insects and radio controlling them. They strap BIG BOMBS to the insects and set them digging. The ship is complete. As no surprise to anyone the hero and (pregnant) heroine of the book are nominated to board the ship and are blasted off towards a nearby star system with nine planets...
The city is destroyed and all the giants die. Monkey boys all die the next day when... for reasons... a lot of volcanoes explode and a tidal wave wipes them all out.
The space ship reaches a habitable ('our') planet... Oh mon Dieux! C'est la Terre!
Quote from Genesis.
Fin.
Pretty dire stuff.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Rêves de sable, châteaux de sang by Yves Frémion (J'ai Lu #2054)
A collection of 11 short stories. A liiittle arty and self-conscious. Some of the stories would have been right at home on the pages of New Worlds when Michael Moorcock was at the helm. (There was a reference made by one narrator to a Ballard story that appeared in the Dangerous Visions collection.) Some of the stories here felt very Ellisonian. More sex than the average American or British SF story of that era though, (all of it heterosexual). I will admit that I was quite lost at times in a some of the stories. The writing was much more literary than I'm up to and the stories themselves were somewhat oblique. But then I often feel that way about stories in old copies of New Worlds. "Well that was interesting but what the hell was it all about?" being a thought that often crosses my head when reading New Wave SF of the 60s and 70s.
A collection of 11 short stories. A liiittle arty and self-conscious. Some of the stories would have been right at home on the pages of New Worlds when Michael Moorcock was at the helm. (There was a reference made by one narrator to a Ballard story that appeared in the Dangerous Visions collection.) Some of the stories here felt very Ellisonian. More sex than the average American or British SF story of that era though, (all of it heterosexual). I will admit that I was quite lost at times in a some of the stories. The writing was much more literary than I'm up to and the stories themselves were somewhat oblique. But then I often feel that way about stories in old copies of New Worlds. "Well that was interesting but what the hell was it all about?" being a thought that often crosses my head when reading New Wave SF of the 60s and 70s.
Matteo
Well-Known Member
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Yes, it was - almost scene for scene. I liked, and have, both but preferred the original which I saw some years previously.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Ysee-A by Louis Thirion: Fleuve Noir #427
The second Fleuve Noir to feature planetary magnetic fields as an opening plot device. Which is either a weird coincidence or evidence that the French (or at least French SF writers) were somehow obsessed by the subject in the late 1960s. Maybe it was a fashionably exciting field at the time and one at which French scientists excelled - like they seem to be all fired up for theoretical astrophysics at the moment; or maybe that's just the science editors at Radio France. It is entirely possible that the series editor at Fleuve Noir had a real big thing for magnets and authors pitching stories to him knew they were onto a winner if they could mention how exciting the Van Allen belts were, or how important planetary magnetic fields were in the first few pages.... or maybe not. I'm waffling.
Ysee-A is a page-turning piece of ultra-nonsensical French space opera from 1970.
In the opening chapters we are introduced to the egg-shaped being Oen-Vur of the race of Tulgs who is in fear for his existence from the relentless Glorvd. When attacked Oen-Vur sacrifices the entire humanoid race whose planet's magnetosphere he has been using to hide from Glorvd and heads out on a millennia long journey to rendezvous with another of his species, Tsée-A, on a far distant planet. Their kind are older than the current universe and have seen it contract and expand several times. Oen-Vur and Tsée-A have a plan. The distant planet they are to meet on has a very strong magnetic field but ultimately they will hide from Glorvd "in evolution!"; they will cast off their ovoid shapes and become aquatic animals with hands.... after the universe has collapsed and been Big Banged again into existance.
So... one collapse of the Universe, one Big Bang, and several aeons later...
Earth. 2370 AD. Jord Moagan (our hero, folks!) is briefed on his next mission to a distant planet. The monoculture planet Vogor in the system 230 is the supplier of 80% of all the phold in the Empire. It has been badly infected and the Empire's supply of phold is screwed for the next couple of hundred years. Luckily there's this dead planet which the powers that are think would be ideal for phold production... with a bit of accelerated terraforming. Just one snag, telepaths have reported some strange eminations coming from it. Not that anyone can see anything - needs checking out first, okay? Right, come and meet the scientists you'll be ferrying out. Sloene (a ravishing beautiful, Swedish looking female woman person) and Rap Bowl her assistant (who is going to be dead in a couple of chapters so the author didn't bother describing him. "He was methodical" was about as detailed as we get.
Off they zoom to Planet X and do some exploring. Sloene finds a strange object, takes it back to the ship's lab and concludes it's fossilised sperm. Curious thing to find on a planet that has never harboured life, she thinks, so she goes back to the site she found it and uncovers a little glowing pyramid. Tsée-A wakes up takes over Sloene's body - wiping all personality and memory as she does so. Instead of the nice aquatic animal she was expecting to wake up in, Tsée-A finds herself at the controls of a speeding craft flying over a dead and barren planet. With no idea how to steer the thing, she crashes. Women drivers eh? Tcha!
Oen-Vur, wakes up hungry, shaken from his aeons long sleep by Tsée-A's cry for help, he sees a ready source of food flying by and eats it. As Tulgs eat radioactive elements and Rap Bowl's ship is atomic powered Rap Bowl's exit from the story is pretty quick. Still hungry and having worked out exactly what happened in the last chapter, Oen-Vur chases our hero, eats half of his ship's fuel supply and, by sheer mental power, hypnothingies him into return to Planet X. He whacks Sloene's body (and our hero's) into a deep freeze and off they go back to Earth.
This takes 14 years.
On arrriving back at Earth our hero is arrested and taken to the de facto head of state. (Earth it turns out is a pretty awful sounding police state which manages to be the centre of an 'Empire' without any mention of a royal family of any kind. None of this seems to surprise or upset Jord Moagan (our hero) so I assume things are pretty much as they were when he left and in the previous books - by this time I had managed to work out this was the fourth of his 'adventures'. What has he been doing for the last two years? the boss wants to know. Apparently Jord Moagan (our hero) only thought the trip home took 12 years. (How? He was in suspended animation the whole time.) Apparently his ship had been seen entering the Solar Sytem when it suddenly did some evasive manouvers and vanished for two years. Jord Moagan (our hero) knows nothing of this. Released, but under constant, monitoring, he goes to see a scientist chum who has examined the fossil sperm found on the mystery planet.
Oen-Vur appears in the Boss's office and hynothingies him into defrosting his girlfriend.
Jord Moagan (our hero)'s scientist friend has not only examined the fossil sperm but he's done a whole Jurrasic Park number on its ass and then subjected the resuts to 'Accellerated Evolution'. The results are some weird six armed walrus like things that are total mental blanks but are amazingly disintegrater raygun blast proof. Isn't science wonderful?!
At that VERY MOMENT the super sexy alluring unfrozen bod of Sloene containing the superpowerful metal powerhouse of Tsée-A's alien brain noggin appears on every TV screen in the galaxy and makes everyone her obediant slave. Apart from Jord Moagan (our hero) of course, who suddenly becomes The Most Dangerous Man in the Universe to the aliens and has to run for his life. He disintegrates his friend and escapes the robot police who come after him by projecting his personality onto the mentally blank, weird, six-armed, amazingly disintegrater raygun blast proof walrus-like things. Aparently robot policemen can't tell the difference between real humans and weird, six-armed, amazingly disintegrater raygun blast proof walrus-like things if they have the same brainwave patterns.
He steals a ship and heads for Tibet for a reason that I didn't quite get but it was something to do with Tibet being full of 'sensitives' who, like Jord Moagan (our hero), didn't instantly fall for the whole Swedish Hotty Alien Mind Control Thing. Needless to say Tibet, being a little less nimble on it's feet than our hero, got nuked. The weird, six-armed, amazingly disintegrater raygun blast proof walrus-like things also steal ships and fly to Tibet - because they all think they're the hero too.
Once there (after a couple of minor diversions blasting cops and having his walrus-like selves drink a swimming pool dry) he discovers a set of underground caverns. All the sensitives are gone but he does find notes about something called 'Glorvd'.
Meanwhile out in deepest space a mysterious pile of old junk ships totally wipes a fleet of the Earth Empire's Finest Space Navy off the face of the universe. To the sound of bugles, the 7th Mounted Deus ex Machina Cavalary ride into the book...
Jord Moagan (our hero), who has gone for a little nap, is woken by a mysterious figure who says "Come with me!" So he goes. They climb into a mysterious old junk space ship and blast off just as Oen-Vur, who has been tunnelling through the Hymalayas looking for him, comes to the surface. His mental hero detector had been mislead by a rich seam of copper which had reflected Jord Moagan's thought waves and made it look like he was over there <---- when he was really going ------> thataway in a souped-up pile of junk space ship. He's out near the orbit of Jupiter by the time Oen-Vur cottens on to his mistake. He sets of in pursuit.
Jord Moagan (our hero) - who, it has to be said, doesn't actually DO much, let alone anything heroic, in this book - is starting to suspect his mysterious rescuers are even more mysterious than they appea; their piece of junk ship is equiped with all sorts of whizbangery and mysteriousness and can go super fast very quicky and stop just as superfastly without pulping the contents. Oen-Vur catches up with them and there is a bit of a chase that ends up near Pluto before Oen-Vur starts to suspect something's up and tries to hide in its magnetic field, All sorts of superscience pyrotechnics are unleashed and the mysterious leader of the mysterious rescuers gives our hero a pair of sunglasses so he can watch the fun and not go blind. (I didn't make that up for a joke. It's in the book!)
Oen-Vur gives them the slip and vanishes out into interstellar space. Meanwhile Swedish Hotty Alien Sloene/Tsée-A has got the wind up, launched the entire Earth Empire Space Navy in every possible direction and has slipped away alone in the most undetectable stealth ship they had. (She'd learned to drive apparently.)
The mysterious rescuers reveal themselves to Jord Moagan (our hero) as energy beings from another dimension. Their idea of big fun is hunting the sentient robots they released into the wild a few Big Bangs ago. Jolly japes. They vanish.
Epilogue
Everyone in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE apart from our hero and a couple of others have somehow forgotten about the whole Sloene/Tsée-A hypno-slave thing.
How they explain to themselves the mysterious disappearance of a whole space fleet and why Tibet is a smoking radioactive hole in the ground is a good question. Another good question is: what IS 'phold', and how has the universe been getting away on only 20% of its normal supply for the past 14 years? Seriously, the book gives no explanation as to what it is, why it's so important, and what (if any) consequences would occur if a new supply wasn't found fast.
FIN
The only book I can recall that had stage directions in the middle of speaches. so that instead of (the equvalent of):
"Blah blah blah... "he said, then, after pausing for a moment, continued, "Blah blah blah."
we get:
"Blah blah blah... "(a pause) "Blah blah blah."
It was very odd.
fossilised sperm
The second Fleuve Noir to feature planetary magnetic fields as an opening plot device. Which is either a weird coincidence or evidence that the French (or at least French SF writers) were somehow obsessed by the subject in the late 1960s. Maybe it was a fashionably exciting field at the time and one at which French scientists excelled - like they seem to be all fired up for theoretical astrophysics at the moment; or maybe that's just the science editors at Radio France. It is entirely possible that the series editor at Fleuve Noir had a real big thing for magnets and authors pitching stories to him knew they were onto a winner if they could mention how exciting the Van Allen belts were, or how important planetary magnetic fields were in the first few pages.... or maybe not. I'm waffling.
Ysee-A is a page-turning piece of ultra-nonsensical French space opera from 1970.
In the opening chapters we are introduced to the egg-shaped being Oen-Vur of the race of Tulgs who is in fear for his existence from the relentless Glorvd. When attacked Oen-Vur sacrifices the entire humanoid race whose planet's magnetosphere he has been using to hide from Glorvd and heads out on a millennia long journey to rendezvous with another of his species, Tsée-A, on a far distant planet. Their kind are older than the current universe and have seen it contract and expand several times. Oen-Vur and Tsée-A have a plan. The distant planet they are to meet on has a very strong magnetic field but ultimately they will hide from Glorvd "in evolution!"; they will cast off their ovoid shapes and become aquatic animals with hands.... after the universe has collapsed and been Big Banged again into existance.
So... one collapse of the Universe, one Big Bang, and several aeons later...
Earth. 2370 AD. Jord Moagan (our hero, folks!) is briefed on his next mission to a distant planet. The monoculture planet Vogor in the system 230 is the supplier of 80% of all the phold in the Empire. It has been badly infected and the Empire's supply of phold is screwed for the next couple of hundred years. Luckily there's this dead planet which the powers that are think would be ideal for phold production... with a bit of accelerated terraforming. Just one snag, telepaths have reported some strange eminations coming from it. Not that anyone can see anything - needs checking out first, okay? Right, come and meet the scientists you'll be ferrying out. Sloene (a ravishing beautiful, Swedish looking female woman person) and Rap Bowl her assistant (who is going to be dead in a couple of chapters so the author didn't bother describing him. "He was methodical" was about as detailed as we get.
Off they zoom to Planet X and do some exploring. Sloene finds a strange object, takes it back to the ship's lab and concludes it's fossilised sperm. Curious thing to find on a planet that has never harboured life, she thinks, so she goes back to the site she found it and uncovers a little glowing pyramid. Tsée-A wakes up takes over Sloene's body - wiping all personality and memory as she does so. Instead of the nice aquatic animal she was expecting to wake up in, Tsée-A finds herself at the controls of a speeding craft flying over a dead and barren planet. With no idea how to steer the thing, she crashes. Women drivers eh? Tcha!
Oen-Vur, wakes up hungry, shaken from his aeons long sleep by Tsée-A's cry for help, he sees a ready source of food flying by and eats it. As Tulgs eat radioactive elements and Rap Bowl's ship is atomic powered Rap Bowl's exit from the story is pretty quick. Still hungry and having worked out exactly what happened in the last chapter, Oen-Vur chases our hero, eats half of his ship's fuel supply and, by sheer mental power, hypnothingies him into return to Planet X. He whacks Sloene's body (and our hero's) into a deep freeze and off they go back to Earth.
This takes 14 years.
On arrriving back at Earth our hero is arrested and taken to the de facto head of state. (Earth it turns out is a pretty awful sounding police state which manages to be the centre of an 'Empire' without any mention of a royal family of any kind. None of this seems to surprise or upset Jord Moagan (our hero) so I assume things are pretty much as they were when he left and in the previous books - by this time I had managed to work out this was the fourth of his 'adventures'. What has he been doing for the last two years? the boss wants to know. Apparently Jord Moagan (our hero) only thought the trip home took 12 years. (How? He was in suspended animation the whole time.) Apparently his ship had been seen entering the Solar Sytem when it suddenly did some evasive manouvers and vanished for two years. Jord Moagan (our hero) knows nothing of this. Released, but under constant, monitoring, he goes to see a scientist chum who has examined the fossil sperm found on the mystery planet.
Oen-Vur appears in the Boss's office and hynothingies him into defrosting his girlfriend.
Jord Moagan (our hero)'s scientist friend has not only examined the fossil sperm but he's done a whole Jurrasic Park number on its ass and then subjected the resuts to 'Accellerated Evolution'. The results are some weird six armed walrus like things that are total mental blanks but are amazingly disintegrater raygun blast proof. Isn't science wonderful?!
At that VERY MOMENT the super sexy alluring unfrozen bod of Sloene containing the superpowerful metal powerhouse of Tsée-A's alien brain noggin appears on every TV screen in the galaxy and makes everyone her obediant slave. Apart from Jord Moagan (our hero) of course, who suddenly becomes The Most Dangerous Man in the Universe to the aliens and has to run for his life. He disintegrates his friend and escapes the robot police who come after him by projecting his personality onto the mentally blank, weird, six-armed, amazingly disintegrater raygun blast proof walrus-like things. Aparently robot policemen can't tell the difference between real humans and weird, six-armed, amazingly disintegrater raygun blast proof walrus-like things if they have the same brainwave patterns.
He steals a ship and heads for Tibet for a reason that I didn't quite get but it was something to do with Tibet being full of 'sensitives' who, like Jord Moagan (our hero), didn't instantly fall for the whole Swedish Hotty Alien Mind Control Thing. Needless to say Tibet, being a little less nimble on it's feet than our hero, got nuked. The weird, six-armed, amazingly disintegrater raygun blast proof walrus-like things also steal ships and fly to Tibet - because they all think they're the hero too.
Once there (after a couple of minor diversions blasting cops and having his walrus-like selves drink a swimming pool dry) he discovers a set of underground caverns. All the sensitives are gone but he does find notes about something called 'Glorvd'.
Meanwhile out in deepest space a mysterious pile of old junk ships totally wipes a fleet of the Earth Empire's Finest Space Navy off the face of the universe. To the sound of bugles, the 7th Mounted Deus ex Machina Cavalary ride into the book...
Jord Moagan (our hero), who has gone for a little nap, is woken by a mysterious figure who says "Come with me!" So he goes. They climb into a mysterious old junk space ship and blast off just as Oen-Vur, who has been tunnelling through the Hymalayas looking for him, comes to the surface. His mental hero detector had been mislead by a rich seam of copper which had reflected Jord Moagan's thought waves and made it look like he was over there <---- when he was really going ------> thataway in a souped-up pile of junk space ship. He's out near the orbit of Jupiter by the time Oen-Vur cottens on to his mistake. He sets of in pursuit.
Jord Moagan (our hero) - who, it has to be said, doesn't actually DO much, let alone anything heroic, in this book - is starting to suspect his mysterious rescuers are even more mysterious than they appea; their piece of junk ship is equiped with all sorts of whizbangery and mysteriousness and can go super fast very quicky and stop just as superfastly without pulping the contents. Oen-Vur catches up with them and there is a bit of a chase that ends up near Pluto before Oen-Vur starts to suspect something's up and tries to hide in its magnetic field, All sorts of superscience pyrotechnics are unleashed and the mysterious leader of the mysterious rescuers gives our hero a pair of sunglasses so he can watch the fun and not go blind. (I didn't make that up for a joke. It's in the book!)
Oen-Vur gives them the slip and vanishes out into interstellar space. Meanwhile Swedish Hotty Alien Sloene/Tsée-A has got the wind up, launched the entire Earth Empire Space Navy in every possible direction and has slipped away alone in the most undetectable stealth ship they had. (She'd learned to drive apparently.)
The mysterious rescuers reveal themselves to Jord Moagan (our hero) as energy beings from another dimension. Their idea of big fun is hunting the sentient robots they released into the wild a few Big Bangs ago. Jolly japes. They vanish.
Epilogue
Everyone in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE apart from our hero and a couple of others have somehow forgotten about the whole Sloene/Tsée-A hypno-slave thing.
How they explain to themselves the mysterious disappearance of a whole space fleet and why Tibet is a smoking radioactive hole in the ground is a good question. Another good question is: what IS 'phold', and how has the universe been getting away on only 20% of its normal supply for the past 14 years? Seriously, the book gives no explanation as to what it is, why it's so important, and what (if any) consequences would occur if a new supply wasn't found fast.
FIN
The only book I can recall that had stage directions in the middle of speaches. so that instead of (the equvalent of):
"Blah blah blah... "he said, then, after pausing for a moment, continued, "Blah blah blah."
we get:
"Blah blah blah... "(a pause) "Blah blah blah."
It was very odd.
fossilised sperm
Attachments
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Le trappeur galactique by BR Bruss Fleuve Noir #328
- a strangely old-fashioned tale of an interstellar "bring 'em back alive" trapper.
It took four chapters, a couple of meals, a swim in the swimming pool, and a couple of postprandial strolls round the trapper's magnificent country estate before he softens enough to start to recount his adventures to a visiting reporter. It's the sort of long-winded set up you would expect from a late Victorian, or Edwardian era book.
Episode one - Did I tell you about the time I went after the 'several hundred metre long, six or seven storey high,' beastie that weighed 'several thousand tonnes' on an unexplored planet so savage and teaming with prehistoric dangers we considered dropping an atomic bomb to clear a space for us to land? We dug a hole and it fell in.
Episode Two - Albino electric telepathic cave-dwelling jungle octopuses. Our reporter hero (who has now joined the trapper's team as the narrative suddenly lurches from being the trapper's recounted stories to his current adventures) rescues the Trapper's beautiful daughter from the clutches of albino electric telepathic cave-dwelling jungle octopuses - and the two young people realise they are in lurve. Albino electric telepathic jungle octopuses are captured - somehow - the author can't actually think of a way to do it, without going back and rewriting some of the corners he's painted himself into so it happens off the page between paragraphs and between two of the large number of vegetarian, round the table, meals these characters get through. Every new character, it is carefully explained to the reader, is a vegetarian!. Very Strange.
Episode Three - Rocks. On a recently-discovered planet stuffed full of Ingredient X, miners discover a rock-based lifeform which bizarrely (and in no way explained or even theorised about) is unable to be registered on film, so no one can take a photo of it. Usually totally inert and immobile, the rock beasts will, when approached, disappear underground with lightning rapidity. There is much head scratching. How to catch something that can just disappear underground like that? After a fortnight's frustrated thought, reporter lad has the bright idea of digging a hole for them to fall into. So they do. They tunnel under the things and go 'boo!' at them and they fall into the specially created steel trucks knocked up by the miners. Simples! But there's more! unbeknownst* to our human heroes, the telepathic beasties are fully aware of what's going on and two of them have willingly fallen into the humans' clutches to be whisked off to the galactic zoo on another planet.
Hero and obligatory beautiful daughter get married and go on an exploring honeymoon (with Dad in tow - the French are weird). The first planet they visit is covered with the self-same rock beings they found on their previous voyage with no other life forms anywhere. On the next planet they encounter more of them! Just as they are beginning to suspect something might not be right in the universe they are all killed...!
...but brought back to life by a bunch of blue-skinned aliens who happened to be passing.
The blue-skinned aliens are engaged in a centuries-long war against the rock beasts who are each capable of destroying entire ecosystems of 'soft ones' with their mental 'zrok rays'. Luckily the blue-skinned ones have come up with a whole bunch of anti-rock monster weaponry including superfast intra-dimensional rock boring thingies which they are more than happy to show our heroes in Captain Nemo like guided tours. (The second book in a row to feature an alien giving our human protagonist a pair of sunglasses to wear to stop them going blind as they gaze upon marvels - this time underground!)
Meanwhile, at the zoo, the captive rock things have laid eggs which have hatched and the zoologists there are about to send mental 'zrok rays' emiting, baby rock monsters to research centres all over the known universe... just like the blue-skinned aliens did centuries before!
Can our heroes and their blue-skinned, (vegetarian), alien friends get there in time with their short-range, modified, cosmic-ray emitter?
Of course they can! and with a few pages to spare for some happy family snaps and promises of eternal freindship.
Fin
One thing I find odd about the French SF of this period** is the fact that there are very few French people in them. For anything set outwith a recognisably local French setting - I.E. anything set in a far distant future, in or Space Opera Time, everyone has Anglo-Saxony names. Maybe in an attempt to make the work look more American and therefore more "authentic" somehow? I don't know but I do know that some of the Anglo-saxony names that French authors come up with are more than a bit odd. The old trapper here is called 'Harp Loser' and other characters rejoice in names like: Harry Song, Pater Patless, and Rog Willy.
*I love that word.
**That I have read so far and I am fully aware I'm talking about a pretty small sample base here.
- a strangely old-fashioned tale of an interstellar "bring 'em back alive" trapper.
It took four chapters, a couple of meals, a swim in the swimming pool, and a couple of postprandial strolls round the trapper's magnificent country estate before he softens enough to start to recount his adventures to a visiting reporter. It's the sort of long-winded set up you would expect from a late Victorian, or Edwardian era book.
Episode one - Did I tell you about the time I went after the 'several hundred metre long, six or seven storey high,' beastie that weighed 'several thousand tonnes' on an unexplored planet so savage and teaming with prehistoric dangers we considered dropping an atomic bomb to clear a space for us to land? We dug a hole and it fell in.
Episode Two - Albino electric telepathic cave-dwelling jungle octopuses. Our reporter hero (who has now joined the trapper's team as the narrative suddenly lurches from being the trapper's recounted stories to his current adventures) rescues the Trapper's beautiful daughter from the clutches of albino electric telepathic cave-dwelling jungle octopuses - and the two young people realise they are in lurve. Albino electric telepathic jungle octopuses are captured - somehow - the author can't actually think of a way to do it, without going back and rewriting some of the corners he's painted himself into so it happens off the page between paragraphs and between two of the large number of vegetarian, round the table, meals these characters get through. Every new character, it is carefully explained to the reader, is a vegetarian!. Very Strange.
Episode Three - Rocks. On a recently-discovered planet stuffed full of Ingredient X, miners discover a rock-based lifeform which bizarrely (and in no way explained or even theorised about) is unable to be registered on film, so no one can take a photo of it. Usually totally inert and immobile, the rock beasts will, when approached, disappear underground with lightning rapidity. There is much head scratching. How to catch something that can just disappear underground like that? After a fortnight's frustrated thought, reporter lad has the bright idea of digging a hole for them to fall into. So they do. They tunnel under the things and go 'boo!' at them and they fall into the specially created steel trucks knocked up by the miners. Simples! But there's more! unbeknownst* to our human heroes, the telepathic beasties are fully aware of what's going on and two of them have willingly fallen into the humans' clutches to be whisked off to the galactic zoo on another planet.
Hero and obligatory beautiful daughter get married and go on an exploring honeymoon (with Dad in tow - the French are weird). The first planet they visit is covered with the self-same rock beings they found on their previous voyage with no other life forms anywhere. On the next planet they encounter more of them! Just as they are beginning to suspect something might not be right in the universe they are all killed...!
...but brought back to life by a bunch of blue-skinned aliens who happened to be passing.
The blue-skinned aliens are engaged in a centuries-long war against the rock beasts who are each capable of destroying entire ecosystems of 'soft ones' with their mental 'zrok rays'. Luckily the blue-skinned ones have come up with a whole bunch of anti-rock monster weaponry including superfast intra-dimensional rock boring thingies which they are more than happy to show our heroes in Captain Nemo like guided tours. (The second book in a row to feature an alien giving our human protagonist a pair of sunglasses to wear to stop them going blind as they gaze upon marvels - this time underground!)
Meanwhile, at the zoo, the captive rock things have laid eggs which have hatched and the zoologists there are about to send mental 'zrok rays' emiting, baby rock monsters to research centres all over the known universe... just like the blue-skinned aliens did centuries before!
Can our heroes and their blue-skinned, (vegetarian), alien friends get there in time with their short-range, modified, cosmic-ray emitter?
Of course they can! and with a few pages to spare for some happy family snaps and promises of eternal freindship.
Fin
One thing I find odd about the French SF of this period** is the fact that there are very few French people in them. For anything set outwith a recognisably local French setting - I.E. anything set in a far distant future, in or Space Opera Time, everyone has Anglo-Saxony names. Maybe in an attempt to make the work look more American and therefore more "authentic" somehow? I don't know but I do know that some of the Anglo-saxony names that French authors come up with are more than a bit odd. The old trapper here is called 'Harp Loser' and other characters rejoice in names like: Harry Song, Pater Patless, and Rog Willy.
*I love that word.
**That I have read so far and I am fully aware I'm talking about a pretty small sample base here.
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JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Les Ides de Mars by Peter Randa - Fleuve Noir #331
On the first manned expedition to Mars the French member of the international crew (our narrator) is examining a plant when two pods burst in his face. The return to Earth is uneventful and, escaping the hullabaloo of their return, the narrator meets up with an old girlfriend in Paris. After a meal and a passionate kiss they return to his hotel room and are both shot dead by the woman's husband.
Two days later they both wake up in the morgue. They discover they can communicate telepathicly, and make other people see visions. They also discover that they can alter their own appearance to avoid detection - a form of protective mimicry and when they touch someone that person becomes instantly subservient to their will. The Martians who have invaded their bodies were interrupted in their takeover by having the bodies they were stealing pumped full of Gallic lead and our hero and heroine win the battle to retain their own personalities against their invaders. The authorities, as you can well imagine, are more than a bit suspicious about all this and soon the couple and the rest of the Martian expedition are on the run with the authorities determined to destroy what they see as a contagious alien invasion before it spreads. One by one the rest of the expedition their wives and others bought into their circle are killed, or commit suicide, leaving the narrator and his wife still running...
Fin
The story clips along nicely but does grind to a halt near the end when one of the expedition has to info-dump a lot of "what the hell started all this?" and Martian evolutionary history backstory to our narrator. He obtained all this sudden knowledge by hypnotising another minor character between chapters without bothering to tell anyone (or the readers). That comes a bit out of nowhere. But otherwise not badly done.
On the first manned expedition to Mars the French member of the international crew (our narrator) is examining a plant when two pods burst in his face. The return to Earth is uneventful and, escaping the hullabaloo of their return, the narrator meets up with an old girlfriend in Paris. After a meal and a passionate kiss they return to his hotel room and are both shot dead by the woman's husband.
Two days later they both wake up in the morgue. They discover they can communicate telepathicly, and make other people see visions. They also discover that they can alter their own appearance to avoid detection - a form of protective mimicry and when they touch someone that person becomes instantly subservient to their will. The Martians who have invaded their bodies were interrupted in their takeover by having the bodies they were stealing pumped full of Gallic lead and our hero and heroine win the battle to retain their own personalities against their invaders. The authorities, as you can well imagine, are more than a bit suspicious about all this and soon the couple and the rest of the Martian expedition are on the run with the authorities determined to destroy what they see as a contagious alien invasion before it spreads. One by one the rest of the expedition their wives and others bought into their circle are killed, or commit suicide, leaving the narrator and his wife still running...
Fin
The story clips along nicely but does grind to a halt near the end when one of the expedition has to info-dump a lot of "what the hell started all this?" and Martian evolutionary history backstory to our narrator. He obtained all this sudden knowledge by hypnotising another minor character between chapters without bothering to tell anyone (or the readers). That comes a bit out of nowhere. But otherwise not badly done.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Cette lueur qui venait des ténèbres by Richard-Bessiere - Fleuve Noir #320
1967. On the day he is released from five years in jail our hero wanders London. He is followed, then approached, by a strange man who offers him a job. He meets his potential employer in a mysteriously-appearing-from-nowhere nightclub called the "Time Club" (great shades of the Weapon Shops!). He enters and gets offered a job on a boat as a radio engineer. When he tries to leave after being told it doesn't matter whether he agrees or not because he already has, he takes a wrong turning and finds himself in olde worlde versions of the same club with the same customers...
He wakes on a steamer heading for Greenland, with ancient antiquated radio equipment. He intercepts a distress call from the Titanic, the next day they rescue survivors of another sinking ship in the far South Atlantic, and finally disembark on a fog shrouded quayside which turns out to be in the centre of a landlocked crater in the middle of Antarctica.
Lots of stuff happens and so thick and fast that it was difficult to keep up but in the mix are Giant Hive Insects, Swamp spores that eat people from the inside and leave only their victim's skin crawling around looking for a new host, Russian pilots from the 22nd Century geting turned into zombies, time displacement (and for once that old "maybe time is measured differently here" cliché, so beloved by Hollywood screen writers who haven't read any SF like to shove in SF films, is actually used with some interesting effect. In the latter half of the book the characters spend a lot of their time trying to come to terms with the fact they inhabit a place where cause and effect are reversed. Events that happened rewrite history to make sure they occur. At one point, the hero, whose diary of these events we are reading, writes that the chapter we just read didn't happen. When he came to write his diary in the evening he found the events of the day already written in in his own handwriting but radically differently from the way he remembers. So we get two accounts of the same day that are radically different but with the same end result. It's very odd and disconcerting.
The aliens, whose time is different, and who have been kidnapping humans from all ages, are evolved machines. They weren't created and became sentient; they evolved. They came from some different primordial proto-electric soup than our primordial proto-biological soup. A soup where electronic components swam and consumed one another and eventually became sentient beings.
Eventually... two rival sets of aliens (one lot having being taken over by the wandering empty skin spore beings) have a right old fight in their crashed spaceship. The robot our heroes have constructed (with a bomb in) explodes as our heroes flee to the portal to Earth time. Their friendly electronic alien (whose head they earlier transplanted onto a dead, but better model, alien) has set the portal to return our hero to his own time....
...except he messed up and returned our hero to before he was born - but long after his girlfriend's time - so she does a whole stepping out of Shangri-La crumbling to dust thing (because she was from the early 18th Century and would be ancient - though, by that measure, why he doesn't revert to being a sperm and an ovum is a good question).
Resued by Admiral Byrd's exploratory party he succumbs to the spore thing that got him as he fled the crater knowing that he will die before he is born and what will become of him when he does?
The last chapter is back to the beginning with our her released from jail...
Fin.
The second Richard-Bessier novel I have read and FAR better than the first which was the goddawful Skylark of Space-a-like La Planete vagabonde.
Cette lueur qui venait des ténèbres takes the van Vogtian formula of relentlessly throwing new ideas and revelations at you without giving you time to breath (or think) and runs with it. Very fast. And without looking where it is going.
It is bewilderingly all over the place. 'Richard-Bessiere' is one of the pseudonyms used by two Fleuve Noir editors ; François Richard, and Henri Bessièr. (They used different names for their different genre imprints Dominique H. Keller for fantasy and F.H. Ribes for detective stories.) Who wrote what and what they collaborated on, and which books were individual efforts is a matter of debate). There were times I thought that the two of them were taking turns in writing chapters and playing tag and trying to trip each other up.
I really liked it.
1967. On the day he is released from five years in jail our hero wanders London. He is followed, then approached, by a strange man who offers him a job. He meets his potential employer in a mysteriously-appearing-from-nowhere nightclub called the "Time Club" (great shades of the Weapon Shops!). He enters and gets offered a job on a boat as a radio engineer. When he tries to leave after being told it doesn't matter whether he agrees or not because he already has, he takes a wrong turning and finds himself in olde worlde versions of the same club with the same customers...
He wakes on a steamer heading for Greenland, with ancient antiquated radio equipment. He intercepts a distress call from the Titanic, the next day they rescue survivors of another sinking ship in the far South Atlantic, and finally disembark on a fog shrouded quayside which turns out to be in the centre of a landlocked crater in the middle of Antarctica.
Lots of stuff happens and so thick and fast that it was difficult to keep up but in the mix are Giant Hive Insects, Swamp spores that eat people from the inside and leave only their victim's skin crawling around looking for a new host, Russian pilots from the 22nd Century geting turned into zombies, time displacement (and for once that old "maybe time is measured differently here" cliché, so beloved by Hollywood screen writers who haven't read any SF like to shove in SF films, is actually used with some interesting effect. In the latter half of the book the characters spend a lot of their time trying to come to terms with the fact they inhabit a place where cause and effect are reversed. Events that happened rewrite history to make sure they occur. At one point, the hero, whose diary of these events we are reading, writes that the chapter we just read didn't happen. When he came to write his diary in the evening he found the events of the day already written in in his own handwriting but radically differently from the way he remembers. So we get two accounts of the same day that are radically different but with the same end result. It's very odd and disconcerting.
The aliens, whose time is different, and who have been kidnapping humans from all ages, are evolved machines. They weren't created and became sentient; they evolved. They came from some different primordial proto-electric soup than our primordial proto-biological soup. A soup where electronic components swam and consumed one another and eventually became sentient beings.
Eventually... two rival sets of aliens (one lot having being taken over by the wandering empty skin spore beings) have a right old fight in their crashed spaceship. The robot our heroes have constructed (with a bomb in) explodes as our heroes flee to the portal to Earth time. Their friendly electronic alien (whose head they earlier transplanted onto a dead, but better model, alien) has set the portal to return our hero to his own time....
...except he messed up and returned our hero to before he was born - but long after his girlfriend's time - so she does a whole stepping out of Shangri-La crumbling to dust thing (because she was from the early 18th Century and would be ancient - though, by that measure, why he doesn't revert to being a sperm and an ovum is a good question).
Resued by Admiral Byrd's exploratory party he succumbs to the spore thing that got him as he fled the crater knowing that he will die before he is born and what will become of him when he does?
The last chapter is back to the beginning with our her released from jail...
Fin.
The second Richard-Bessier novel I have read and FAR better than the first which was the goddawful Skylark of Space-a-like La Planete vagabonde.
Cette lueur qui venait des ténèbres takes the van Vogtian formula of relentlessly throwing new ideas and revelations at you without giving you time to breath (or think) and runs with it. Very fast. And without looking where it is going.
It is bewilderingly all over the place. 'Richard-Bessiere' is one of the pseudonyms used by two Fleuve Noir editors ; François Richard, and Henri Bessièr. (They used different names for their different genre imprints Dominique H. Keller for fantasy and F.H. Ribes for detective stories.) Who wrote what and what they collaborated on, and which books were individual efforts is a matter of debate). There were times I thought that the two of them were taking turns in writing chapters and playing tag and trying to trip each other up.
I really liked it.
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JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
L'odyssee du Delta by J and D LeMay - Fleuve Noir #339
An interstellar liner is attacked and vanishes. The High Council of Galactic Everything gets a couple of ransom notes which appear mysteriously from nowhere in the offices of a couple of planetary heads. In return for the liner (the Delta of the title) whoever was responsible for its disappearance wants one hundred tonnes of 'Sirium', element 692, the most dangerous element in the galaxy! The manner of the ransom notes sudden appearances. and the fact that, though they can be picked up and read, they don't appear to be made of matter, leads the intergalactic police to realise they are possibly dealing with beings from some previously unknown dimension. Because this is a cheap SF book the fate of the liner, its crew and passengers (some several hundred in number), and the transportation of a vast quantity of the most dangerous element in the known universe is handed to a passing heterosexual male and his sidekick who blast off with carte blanche and a couple of other crew members foisted on them at the last moment. Women!
Gasps!
Most of the book is then spent getting the pecking order sorted out and establishing that women can't drive spaceships under pressure.
They collect their cargo and go to the hyperspace coordinates where the Delta vanished. There they are met by an energy being inhabiting the body of one of the Delta's crew. It tells them that it needs the Sirium to give it enough energy to escape the solar system it evolved in because one of its binary suns is about to go nova and kill it. There's a bit of a stand off and dickering as the heroes don't quite believe any of this, then they work out a deal with the entity and everyone goes home. (Well those that are still alive do - a lot of the passengers of the Delta died during the hijacking - which wasn't a highjacking but a first attempt at communication between radically different life forms that went a bit wrong.)
Fin
Most of the book was taken up with going round the houses conversations working out how to do the next thing they had to do and then laboriously doing it. There was one effective sequence where our heroes work their way, cabin by cabin, through the stricken liner in the search for survivors but most of the book was all just a little dull. Nice to know though that intergalactic, hyper-steel hulled spaceships' control panels are chock full of oscilloscopes. And we got some decent SF names for a change: The president of the Solarian Federation was 'Bjorch Serf', our hero was called 'Jeln Davril', his sidekick 'Veldro Olsen' and their boss was called Scrabblehand McGinty.
Turns out this is the fourth in a series of 13 'Enquêtes Galactiques'.
An interstellar liner is attacked and vanishes. The High Council of Galactic Everything gets a couple of ransom notes which appear mysteriously from nowhere in the offices of a couple of planetary heads. In return for the liner (the Delta of the title) whoever was responsible for its disappearance wants one hundred tonnes of 'Sirium', element 692, the most dangerous element in the galaxy! The manner of the ransom notes sudden appearances. and the fact that, though they can be picked up and read, they don't appear to be made of matter, leads the intergalactic police to realise they are possibly dealing with beings from some previously unknown dimension. Because this is a cheap SF book the fate of the liner, its crew and passengers (some several hundred in number), and the transportation of a vast quantity of the most dangerous element in the known universe is handed to a passing heterosexual male and his sidekick who blast off with carte blanche and a couple of other crew members foisted on them at the last moment. Women!
Gasps!
Most of the book is then spent getting the pecking order sorted out and establishing that women can't drive spaceships under pressure.
They collect their cargo and go to the hyperspace coordinates where the Delta vanished. There they are met by an energy being inhabiting the body of one of the Delta's crew. It tells them that it needs the Sirium to give it enough energy to escape the solar system it evolved in because one of its binary suns is about to go nova and kill it. There's a bit of a stand off and dickering as the heroes don't quite believe any of this, then they work out a deal with the entity and everyone goes home. (Well those that are still alive do - a lot of the passengers of the Delta died during the hijacking - which wasn't a highjacking but a first attempt at communication between radically different life forms that went a bit wrong.)
Fin
Most of the book was taken up with going round the houses conversations working out how to do the next thing they had to do and then laboriously doing it. There was one effective sequence where our heroes work their way, cabin by cabin, through the stricken liner in the search for survivors but most of the book was all just a little dull. Nice to know though that intergalactic, hyper-steel hulled spaceships' control panels are chock full of oscilloscopes. And we got some decent SF names for a change: The president of the Solarian Federation was 'Bjorch Serf', our hero was called 'Jeln Davril', his sidekick 'Veldro Olsen' and their boss was called Scrabblehand McGinty.
Turns out this is the fourth in a series of 13 'Enquêtes Galactiques'.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Les Sirenes de Fao by Maurice Limat Fleuve Noir #371
It's drinkies time at a tourist trap on a mountain top on Venus and everyone is having jolly fun watching the tourists try to take a holographic drink from the holographic waitress when there is a sudden alarm. A space ship of an unknown type swoops down and well armed troops leap out and start blasting. Space pirates! Men are crisped to cinders by the lithe, supple invaders who are, beneath their armour, strangely feminine in build. Women Space Pirates! Every one succumbs to a sudden lethargy and when they awake all the mysterious strangers are gone and so are all the women tourists and the bar's hostesses! Every female in the place has been abducted! Lesbian space pirates!
Chapter two - On earth a young couple, Tamara, a young film starlet on the verge of getting her big break and her rocketship test pilot boyfriend, Luc Delta, are on the train from Paris heading off for a holiday, there's breaking news on the in-train TV. There have been strange weather events and electrical disturbances in Paris as glowing lights and balls of energy descend from the sky and surround women before vanishing. This time no women are abducted like they did on Venus, and (we are told) the Moon, Mars, and Hong Kong... obviously a lot's happened between chapters.
The electrical disturbances that plagued Paris suddenly envelope the train and Tamara vanishes!
The united space fleets of the world leap into action (now that it's a blonde White woman.... ) and Luc, within minutes, gets to be part of a crack fleet of two-man rocket missile fighter squadron in hot pursuit of the "satellite" the interstellar cops think is responsible. As the fleet approaches there are sudden lightening storms (in space???!). Our hero zigs when the rest of the fleet zags and his ship is the only one not toasted to a crisp. His rocket is right next to the pirate dodecahedral ship when a sudden green glow and sudden lurch transports them to somewhere else in the universe, landing on a planet in a solar system with two suns. Binary star system seem to crop up a lot in Fleuve Noir books; another "This is Real Science Fiction" tick box the editors liked to see.
Anyhoo
Before the dodecahedron pirate ship lands. Our hero and his side kick slip away and hide in a nearby swampy jungle. Then, using their handy dandy individual antigravity ornithopters they sneak up on the landed pirate ship. They peer at the landing site through binoculars and just have enough time to notice that all the people milling around the landing site are women - some of them wearing tight-fitting purple nylon uniforms - when they all climb back in the ship and it takes off. Our heroes are hours away from their ship, have no way of following the pirates and have no idea where they are in the galaxy.
So they have a bathe in a local river and eat some fruit. They discover some of the local flowers are telepathic and repeat the last thing that was said to them. So after a bit of chin stroking they relocate to the pirates' landing site and spend the day listening to the local flora repeat all the gossipy chit chat of the women who had been there the day before. The chit chat not only tells them the name of the pirates home planet 'Fao' but also presumably its location because our heroes blast off confident they know where they are going.
Tamara wakes up on Fao naked apart from a diaphanous cloth draped over her magnificent body. A beautiful young woman is waiting for her to wake. The beautiful young woman starts worshipping her and telling her she is The Divine. A strange disembodied voice agrees and for a few moments I get a real Dougal and the Blue Cat vibe. Talking flowers, disembodied female voices - sadly a couple of moments of research on IMDb shows that this book was published two years before Dougal and the Blue Cat was released. (Maybe Serge Danot read it in the bath.) Two guards appear and bow and, with a single bound, the athletic Tamara has both their guns and is running - when a sudden unseen force wrests the guns from her wraps her in a transparent ball of energy! The energy ball takes her on a rooftop guided tour of the industrious city below where thousands of women rush out into the streets and raise their arms in adulation and praise. Tamara, floating over their heads, like Glinda, in the Wizard of Oz, suddenly realises she dropped the diaphanous cloth when thumping the guards and is naked. The author spends a lot of time telling us she is a virgin, engaged to the hero of the book and in no way at all is in any way enjoying herself. At all. Not in the slightest. Oh and there are men on this planet. Brutish slaves whipped and reduced to the status of pack animals.
Tamara is welcomed to the high temple where beneath a pure white statue which looks just like Tamara! white clad women are doing all kinds of science! Their leader, super-scientist, ruler of the planet, and disembodied voice, Morgania has a good old gloat and tells Tamara that, using her understanding of 'liquid electricity' - the force that holds electrons together, she will turn, Tamara, into an immortal goddess. A goddess who will spread the rule of women throughout the galaxy! And women will rule because she hates men; she's a bit ugly and can't get one of her own. That'll teach them. (Seriously - that's given as the character's sole motivation.)
Our heroes eventually find their way to the planet Fao (apparently girlie chit chat didn't involve precise navigational coordinates). They get blown out of the sky by Morgania, bail out just in time, escape the dreaded acid-secreting flying afoogh fish by stripping naked in mid air, land on a rolling carpet like river thing which takes them through a deep gorge where they see slave men being whipped by hot women, find all the useful gear they thought they had lost, go back, zap one of the hot whipping women's slave control box and start a revolution - then essentially disappear from the rest of the book because the author can't think of anything else to do with them.
Morgania, incensed that the off-page noises of revolution are not in her masterplan, accelerates the 'turning Tamara into a goddess' part of it... and turns the unwilling Tamara into a goddess. Tamara spends a couple of well-padded chapters splitting herself into several conflicted aspects and asking herself endless lists of page-filling rhetorical questions before coalescing into corporal form, rescuing Luc (who had somehow gotten himself captured between chapters), and restoring 'the natural order' of heterosexual patriarchy.
Morgania, attempting to escape, falls into the valley of the dreaded acid-secreting flying afoogh fish and gets gobbled up.
Fin.
Well that was a load of crap.
It's drinkies time at a tourist trap on a mountain top on Venus and everyone is having jolly fun watching the tourists try to take a holographic drink from the holographic waitress when there is a sudden alarm. A space ship of an unknown type swoops down and well armed troops leap out and start blasting. Space pirates! Men are crisped to cinders by the lithe, supple invaders who are, beneath their armour, strangely feminine in build. Women Space Pirates! Every one succumbs to a sudden lethargy and when they awake all the mysterious strangers are gone and so are all the women tourists and the bar's hostesses! Every female in the place has been abducted! Lesbian space pirates!
Chapter two - On earth a young couple, Tamara, a young film starlet on the verge of getting her big break and her rocketship test pilot boyfriend, Luc Delta, are on the train from Paris heading off for a holiday, there's breaking news on the in-train TV. There have been strange weather events and electrical disturbances in Paris as glowing lights and balls of energy descend from the sky and surround women before vanishing. This time no women are abducted like they did on Venus, and (we are told) the Moon, Mars, and Hong Kong... obviously a lot's happened between chapters.
The electrical disturbances that plagued Paris suddenly envelope the train and Tamara vanishes!
The united space fleets of the world leap into action (now that it's a blonde White woman.... ) and Luc, within minutes, gets to be part of a crack fleet of two-man rocket missile fighter squadron in hot pursuit of the "satellite" the interstellar cops think is responsible. As the fleet approaches there are sudden lightening storms (in space???!). Our hero zigs when the rest of the fleet zags and his ship is the only one not toasted to a crisp. His rocket is right next to the pirate dodecahedral ship when a sudden green glow and sudden lurch transports them to somewhere else in the universe, landing on a planet in a solar system with two suns. Binary star system seem to crop up a lot in Fleuve Noir books; another "This is Real Science Fiction" tick box the editors liked to see.
Anyhoo
Before the dodecahedron pirate ship lands. Our hero and his side kick slip away and hide in a nearby swampy jungle. Then, using their handy dandy individual antigravity ornithopters they sneak up on the landed pirate ship. They peer at the landing site through binoculars and just have enough time to notice that all the people milling around the landing site are women - some of them wearing tight-fitting purple nylon uniforms - when they all climb back in the ship and it takes off. Our heroes are hours away from their ship, have no way of following the pirates and have no idea where they are in the galaxy.
So they have a bathe in a local river and eat some fruit. They discover some of the local flowers are telepathic and repeat the last thing that was said to them. So after a bit of chin stroking they relocate to the pirates' landing site and spend the day listening to the local flora repeat all the gossipy chit chat of the women who had been there the day before. The chit chat not only tells them the name of the pirates home planet 'Fao' but also presumably its location because our heroes blast off confident they know where they are going.
Tamara wakes up on Fao naked apart from a diaphanous cloth draped over her magnificent body. A beautiful young woman is waiting for her to wake. The beautiful young woman starts worshipping her and telling her she is The Divine. A strange disembodied voice agrees and for a few moments I get a real Dougal and the Blue Cat vibe. Talking flowers, disembodied female voices - sadly a couple of moments of research on IMDb shows that this book was published two years before Dougal and the Blue Cat was released. (Maybe Serge Danot read it in the bath.) Two guards appear and bow and, with a single bound, the athletic Tamara has both their guns and is running - when a sudden unseen force wrests the guns from her wraps her in a transparent ball of energy! The energy ball takes her on a rooftop guided tour of the industrious city below where thousands of women rush out into the streets and raise their arms in adulation and praise. Tamara, floating over their heads, like Glinda, in the Wizard of Oz, suddenly realises she dropped the diaphanous cloth when thumping the guards and is naked. The author spends a lot of time telling us she is a virgin, engaged to the hero of the book and in no way at all is in any way enjoying herself. At all. Not in the slightest. Oh and there are men on this planet. Brutish slaves whipped and reduced to the status of pack animals.
Tamara is welcomed to the high temple where beneath a pure white statue which looks just like Tamara! white clad women are doing all kinds of science! Their leader, super-scientist, ruler of the planet, and disembodied voice, Morgania has a good old gloat and tells Tamara that, using her understanding of 'liquid electricity' - the force that holds electrons together, she will turn, Tamara, into an immortal goddess. A goddess who will spread the rule of women throughout the galaxy! And women will rule because she hates men; she's a bit ugly and can't get one of her own. That'll teach them. (Seriously - that's given as the character's sole motivation.)
Our heroes eventually find their way to the planet Fao (apparently girlie chit chat didn't involve precise navigational coordinates). They get blown out of the sky by Morgania, bail out just in time, escape the dreaded acid-secreting flying afoogh fish by stripping naked in mid air, land on a rolling carpet like river thing which takes them through a deep gorge where they see slave men being whipped by hot women, find all the useful gear they thought they had lost, go back, zap one of the hot whipping women's slave control box and start a revolution - then essentially disappear from the rest of the book because the author can't think of anything else to do with them.
Morgania, incensed that the off-page noises of revolution are not in her masterplan, accelerates the 'turning Tamara into a goddess' part of it... and turns the unwilling Tamara into a goddess. Tamara spends a couple of well-padded chapters splitting herself into several conflicted aspects and asking herself endless lists of page-filling rhetorical questions before coalescing into corporal form, rescuing Luc (who had somehow gotten himself captured between chapters), and restoring 'the natural order' of heterosexual patriarchy.
Morgania, attempting to escape, falls into the valley of the dreaded acid-secreting flying afoogh fish and gets gobbled up.
Fin.
Well that was a load of crap.
Last edited:
Matteo
Well-Known Member
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- 1,386
wonders whether @JunkMonkey actually read this one or whether he only dreamed it...
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
It's all true! Scout's honour! *
I am having so much fun reading these (I kept notes as I was reading Les Sirenes de Fao as I knew no one would believe me if I tried to do it from memory.) The next book is going to be Tout Commencera... Hier the sixty-third! novel by Richard-Bessiere who, the blurb informs me, has been "surnommé le << Nostradamus du XXe siecle >>" (the Nostradamus of the 20th Century).
*or Guide's; I'm not fussy.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Tout Commencera... Hier by Richard-Bessiere - Fleuve Noir #359
In the 23rd Century, returning from an assignment in, I presume, their previous book, the crew of the The Aristotle (who rejoice in the Anglo Saxonny names of Georges Spencer, Anton Lurbeck, and Ted Mason) pass the time by teasing second pilot Jeff O'Connor about his sketchy knowledge of medieval French history as he drops what are probably a hilarious stream of schoolboy howlers. Hilarious presumably if you knew anything about Medieval French history; which I don't... but I know clumsy foreshadowing when I see it.
Sure enough, arriving at their HQ they find it all in a tizzy and their boss wearing a trench in the carpet because a time machine just turned up from nowhere (time travel being previously unknown in this universe) The machine had one passenger. A young chap claiming to be an emissary to the future from the court of King Arthur.
The young chap it turns out has powers which aren't magic because they are based on a science that science-based science can't understand. He demonstrates his soon to be very convenient, get out of jail free card powers by materialising into the room where the briefing is taking place and lighting, with a casual gesture, the cigarette our hero is about to light with his "briquet atomique" (atomic cigarette lighter) - in the future you won't have to worry about cigarettes giving you cancer because your lighter will get there first.
Arthurian dude didn't build the time machine. A bunch of not nice 'Future Men turned up at Camelot in three of the things - but this one broke down so they left it. But the not magicians at Arthur's court got it going again and here we are. The Future Men are trying to alter history and their well armed time machines - that can fire missiles that travel in time as well as space - leading to an interesting running gag about firing at the enemy but missing and hitting somewhere/when else instead. Stray shots were likely to end up in Mongolia in 214 AD or Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 - and leaving people puzzling about whether Meteor Crater in Arizona actually existed before they test fired the thing last Tuesday or whether they had re-written history.
So off they all zip in time to stop the Future Men from trying to alter history and find out why they are doing it in the first place. After accidentally persuading Nero not to burn Rome down... and then accidentally spectacularly setting fire to it when they blow up one of the Future Men's time machines, visiting Arthur's Court, medieval France - where things have apparently gone totally wrong historically - they have a bit of a brainwave and zoom forward in time. They find a devastated Earth; aliens invaders are wiping out humanity. A venerable Future Scientist (equipped with a Standard Mk IV Elderly Scientist Hot Daughter) invented a time machine and discovered diverging time lines, two alternate realities, and the Aliens had only invaded one.... If he could go back in time and alter history so that his time line matched the un-invaded one everyone would be saved! (I think?) History is put back on the right track - from our hers' point of view by stopping the last of the Future Men from killing William the Conqueror the night before the Battle of Hasting. (Thus ensuring the French won) and a bit more ping ponging around in time and the location of the divergence - when the two time lines split - is discovered. One of Arthur's not scientist scientists blew himself up messing with the time machine they had sent back. By trying to rescue themselves they had created the very problem they were trying to extricate themselves from. (Oh, I do love a good paradox.)
Now they know how to create differing alternate realities the Future People can create one just before the Aliens invade and live happily ever. Hot Daughter comes back to tell them plan A worked, and to fall into the arms of our hero because, of course...
Fin
What's not explained (or worried) about is what happens to the people who are in the non diverged second timeline. They are in exactly the same position as they would have been and would presumably do exactly what they did the first time when the aliens invade and invent time machines, go back in time, and try and alter history and... round and round it goes. Unless Elderly Scientist is incredibly noble in the second time line and delibereately doesn't invent a way to save himself and his daughter. Knowing that somewhere in spacetime he is living a happy uninvaded by aliens life?
Annoying Get out of Jail Free (literaly) magic stuff aside this was an ok piece of pulp junk, cardboard character time travel nonsence.
In the 23rd Century, returning from an assignment in, I presume, their previous book, the crew of the The Aristotle (who rejoice in the Anglo Saxonny names of Georges Spencer, Anton Lurbeck, and Ted Mason) pass the time by teasing second pilot Jeff O'Connor about his sketchy knowledge of medieval French history as he drops what are probably a hilarious stream of schoolboy howlers. Hilarious presumably if you knew anything about Medieval French history; which I don't... but I know clumsy foreshadowing when I see it.
Sure enough, arriving at their HQ they find it all in a tizzy and their boss wearing a trench in the carpet because a time machine just turned up from nowhere (time travel being previously unknown in this universe) The machine had one passenger. A young chap claiming to be an emissary to the future from the court of King Arthur.
The young chap it turns out has powers which aren't magic because they are based on a science that science-based science can't understand. He demonstrates his soon to be very convenient, get out of jail free card powers by materialising into the room where the briefing is taking place and lighting, with a casual gesture, the cigarette our hero is about to light with his "briquet atomique" (atomic cigarette lighter) - in the future you won't have to worry about cigarettes giving you cancer because your lighter will get there first.
Arthurian dude didn't build the time machine. A bunch of not nice 'Future Men turned up at Camelot in three of the things - but this one broke down so they left it. But the not magicians at Arthur's court got it going again and here we are. The Future Men are trying to alter history and their well armed time machines - that can fire missiles that travel in time as well as space - leading to an interesting running gag about firing at the enemy but missing and hitting somewhere/when else instead. Stray shots were likely to end up in Mongolia in 214 AD or Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 - and leaving people puzzling about whether Meteor Crater in Arizona actually existed before they test fired the thing last Tuesday or whether they had re-written history.
So off they all zip in time to stop the Future Men from trying to alter history and find out why they are doing it in the first place. After accidentally persuading Nero not to burn Rome down... and then accidentally spectacularly setting fire to it when they blow up one of the Future Men's time machines, visiting Arthur's Court, medieval France - where things have apparently gone totally wrong historically - they have a bit of a brainwave and zoom forward in time. They find a devastated Earth; aliens invaders are wiping out humanity. A venerable Future Scientist (equipped with a Standard Mk IV Elderly Scientist Hot Daughter) invented a time machine and discovered diverging time lines, two alternate realities, and the Aliens had only invaded one.... If he could go back in time and alter history so that his time line matched the un-invaded one everyone would be saved! (I think?) History is put back on the right track - from our hers' point of view by stopping the last of the Future Men from killing William the Conqueror the night before the Battle of Hasting. (Thus ensuring the French won) and a bit more ping ponging around in time and the location of the divergence - when the two time lines split - is discovered. One of Arthur's not scientist scientists blew himself up messing with the time machine they had sent back. By trying to rescue themselves they had created the very problem they were trying to extricate themselves from. (Oh, I do love a good paradox.)
Now they know how to create differing alternate realities the Future People can create one just before the Aliens invade and live happily ever. Hot Daughter comes back to tell them plan A worked, and to fall into the arms of our hero because, of course...
Fin
What's not explained (or worried) about is what happens to the people who are in the non diverged second timeline. They are in exactly the same position as they would have been and would presumably do exactly what they did the first time when the aliens invade and invent time machines, go back in time, and try and alter history and... round and round it goes. Unless Elderly Scientist is incredibly noble in the second time line and delibereately doesn't invent a way to save himself and his daughter. Knowing that somewhere in spacetime he is living a happy uninvaded by aliens life?
Annoying Get out of Jail Free (literaly) magic stuff aside this was an ok piece of pulp junk, cardboard character time travel nonsence.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
La Machine venue d'ailleurs by Richard-Bessiere - Fleuve Noir #372
Sydney Gordon, New York Newspaperman is having a very odd day. The Eiffel Tower is a New York landmark, people think he's the president of the United States, and every woman in New York is his wife Margaret. And he's having these incredible headaches....
He puts the headaches down to the loud noises coming from the building work on the old cinema next door to his office. He goes to investigate the site - wondering why no one has been seen entering or leaving the place. There's no one in the building when he enters just a lot of strange looking machinery, he has a dizzy spell when he enters a red circle of light and when he exits the building he finds his car is missing; even worse he learns that he's somehow slipped into an alternate New York where owning a car is illegal... as is owning anything - even the language has been modified so that you can't say "can I have a glass of water?" because 'having' something implies ownership.
In this universe his wife divorced him and married a plumber. He has no acceptable papers to prove who he is and the police aren't too happy with him. Weirder yet, people with horns on their heads appear from nowhere and yell at him to "leave this world!" A stranger turns up and offers to get him on a fishing boat to escape to capitalist China. He's on the boat, about to leave with his drugged and kidnapped wife, and friends when the horned headed ones attack... and suddenly he finds himself back in the strange machine.
His wife is there in the room and so are his friends. And so are two short humanoids who go into a full-on sales pitch about their alternate universe simulator which would be great for people to try out new ideas and philosophies and see their full ramifications before they implement them
"What about about the horned men who tried to kill me?"
"A slight bug - they appear in every simulation. We're working on it."
The two creatures want gold or uranium - they can't make their mind up - and this wonderful tech is theirs for the taking. They have smaller models too. Taken on a guided tour of the showroom Margaret gets kidnapped by the horned ones. Syd sets out after them and they slip from one weird reality to another first in in pursuit, then escape. In one world animals didn't evolve and plants are sentient. The humans in that one go to restaurants and wriggle their toes in exotic soils from around the world. In each world the horned ones attack them claiming the two creatures who are trying to sell them the machine are con men who stole it from them. In every world a character called John Smith turns up and tries to rescue them by getting them to go on a fishing boat and flee to China.
I was reminded while reading this book of Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles and Mindswap. There were a few genuinely laugh out loud moments. A few pages from the end the author, who is obviously having a lot of fun, notices he's running out of pages and has to hurriedly arrange for our hero to fall unconscious as a female aspect of the recurring rescuing character "Call me Joan!" leaps on him. (This in a world where the 'normal standards of beauty' have been reversed.)
When he wakes he's back in the 'real' world and has a lot of stuff that happened while he was out cold explained to him. The horny headed ones were telling the truth but just to complicate things the machine had fallen in love with our hero - which is why he had a hard time escaping from it.
Anyway handwavy handwavy infodumping and onto the next book.
Sydney Gordon, New York Newspaperman is having a very odd day. The Eiffel Tower is a New York landmark, people think he's the president of the United States, and every woman in New York is his wife Margaret. And he's having these incredible headaches....
He puts the headaches down to the loud noises coming from the building work on the old cinema next door to his office. He goes to investigate the site - wondering why no one has been seen entering or leaving the place. There's no one in the building when he enters just a lot of strange looking machinery, he has a dizzy spell when he enters a red circle of light and when he exits the building he finds his car is missing; even worse he learns that he's somehow slipped into an alternate New York where owning a car is illegal... as is owning anything - even the language has been modified so that you can't say "can I have a glass of water?" because 'having' something implies ownership.
In this universe his wife divorced him and married a plumber. He has no acceptable papers to prove who he is and the police aren't too happy with him. Weirder yet, people with horns on their heads appear from nowhere and yell at him to "leave this world!" A stranger turns up and offers to get him on a fishing boat to escape to capitalist China. He's on the boat, about to leave with his drugged and kidnapped wife, and friends when the horned headed ones attack... and suddenly he finds himself back in the strange machine.
His wife is there in the room and so are his friends. And so are two short humanoids who go into a full-on sales pitch about their alternate universe simulator which would be great for people to try out new ideas and philosophies and see their full ramifications before they implement them
"What about about the horned men who tried to kill me?"
"A slight bug - they appear in every simulation. We're working on it."
The two creatures want gold or uranium - they can't make their mind up - and this wonderful tech is theirs for the taking. They have smaller models too. Taken on a guided tour of the showroom Margaret gets kidnapped by the horned ones. Syd sets out after them and they slip from one weird reality to another first in in pursuit, then escape. In one world animals didn't evolve and plants are sentient. The humans in that one go to restaurants and wriggle their toes in exotic soils from around the world. In each world the horned ones attack them claiming the two creatures who are trying to sell them the machine are con men who stole it from them. In every world a character called John Smith turns up and tries to rescue them by getting them to go on a fishing boat and flee to China.
I was reminded while reading this book of Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles and Mindswap. There were a few genuinely laugh out loud moments. A few pages from the end the author, who is obviously having a lot of fun, notices he's running out of pages and has to hurriedly arrange for our hero to fall unconscious as a female aspect of the recurring rescuing character "Call me Joan!" leaps on him. (This in a world where the 'normal standards of beauty' have been reversed.)
When he wakes he's back in the 'real' world and has a lot of stuff that happened while he was out cold explained to him. The horny headed ones were telling the truth but just to complicate things the machine had fallen in love with our hero - which is why he had a hard time escaping from it.
Anyway handwavy handwavy infodumping and onto the next book.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Les Marteaux de Vulcain by F. RICHARD-BESSIÈRE - FLEUVE NOIR Anticipation n° 400
This one was bad.
The other Richard-Bessier got hold of the typewriter for the two days it took to write this one. (As mentioned previously 'Richard-Bessiere' is a pseudonym used by two Fleuve Noir editors; François Richard and Henri Bessièr. No one can agree, 50 years later, who wrote what.)
At the start of the book our narrator is in possession of a map to a planet which contains a fabulous treasure trove of jewels. He's about to gather together a crew to go look for it when Redbeard, a killer space pirate from his past ("the most feared and wanted man in the galaxy") turns up having found our narrator's watch next to the body of the last known possessor of the map. At blaster point our hero pulls out an ace card and tells the pirate that he's destroyed the map... but memorised it. You need me alive! Redbeard, I'm useless to you dead!
So off they go. Stopping only to blow up a galactic patrol ship that gets in their way, they navigate the secret hyperspacial path to the hidden planet, Fortuna. The crew are a repulsive, venal lot, a drunken doctor, a hermaphrodite from Saturn (who keeps the narrator awake at night by having noisy sex with itself), a Venusian who has to eat every 20 minutes and so on.
When they get there they find the planet Fortuna is surrounded by unusually high concentrations of "living proteins" which the author/s claim in footnote is a real thing, citing the, then recent, discovery of ammonia and formaldehyde in space https://www.nature.com/articles/222009a0.pdf - neither of which are proteins - anyway....
And after finding they can't eat the local fauna - the one animal they do try to eat has some kind of chlorophyll for blood, they set off in the direction of 'thataway' because, though the narrator has a map to how to get to the planet, he has no idea where on the planet the treasure is. Luckily the Venusian crew member has the uncanny ability to just point in the direction that any nearby pile of expensive rocks happens to be. So off they go following his sixth sense.
And the book gets very boring and repetitive for a long time. "We were attacked by some giant horrible worms that tried to eat us, so we ran into a cave where some horrible giant insects tried to eat us, so we ran out of the cave again and the worms had gone away but the rocks were suddenly explosive! and then a tree tried to eat us but we ran away and...." for chapter after chapter. During the course of their running away they are constantly beset by creatures with bizarre life cycles. Trees that bear animals as fruit, rocks which hatch out into insects. Caves where time suddenly runs at a different rate - they spend two hours inside while twenty days pass outside. Giant human arms grow out of the ground and try to flatten them with their fists - and get one of the crew. Splat! The whole ecosystem of the planet is one weird hyper-mishmash of mineral, animal and plant. The Venusian dies when something he ate turns him into a tree but luckily he drew a map. Why he drew a map is not explained but the book would have just stopped if he hadn't. More of them die. A fire breathing dragon sets fire to a desert as they are trying to cross a river. Our hero and Laura, the only woman in the crew and Redbeard's girlfriend, get separated from the others. As you would expect - they fall in love.
Eventually they meet up with the remaining members of the crew. Along the way they pass strange columns of light surrounded by circling flying fish. (Again with the flying fish!) Creatures run into the light and die and dissolve and become proteins which fountain into the air and spread out over the planet starting the life cycle all over again. Some of the molecules achieve escape velocity and get into space to form the panspermial clouds they'd observed around the planet on their approach. (Wait! is 'panspermial' a real word? hang on... Googly... Googly... it is! Cool!) Anyway after observing this weird wonder they find the treasure. Huge piles of jewels just lying about in a valley. A strangely silent valley. The slightest noise makes violent echoes which threaten to bring down the surrounding cliffs and bury the treasure forever. Redbeard steps on a lose rock and makes a sound so loud that the echoes amplify so much they become so loud they become solid (sic)... and bring down the surrounding cliffs... and bury the treasure forever....
The last four characters get back to the ship - "Aha!" cries Redbeard, "I have the jewels! I no long need you, narrator person!" and pulls the trigger on his blaster. But nothing happens! How can this be? (Spoiler: Laura has taken the batteries out.) Our hero fires his weapon and blasts the villain - and the treasure - to atoms.
The doctor fries himself to death trying to repair the ship and the narrator and Laura start to feel feel heavy.
So they sit down and turn into rocks.
FIN
Seriously awful. I suspect fashionable, 1968 type, recreational pharmaceuticals were involved.
This one was bad.
The other Richard-Bessier got hold of the typewriter for the two days it took to write this one. (As mentioned previously 'Richard-Bessiere' is a pseudonym used by two Fleuve Noir editors; François Richard and Henri Bessièr. No one can agree, 50 years later, who wrote what.)
At the start of the book our narrator is in possession of a map to a planet which contains a fabulous treasure trove of jewels. He's about to gather together a crew to go look for it when Redbeard, a killer space pirate from his past ("the most feared and wanted man in the galaxy") turns up having found our narrator's watch next to the body of the last known possessor of the map. At blaster point our hero pulls out an ace card and tells the pirate that he's destroyed the map... but memorised it. You need me alive! Redbeard, I'm useless to you dead!
So off they go. Stopping only to blow up a galactic patrol ship that gets in their way, they navigate the secret hyperspacial path to the hidden planet, Fortuna. The crew are a repulsive, venal lot, a drunken doctor, a hermaphrodite from Saturn (who keeps the narrator awake at night by having noisy sex with itself), a Venusian who has to eat every 20 minutes and so on.
When they get there they find the planet Fortuna is surrounded by unusually high concentrations of "living proteins" which the author/s claim in footnote is a real thing, citing the, then recent, discovery of ammonia and formaldehyde in space https://www.nature.com/articles/222009a0.pdf - neither of which are proteins - anyway....
And after finding they can't eat the local fauna - the one animal they do try to eat has some kind of chlorophyll for blood, they set off in the direction of 'thataway' because, though the narrator has a map to how to get to the planet, he has no idea where on the planet the treasure is. Luckily the Venusian crew member has the uncanny ability to just point in the direction that any nearby pile of expensive rocks happens to be. So off they go following his sixth sense.
And the book gets very boring and repetitive for a long time. "We were attacked by some giant horrible worms that tried to eat us, so we ran into a cave where some horrible giant insects tried to eat us, so we ran out of the cave again and the worms had gone away but the rocks were suddenly explosive! and then a tree tried to eat us but we ran away and...." for chapter after chapter. During the course of their running away they are constantly beset by creatures with bizarre life cycles. Trees that bear animals as fruit, rocks which hatch out into insects. Caves where time suddenly runs at a different rate - they spend two hours inside while twenty days pass outside. Giant human arms grow out of the ground and try to flatten them with their fists - and get one of the crew. Splat! The whole ecosystem of the planet is one weird hyper-mishmash of mineral, animal and plant. The Venusian dies when something he ate turns him into a tree but luckily he drew a map. Why he drew a map is not explained but the book would have just stopped if he hadn't. More of them die. A fire breathing dragon sets fire to a desert as they are trying to cross a river. Our hero and Laura, the only woman in the crew and Redbeard's girlfriend, get separated from the others. As you would expect - they fall in love.
Eventually they meet up with the remaining members of the crew. Along the way they pass strange columns of light surrounded by circling flying fish. (Again with the flying fish!) Creatures run into the light and die and dissolve and become proteins which fountain into the air and spread out over the planet starting the life cycle all over again. Some of the molecules achieve escape velocity and get into space to form the panspermial clouds they'd observed around the planet on their approach. (Wait! is 'panspermial' a real word? hang on... Googly... Googly... it is! Cool!) Anyway after observing this weird wonder they find the treasure. Huge piles of jewels just lying about in a valley. A strangely silent valley. The slightest noise makes violent echoes which threaten to bring down the surrounding cliffs and bury the treasure forever. Redbeard steps on a lose rock and makes a sound so loud that the echoes amplify so much they become so loud they become solid (sic)... and bring down the surrounding cliffs... and bury the treasure forever....
The last four characters get back to the ship - "Aha!" cries Redbeard, "I have the jewels! I no long need you, narrator person!" and pulls the trigger on his blaster. But nothing happens! How can this be? (Spoiler: Laura has taken the batteries out.) Our hero fires his weapon and blasts the villain - and the treasure - to atoms.
The doctor fries himself to death trying to repair the ship and the narrator and Laura start to feel feel heavy.
So they sit down and turn into rocks.
FIN
Seriously awful. I suspect fashionable, 1968 type, recreational pharmaceuticals were involved.
Last edited:
Sargeant_Fox
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2009
- Messages
- 249
It seems no one's mentioned Brian Stableford's translations yet. This man has been translating Symbolist/Decadent, fantasy, horror, sci-fi from France for decades now. He's translated upwards of 100 books, including lots of French early sci-fi pioneers.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/191933.Translated_By_Brian_Stableford
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/191933.Translated_By_Brian_Stableford
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2008
- Messages
- 8,136
This sounds like the sort of plot I'd expect from Phillipe Qui Dique.
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