JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Go for it! Any alternate history has to be more logical and grounded than some of the bewildering fever dream stuff I've been reading.
French Science Fiction Authors
- Thread starter The Wanderer
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Go for it! Any alternate history has to be more logical and grounded than some of the bewildering fever dream stuff I've been reading.
Of course I would like to tell you about this book.
It's Civilisations by Laurent Binet. Perhaps you read the popular science book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. In this book, the author tries to explain why the people of Western Europe conquered the New World rather than the other way round. In trying to do this, he keeps coming back to the same example. Why did Pizarro arrive in Cuzco and capture Atahualpa and not the other way round?
Civilisations is a great and beautifully written parody of Jared Diamond's work. In this book, Atahualpa loses the internal war to his brother and arrives in Europe at the head of a newly formed Inca fleet. He actually captures the Spanish king and then, with the help of his local allies, takes over Portugal, Spain and several other countries in Western Europe and North Africa. Then, following in the footsteps of the Incas, Cuāuhtémōc also sails to Europe and takes over France and England.
It may all sound like nonsense in my retelling, but in fact Civilisations is exactly the case when alternate history is very logical and grounded. In Laurent Binet's world, for example, cattle, steel and germs arrived in the New World much earlier thanks to a series of coincidences. I won't tell you exactly how they got there, because I've already given you a lot of spoilers, but it seems very clear and logical when you read the book.
As I said, Civilisations is a very well-written novel, with a great author's style and memorable characters. In addition, many parts of the book are stylised to look like old writings - first the Icelandic sagas, then the diaries of Columbus, and finally numerous books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This brilliant stylisation also contains a certain amount of parody. In Civilisations, for example, Columbus describes the rebuff he and his crew (made up of criminals recruited from prisons, as in the real history) received from the Native Americans, using the same words and expressions that the real Columbus used in his actual diaries.
But to appreciate Laurent Binet's subtle humor, you need to be familiar with the old books he so spectacularly mocks. Civilisations is therefore a great joke for history fans and intellectuals. For example, if you read about Miguel Cervantes seducing Montaigne's wife in Aztec-occupied France, you should at least know who Miguel Cervantes and Michel Montaigne were.
Civilisations is also a very gentle book. Although it talks about wars and other bad things, the author never gives too dirty and bloody descriptions. Even the deaths of some of the characters seem funny. When the Incas have to bury a Spanish king who has died in strange circumstances (it's a great parody of the death of Motecuhzoma II Xocoyotzin), they hide his body under the rows of tomato plants they're trying to grow in Spain, and you giggle, even though it's a funeral.
Even the division of Western Europe between the Aztecs and Incas is not the cataclysmic event it usually is in AU books and games. Conquerors and conquered gradually get used to each other, start families and have children. In addition, Atahualpa's agricultural reforms and the new crops brought to Europe save the poor continent from starvation. At the end of the book, the cuckolded Montaigne even make a long eulogy in honor of his good master Cuāuhtémōc, King of France and England, and draws historical parallels, comparing him to Aeneas, the Europeans to the Etruscans, and the Aztecs and Incas to the Romans. His friend El Greco goes to work in Mexico - the local nobility need good artists, as the New World lags so far behind the Old in the fine arts.
This book has been translated into several European languages. As far as I know, there is also an English translation. But I don't know how good it is. You need a really good translator to convey the author's style and his great stylisation of old writings.
I also read a short story about an alternative history of Joan of Arc, but I can't remember the author or the title. Maybe I'll find it again.
I can also recommend some good French fantasy books. But they would hardly be appropriate for this thread, since it's obviously fantasy.
It's Civilisations by Laurent Binet. Perhaps you read the popular science book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. In this book, the author tries to explain why the people of Western Europe conquered the New World rather than the other way round. In trying to do this, he keeps coming back to the same example. Why did Pizarro arrive in Cuzco and capture Atahualpa and not the other way round?
Civilisations is a great and beautifully written parody of Jared Diamond's work. In this book, Atahualpa loses the internal war to his brother and arrives in Europe at the head of a newly formed Inca fleet. He actually captures the Spanish king and then, with the help of his local allies, takes over Portugal, Spain and several other countries in Western Europe and North Africa. Then, following in the footsteps of the Incas, Cuāuhtémōc also sails to Europe and takes over France and England.
It may all sound like nonsense in my retelling, but in fact Civilisations is exactly the case when alternate history is very logical and grounded. In Laurent Binet's world, for example, cattle, steel and germs arrived in the New World much earlier thanks to a series of coincidences. I won't tell you exactly how they got there, because I've already given you a lot of spoilers, but it seems very clear and logical when you read the book.
As I said, Civilisations is a very well-written novel, with a great author's style and memorable characters. In addition, many parts of the book are stylised to look like old writings - first the Icelandic sagas, then the diaries of Columbus, and finally numerous books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This brilliant stylisation also contains a certain amount of parody. In Civilisations, for example, Columbus describes the rebuff he and his crew (made up of criminals recruited from prisons, as in the real history) received from the Native Americans, using the same words and expressions that the real Columbus used in his actual diaries.
But to appreciate Laurent Binet's subtle humor, you need to be familiar with the old books he so spectacularly mocks. Civilisations is therefore a great joke for history fans and intellectuals. For example, if you read about Miguel Cervantes seducing Montaigne's wife in Aztec-occupied France, you should at least know who Miguel Cervantes and Michel Montaigne were.
Civilisations is also a very gentle book. Although it talks about wars and other bad things, the author never gives too dirty and bloody descriptions. Even the deaths of some of the characters seem funny. When the Incas have to bury a Spanish king who has died in strange circumstances (it's a great parody of the death of Motecuhzoma II Xocoyotzin), they hide his body under the rows of tomato plants they're trying to grow in Spain, and you giggle, even though it's a funeral.
Even the division of Western Europe between the Aztecs and Incas is not the cataclysmic event it usually is in AU books and games. Conquerors and conquered gradually get used to each other, start families and have children. In addition, Atahualpa's agricultural reforms and the new crops brought to Europe save the poor continent from starvation. At the end of the book, the cuckolded Montaigne even make a long eulogy in honor of his good master Cuāuhtémōc, King of France and England, and draws historical parallels, comparing him to Aeneas, the Europeans to the Etruscans, and the Aztecs and Incas to the Romans. His friend El Greco goes to work in Mexico - the local nobility need good artists, as the New World lags so far behind the Old in the fine arts.
This book has been translated into several European languages. As far as I know, there is also an English translation. But I don't know how good it is. You need a really good translator to convey the author's style and his great stylisation of old writings.
I also read a short story about an alternative history of Joan of Arc, but I can't remember the author or the title. Maybe I'll find it again.
I can also recommend some good French fantasy books. But they would hardly be appropriate for this thread, since it's obviously fantasy.
Matteo
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Hi @JunkMonkey check out your PMs for some more Fleuvre Noir/Anticipation news.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
S.O.S. Cerveaux by M A Rayjean Fleuve Noir #403
London in a not to distant early 1970's future - flying cars, video telephony (land line), anti-gravity lift shafts - but lots of fog; as always in cheap French literature it's always raining and foggy in London - a man takes another hostage at gun point and makes him drive to a remote country location. Once out of the car the scene is set for a Miller's Crossing like woodland killing when suddenly a ball of blue light emerges from the undergrowth, engulfs the would-be assassin for a moment, then departs the way it came leaving him unconscious on the ground.
For some reason (possibly it was a slow news day) three reporters: a husband and wife team (working for rival outlets) and a cameraman fly in from America to cover the story. The would-be killer was unconscious for 24 hours after being hit by the flying glowing ball but is now awake, apparently none the worse for his experience. He is under guard in a hospital but the reporters, with the help of a local fixer who goes by the not quite anglo-saxony sounding name of Rods* sneak in and get and interview him on film (sic - the news cameraman of this not to distant future is shooting on film which has to be shipped off to America to be developed).
The would-be killer (and the reporters) go out of their way to tell each other it's mysterious why he is under police guard in the hospital. The idea that he could possibly be suspected of kidnapping and attempted murder is never mentioned by anyone.
As the reporters send off their copy (and film) more of the strange glowing balls appear as the day shift at the abattoir that supplies all of London's meat are about to start the day shift. Anyone who even thought about killing a cow gets knocked cold.
The husband of the reporter couple hatches a cunning plan to get a scoop. He gets his cameraman to hide in his hotel room closet and, when his wife comes back from an errand, he attacks her. He's half way through strangling her to death when a blue ball of light smashes through the hotel room bedroom and knocks him unconscious as the cameraman gets it all on film.
The husband wakes up and finds his wife hasn't pressed charges, filed for divorce, or hired a bodyguard. She is some hardbitten newshound! Being attacked and nearly strangled to death by her husband in order to get a scoop is all in a day's work.
Suddenly the little balls of light, labelled 'psycho-agressors', are all over the London area. Hunters and fishermen are rendered unconscious. The government implements 'draconian' hunting and fishing bans. And our heroes come up with a cunning plan.
All three take off to Rods's holiday home just west of Windsor with a pile of sheet steel and a rabbit. They shutter the whole building - apart from one window... Flopsy is let out of his cage... Rods raises his rifle and... Kersmasho! a ball of light comes through the window and, in the time it takes for it to knock him out the others quickly slam the last steel shutter over the broken window. Trapped, the glowing 'psycho-agressor' batters at the shuttered window like a demented bluebottle before finaly running out of steam and falling to the floor.
A stranger arrives at their isolated doorstep "Help help horrible heffelumps in the woods!" Newhounds all they ALL go traipsing off after him to see what's up. And get zapped unconscious.
Joey wakes up in a featureless cell. His jailer, the stranger who lured them into the woods, turns out to be a robot called AX-3 - because he is a robot and hasn't been programmed NOT to let people remove his exterior flexible skin, AX-3 lets Joey remove his exterior flexible skin and sits supine as Joey sneaks out of the cell and starts to explore the corridors outside... He's just made a cliffhanging, end-of-chapter, horrible discovery when, on the next page it turns out all his cleverness in getting the robot to lend him its outershell and sneaking around stuff was all pointless as he's been under observation by the head alien the whole time. What he has discovered is a room full of disembodied brains. The 'psycho-agressors' are disembodied flying brains!
The hero gets subjected to some serious info dumping from the head alien (who wears a helmet with two aerials sticking out the top). They have come from a planet 10 light years away but their ancestors were originally from earth - taken from Judea two millennia ago by real aliens who gave them a whole load of technology and went away. They have come back to bring peace and harmony They also speak Hebrew which, apparently, no one on Earth does any more . Which is a weird bit of world building and opens up all sorts of cans of worms - none of which are explored.
Out in the real world a bunch of construction workers are zapped when they they start to bulldoze some trees; a farmer, about to spray his crops with insecticide, gets zapped and crashes his plane and dies. Things are getting silly.
The Psycho aggressors, head infodump alien explains, are humans volunteers from the alien planet who have a 'calling' to have their skulls opened up and become flying baddy-zapping brains. Trouble is they come from a society where there are no other lifeforms and all their food is 'artificial' (which stinks of the authors digging themselves out of a very obvious hole in their plotting) and cannot distinguish between crime and necessary food gathering activities. What Earth needs is home-grown disembodied flying brains!
The second half of the book is our hero shuttling backwards and forwards between the aliens' ship (somewhere deep in the Atlantic Ocean to the west of Ireland - but with a handy teleportation cube that will take them anywhere) and central London where he has to convince the authorities to let the alien's have five thousand people to de-brain. Long term prisoners perhaps? Eventually he ends up kidnapping the Prime Minister, Royal Navy submarines surround the alien ship and the first of the human 'psycho-agressors' turns its power against the aliens as it defends Earth against an alien invader. (Our hero's local fixer and would-be bunny assassin Rods, had the top of his head removed between chapters and we are lead to presume it is he.)
Further confessions from the defeated alien - he reveals that he had no intention of pacifying earth. He really just wanted a whole bunch of fresh brains to take home with him as their local population is becoming less and less willing to be debrained these days. Young people huh? I dunno, what is the world coming to?
The aliens are persuaded to leave by being threatened with nuclear weapons and off they go back to their home planet - presumably taking all their flying brains (and the dozen or so policemen they de-brained) with them.
The end.
This one was a bit of a slog as, for a lot of the time, the plot was just treading water trying to keep afloat till the required number of pages was reached. Introducing characters who did nothing for a few pages other than occupy space, then dropping them and introducing some more.
And again these were the further adventures of recurring characters. So they were referred to many times in that very strange way French writers have of referring to characters the reader is familiar with as 'nos amis' (our friends) and Joe spent a lot of time being referred to as 'le mari de Joan' (the husband of Joan) for why? I have no idea - other than maybe 'le mari de Joan' takes up twelve more characters than 'Joe'?
At one point to wards the end of the book our heroine - who doesn't actually do much apart from be the victim of a fake attempted murder early on in the book, and sit in a cell as an off page hostage for the rest, gets to say to her husband:
- Tu as sauvé la terre, mon chou, un fois de plus!
"You've saved the world, my darling, once again!"
Next!
* Our hero is called Joe (that's an e with one of those double dot umlaut thingies over it - which in French means you pronounce both vowels, both the O and the E. It's the French phonetic spelling of 'Joey')
London in a not to distant early 1970's future - flying cars, video telephony (land line), anti-gravity lift shafts - but lots of fog; as always in cheap French literature it's always raining and foggy in London - a man takes another hostage at gun point and makes him drive to a remote country location. Once out of the car the scene is set for a Miller's Crossing like woodland killing when suddenly a ball of blue light emerges from the undergrowth, engulfs the would-be assassin for a moment, then departs the way it came leaving him unconscious on the ground.
For some reason (possibly it was a slow news day) three reporters: a husband and wife team (working for rival outlets) and a cameraman fly in from America to cover the story. The would-be killer was unconscious for 24 hours after being hit by the flying glowing ball but is now awake, apparently none the worse for his experience. He is under guard in a hospital but the reporters, with the help of a local fixer who goes by the not quite anglo-saxony sounding name of Rods* sneak in and get and interview him on film (sic - the news cameraman of this not to distant future is shooting on film which has to be shipped off to America to be developed).
The would-be killer (and the reporters) go out of their way to tell each other it's mysterious why he is under police guard in the hospital. The idea that he could possibly be suspected of kidnapping and attempted murder is never mentioned by anyone.
As the reporters send off their copy (and film) more of the strange glowing balls appear as the day shift at the abattoir that supplies all of London's meat are about to start the day shift. Anyone who even thought about killing a cow gets knocked cold.
The husband of the reporter couple hatches a cunning plan to get a scoop. He gets his cameraman to hide in his hotel room closet and, when his wife comes back from an errand, he attacks her. He's half way through strangling her to death when a blue ball of light smashes through the hotel room bedroom and knocks him unconscious as the cameraman gets it all on film.
The husband wakes up and finds his wife hasn't pressed charges, filed for divorce, or hired a bodyguard. She is some hardbitten newshound! Being attacked and nearly strangled to death by her husband in order to get a scoop is all in a day's work.
Suddenly the little balls of light, labelled 'psycho-agressors', are all over the London area. Hunters and fishermen are rendered unconscious. The government implements 'draconian' hunting and fishing bans. And our heroes come up with a cunning plan.
All three take off to Rods's holiday home just west of Windsor with a pile of sheet steel and a rabbit. They shutter the whole building - apart from one window... Flopsy is let out of his cage... Rods raises his rifle and... Kersmasho! a ball of light comes through the window and, in the time it takes for it to knock him out the others quickly slam the last steel shutter over the broken window. Trapped, the glowing 'psycho-agressor' batters at the shuttered window like a demented bluebottle before finaly running out of steam and falling to the floor.
A stranger arrives at their isolated doorstep "Help help horrible heffelumps in the woods!" Newhounds all they ALL go traipsing off after him to see what's up. And get zapped unconscious.
Joey wakes up in a featureless cell. His jailer, the stranger who lured them into the woods, turns out to be a robot called AX-3 - because he is a robot and hasn't been programmed NOT to let people remove his exterior flexible skin, AX-3 lets Joey remove his exterior flexible skin and sits supine as Joey sneaks out of the cell and starts to explore the corridors outside... He's just made a cliffhanging, end-of-chapter, horrible discovery when, on the next page it turns out all his cleverness in getting the robot to lend him its outershell and sneaking around stuff was all pointless as he's been under observation by the head alien the whole time. What he has discovered is a room full of disembodied brains. The 'psycho-agressors' are disembodied flying brains!
The hero gets subjected to some serious info dumping from the head alien (who wears a helmet with two aerials sticking out the top). They have come from a planet 10 light years away but their ancestors were originally from earth - taken from Judea two millennia ago by real aliens who gave them a whole load of technology and went away. They have come back to bring peace and harmony They also speak Hebrew which, apparently, no one on Earth does any more . Which is a weird bit of world building and opens up all sorts of cans of worms - none of which are explored.
Out in the real world a bunch of construction workers are zapped when they they start to bulldoze some trees; a farmer, about to spray his crops with insecticide, gets zapped and crashes his plane and dies. Things are getting silly.
The Psycho aggressors, head infodump alien explains, are humans volunteers from the alien planet who have a 'calling' to have their skulls opened up and become flying baddy-zapping brains. Trouble is they come from a society where there are no other lifeforms and all their food is 'artificial' (which stinks of the authors digging themselves out of a very obvious hole in their plotting) and cannot distinguish between crime and necessary food gathering activities. What Earth needs is home-grown disembodied flying brains!
The second half of the book is our hero shuttling backwards and forwards between the aliens' ship (somewhere deep in the Atlantic Ocean to the west of Ireland - but with a handy teleportation cube that will take them anywhere) and central London where he has to convince the authorities to let the alien's have five thousand people to de-brain. Long term prisoners perhaps? Eventually he ends up kidnapping the Prime Minister, Royal Navy submarines surround the alien ship and the first of the human 'psycho-agressors' turns its power against the aliens as it defends Earth against an alien invader. (Our hero's local fixer and would-be bunny assassin Rods, had the top of his head removed between chapters and we are lead to presume it is he.)
Further confessions from the defeated alien - he reveals that he had no intention of pacifying earth. He really just wanted a whole bunch of fresh brains to take home with him as their local population is becoming less and less willing to be debrained these days. Young people huh? I dunno, what is the world coming to?
The aliens are persuaded to leave by being threatened with nuclear weapons and off they go back to their home planet - presumably taking all their flying brains (and the dozen or so policemen they de-brained) with them.
The end.
This one was a bit of a slog as, for a lot of the time, the plot was just treading water trying to keep afloat till the required number of pages was reached. Introducing characters who did nothing for a few pages other than occupy space, then dropping them and introducing some more.
And again these were the further adventures of recurring characters. So they were referred to many times in that very strange way French writers have of referring to characters the reader is familiar with as 'nos amis' (our friends) and Joe spent a lot of time being referred to as 'le mari de Joan' (the husband of Joan) for why? I have no idea - other than maybe 'le mari de Joan' takes up twelve more characters than 'Joe'?
At one point to wards the end of the book our heroine - who doesn't actually do much apart from be the victim of a fake attempted murder early on in the book, and sit in a cell as an off page hostage for the rest, gets to say to her husband:
- Tu as sauvé la terre, mon chou, un fois de plus!
"You've saved the world, my darling, once again!"
Next!
* Our hero is called Joe (that's an e with one of those double dot umlaut thingies over it - which in French means you pronounce both vowels, both the O and the E. It's the French phonetic spelling of 'Joey')
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JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Les prisonniers de Kazor par Richard-Bessiere Fleuve Noir #422
The crew of the Aristote (heroes of several previous books; only one I have read) are on their way home for some well deserved R&R when they find they aren't getting any R&R after all and are briefed on their new mission. A few years ago, they are told, a scientist developed a bio weapon so powerful it would kill lifeforms of any kind - even if they aren't carbon based it'll get them. He and his team were ordered to stop their research but disappeared after their secret lab sprang a leak and thousands of people died. Now, mysteriously, the scientist's ring has reappeared and been traced back to a shady seedy interstellar nightspot. A low dive of sin and iniquity that caters for every vice known to man - including homosexual hookers from Alpha Centauri with 'strange powers of mimicry'. Our heroes have had previous dealings on the satellite of sin; Alpha Centaurian homosexual hookers may or may not have been involved; I haven't read that book yet.
After a 'Nice bar you've got here, it would be a pity if anything happened to it...' private detective-type conversation with the owner, he tells them he took the ring in payment for human provisions destined for Kazor, a planet outside the Terran Federation. The crew get a briefing on the Kazorians. They are hermaphrodites! (I think Richard-Bressiere has a thing about hermaphrodites because there was one in the last book of his I read as well.) Weirdly the Kazorians have a cemetery asteroid in Terran Space because their planet is too full and... there aren't any asteroids in their solar system? ... or something.
Our heroes head off to Kazor but their ship is damaged by 'galactic turbulence' en route and, for safety, they put down well away from the Kazorian capitol. It will take them a while to fix the ship. In the meantime the Kazorian high poo-bah denies that he has any renegade mad scientist s hidden away because the mad scientist in question was dead, killed by the same 'galactic turbulence' that had damaged their ship and he has the paperwork to prove it.
Bored with the vegetarian diet provided by the locals, one of the crew gets permission to go hunting. Why he thinks the local wildlife would be edible, given that the humanoid locals' skin is toxic to the touch, is beyond me but off he goes and shoots a Zebra-Pig thing and then accidentally kills a local. Faced with the possible diplomatic embarrassment of having killed an innocent bystander our heroes take the dubious decision that hiding the body somewhere, well away from the ship, would be a good idea. Luckily they have a shuttle ship fitted with an invisibility device they'd picked up in a previous book. Off they go, find an abandoned building out in the hinterlands and dump the body. On their return they are surprised to find the local head honcho poo-bah has turned up with a dossier proving his version of events and, unthinkingly, one of our gallant crew shakes his hand without putting on his gloves!
"Argh! Oh no! Cut my hand off! before I get deaded!"
"No," says the head honcho poo-bah, "we have medicines! let us deliver some to you."
When the medicines arrive one of the vials has a fingerprint on it - and it must be a human fingerprint because, for plot reasons, we have been told the locals don't leave fingerprints. Could these humans fingerprint possibly be from one of the humans they are looking for? Donning invisibility suits, and flying in their invisible shuttle, a couple of our chums set off and trail the delivery ship back to its destination. They've just arrived at a huge medical facility when they are diverted by their chief to investigate some subterranean rumblings and anomalous radiations he has detected somewhere else. Come on! Focus!
Behind a Thunderbird Two type launchpad, opening cliff-face door, our invisible friends are soon invisibly sneaking around a secret underground base, a base with atomic power, and semi-evolved ape-hermaphrodite slaves. The Kazorians are building an armada of space ships! But what could they want with all those ships? What secret mysterious weapon could they be carrying? (Secretly building spaceships underground is another recurring theme in Fleuve Noir books. As are endless, page-filling, rhetorical questions.) Three dramatic chords later the invisibility suits mysteriously (and inconveniently) stop working and, after some fisticuffs they're captured. Moments later the rest of our heroes are delivered at gunpoint and cast into a circular prison space that is cut off from the rest of the universe - and possibly even time itself! Realising he has painted himself into a real corner with this one, the author quickly has the captors release them for interrogation just as the invisibility suits start working again and bish! bash! bosh! they escape.
They've fixed their ship by this point so they send a couple of the crew off in that to keep it safe from harm while the rest of them continue their invisible sneaking. The medical centre is their first port of call and 30 seconds after arriving there they spot a beautiful, young, very human woman - she's the missing scientist's beautifuldaughter niece. They make contact. It was her deliberately placed fingerprint on the vial. She knew they would come to rescue them if they knew they were on the planet and it was the only way she had to communicate her presence to them. Her father uncle is not working on any killer virus at all but something to help the Kazorians with their population problem.
She agrees to set up a meet between the heroes and the scientist the next day, but first, everyone need a little snooze. The heroes set off for lonely ruin where they dumped the body. The body is still there but weirdly bloated and strangely not dead. So they bury it anyway. Next morning the body has gone but they are attacked by two of the half-evolved ape-hermaphrodites last seen slaving away in the secret base. One is killed and the other instantly dies... as if they were somehow psychically linked. What IS going on?
At the meeting Uncle Misguided Scientist explains all. The Kazorian evolutionary system is ratshit bonkers. Possibly even more ratshit bonkers than the one Richard-Bessier came up with for Les Marteaux de Vulcain. No animal ever dies on Kazor - well it dies, but it doesn't rot away; it gets resurrected as two of a lower life form. One Kazorian Humanoid hermaphrodite will die and become two half-evolved ape-hermaphrodites who will, in turn, both die and become four zebra-pig hermaphrodite things, and so on, and so on till you get down to the microbial, single cell animal level. When it can go no further the process goes into reverse back all the way up the 'evolutionary tree' to dominant humanoids again. Prof. Misguided though has come up with a 'serum' that stops the process at the top. With his serum, when an ape-hermaphrodite dies, it doesn't devolve into two zebra-pigs but evolves into two identical Kazorian Humanoids!
"Gosh!" says our hero "So that's their secret weapon!"
"What?"
"Yes, Prof. Misguided, you have given the Kazorians a way of manufacturing identi-clone troops in stupendously large numbers! Like the doubling the grains of rice on a chessboard analogy we have been dropping into the conversation, within weeks there will be millions of the buggers!"
"Oh no! What a foolish old misguided scientist I have been! What can we do?"
Just then the Kazorian military arrive and, to cut a bit of tooing and froing, there's a few pages of bish! bash! bosh! "Eat laser, Karorian scum!" action and our heroes and most of the scientists escape the planet. Prof Misguided... he... sob! he didn't make it, gunned down by the head Kazorian Poo-bah after it was deemed he had outlived his usefulness and could be eliminated.
Earth is warned. Stock footage of spaceships taking off is spliced into the film version of the book.
"But wait!" says our hero - or one of his near identical sidekicks. "Remember how, when we killed that ape-hermaphrodite out by the old barn, the other one died because of reasons? Surely we only have to destroy a portion of their fleet and all the others will die too - because of reasons!"
"Not so easy." Says a stand-in scientist. "We helped the Kazorians build a 'cybernetic psychogenetic accumulator' thingy just to stop exactly this sort of thing happening."
"Damn! you guys really didn't think things through did you? Okay. Then we must destroy it!"
"But I don't know where it is!"
"I bet it's on the cemetery asteroid. It has to be. There's no other reason for it to have been written into the book - and there aren't many pages left!"
- so off they go.
The asteroid is a hive of activity firing warlike spaceships off in every direction. After a moment or two's worry that the 'cybernetic psychogenetic accumulator' thingy might be hidden in a timeless void like the prison in which they were briefly held, the stand-in scientist recognises a corridor follows some cables - "follow those cables and don't lose them!" - and there it is. So they shoot it, and it explodes, and all the Kazorians are blown to itty bitty panspermian bits and float through the aether. (Panspermianism is another of Richard-Bessier's go-to SF checklist ideas.)
The galaxy saved once again our hero and hot totty scientist daughter slip off to his cabin to 'continue their conversation in peace'. And have implied sex.
Fin
That was painful.
The crew of the Aristote (heroes of several previous books; only one I have read) are on their way home for some well deserved R&R when they find they aren't getting any R&R after all and are briefed on their new mission. A few years ago, they are told, a scientist developed a bio weapon so powerful it would kill lifeforms of any kind - even if they aren't carbon based it'll get them. He and his team were ordered to stop their research but disappeared after their secret lab sprang a leak and thousands of people died. Now, mysteriously, the scientist's ring has reappeared and been traced back to a shady seedy interstellar nightspot. A low dive of sin and iniquity that caters for every vice known to man - including homosexual hookers from Alpha Centauri with 'strange powers of mimicry'. Our heroes have had previous dealings on the satellite of sin; Alpha Centaurian homosexual hookers may or may not have been involved; I haven't read that book yet.
After a 'Nice bar you've got here, it would be a pity if anything happened to it...' private detective-type conversation with the owner, he tells them he took the ring in payment for human provisions destined for Kazor, a planet outside the Terran Federation. The crew get a briefing on the Kazorians. They are hermaphrodites! (I think Richard-Bressiere has a thing about hermaphrodites because there was one in the last book of his I read as well.) Weirdly the Kazorians have a cemetery asteroid in Terran Space because their planet is too full and... there aren't any asteroids in their solar system? ... or something.
Our heroes head off to Kazor but their ship is damaged by 'galactic turbulence' en route and, for safety, they put down well away from the Kazorian capitol. It will take them a while to fix the ship. In the meantime the Kazorian high poo-bah denies that he has any renegade mad scientist s hidden away because the mad scientist in question was dead, killed by the same 'galactic turbulence' that had damaged their ship and he has the paperwork to prove it.
Bored with the vegetarian diet provided by the locals, one of the crew gets permission to go hunting. Why he thinks the local wildlife would be edible, given that the humanoid locals' skin is toxic to the touch, is beyond me but off he goes and shoots a Zebra-Pig thing and then accidentally kills a local. Faced with the possible diplomatic embarrassment of having killed an innocent bystander our heroes take the dubious decision that hiding the body somewhere, well away from the ship, would be a good idea. Luckily they have a shuttle ship fitted with an invisibility device they'd picked up in a previous book. Off they go, find an abandoned building out in the hinterlands and dump the body. On their return they are surprised to find the local head honcho poo-bah has turned up with a dossier proving his version of events and, unthinkingly, one of our gallant crew shakes his hand without putting on his gloves!
"Argh! Oh no! Cut my hand off! before I get deaded!"
"No," says the head honcho poo-bah, "we have medicines! let us deliver some to you."
When the medicines arrive one of the vials has a fingerprint on it - and it must be a human fingerprint because, for plot reasons, we have been told the locals don't leave fingerprints. Could these humans fingerprint possibly be from one of the humans they are looking for? Donning invisibility suits, and flying in their invisible shuttle, a couple of our chums set off and trail the delivery ship back to its destination. They've just arrived at a huge medical facility when they are diverted by their chief to investigate some subterranean rumblings and anomalous radiations he has detected somewhere else. Come on! Focus!
Behind a Thunderbird Two type launchpad, opening cliff-face door, our invisible friends are soon invisibly sneaking around a secret underground base, a base with atomic power, and semi-evolved ape-hermaphrodite slaves. The Kazorians are building an armada of space ships! But what could they want with all those ships? What secret mysterious weapon could they be carrying? (Secretly building spaceships underground is another recurring theme in Fleuve Noir books. As are endless, page-filling, rhetorical questions.) Three dramatic chords later the invisibility suits mysteriously (and inconveniently) stop working and, after some fisticuffs they're captured. Moments later the rest of our heroes are delivered at gunpoint and cast into a circular prison space that is cut off from the rest of the universe - and possibly even time itself! Realising he has painted himself into a real corner with this one, the author quickly has the captors release them for interrogation just as the invisibility suits start working again and bish! bash! bosh! they escape.
They've fixed their ship by this point so they send a couple of the crew off in that to keep it safe from harm while the rest of them continue their invisible sneaking. The medical centre is their first port of call and 30 seconds after arriving there they spot a beautiful, young, very human woman - she's the missing scientist's beautiful
She agrees to set up a meet between the heroes and the scientist the next day, but first, everyone need a little snooze. The heroes set off for lonely ruin where they dumped the body. The body is still there but weirdly bloated and strangely not dead. So they bury it anyway. Next morning the body has gone but they are attacked by two of the half-evolved ape-hermaphrodites last seen slaving away in the secret base. One is killed and the other instantly dies... as if they were somehow psychically linked. What IS going on?
At the meeting Uncle Misguided Scientist explains all. The Kazorian evolutionary system is ratshit bonkers. Possibly even more ratshit bonkers than the one Richard-Bessier came up with for Les Marteaux de Vulcain. No animal ever dies on Kazor - well it dies, but it doesn't rot away; it gets resurrected as two of a lower life form. One Kazorian Humanoid hermaphrodite will die and become two half-evolved ape-hermaphrodites who will, in turn, both die and become four zebra-pig hermaphrodite things, and so on, and so on till you get down to the microbial, single cell animal level. When it can go no further the process goes into reverse back all the way up the 'evolutionary tree' to dominant humanoids again. Prof. Misguided though has come up with a 'serum' that stops the process at the top. With his serum, when an ape-hermaphrodite dies, it doesn't devolve into two zebra-pigs but evolves into two identical Kazorian Humanoids!
"Gosh!" says our hero "So that's their secret weapon!"
"What?"
"Yes, Prof. Misguided, you have given the Kazorians a way of manufacturing identi-clone troops in stupendously large numbers! Like the doubling the grains of rice on a chessboard analogy we have been dropping into the conversation, within weeks there will be millions of the buggers!"
"Oh no! What a foolish old misguided scientist I have been! What can we do?"
Just then the Kazorian military arrive and, to cut a bit of tooing and froing, there's a few pages of bish! bash! bosh! "Eat laser, Karorian scum!" action and our heroes and most of the scientists escape the planet. Prof Misguided... he... sob! he didn't make it, gunned down by the head Kazorian Poo-bah after it was deemed he had outlived his usefulness and could be eliminated.
Earth is warned. Stock footage of spaceships taking off is spliced into the film version of the book.
"But wait!" says our hero - or one of his near identical sidekicks. "Remember how, when we killed that ape-hermaphrodite out by the old barn, the other one died because of reasons? Surely we only have to destroy a portion of their fleet and all the others will die too - because of reasons!"
"Not so easy." Says a stand-in scientist. "We helped the Kazorians build a 'cybernetic psychogenetic accumulator' thingy just to stop exactly this sort of thing happening."
"Damn! you guys really didn't think things through did you? Okay. Then we must destroy it!"
"But I don't know where it is!"
"I bet it's on the cemetery asteroid. It has to be. There's no other reason for it to have been written into the book - and there aren't many pages left!"
- so off they go.
The asteroid is a hive of activity firing warlike spaceships off in every direction. After a moment or two's worry that the 'cybernetic psychogenetic accumulator' thingy might be hidden in a timeless void like the prison in which they were briefly held, the stand-in scientist recognises a corridor follows some cables - "follow those cables and don't lose them!" - and there it is. So they shoot it, and it explodes, and all the Kazorians are blown to itty bitty panspermian bits and float through the aether. (Panspermianism is another of Richard-Bessier's go-to SF checklist ideas.)
The galaxy saved once again our hero and hot totty scientist daughter slip off to his cabin to 'continue their conversation in peace'. And have implied sex.
Fin
That was painful.
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JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Le Voleur de rêves by Maurice Limat Fleuve Noir #411
This is going to be a little shorter than usual because I started this book over a month ago, got distracted by something shiny, and only just picked it up to finish the final few pages last night. My memory of what happened in the first part of the book is pretty sketchy.
It's another Coqdor story (the 14th of his adventures.). I think the fact that he is not mentioned on the back cover blurb means that his presence as a character was not a great selling point back in the day.
All weirdness has broken loose on the Uranian moon Titania - earthquakes and tempests and all sorts of heck wipe out a great part of the population as the people of the Solar System helplessly watch their TVs. Nearer home le chevalier Coqdor is going to the earth orbiting Hospital Station 22 (wittily named HS22) to investigate a strange outbreak. Otherwise healthy people go to sleep and don't wake up after their brains cease to function in any meaningful way. As he approaches the hospital the staff there suffer a sudden collective madness and he has to crash into the airlock and escape through the torn metal. There's a lot of running up and down corridors as mobs of hitherto rational medical staff and patients turn into rampaging mobs and the humanoid robots turn into psychopathic killers - apart from the one who grabs the only female character (a nurse) and carries her unconscious body around like Robbie the Robot never did for the poster for Forbidden Planet:
Suddenly! HS22 is whisked out of orbit by some unknown force, a rescue ship is destroyed with a huge interstellar wall of flame! The Hospital ship hurtles across the vast voidiness of interplanetary space towards the asteroid belt - where it lands on a planetoid with a breathable atmosphere. (Here our author confidently demonstrates his total lack of understanding of solar mechanics by telling us the Earth and the Moon are still visible to the naked eye as faint crescents in the sky.) More running around, this time chasing the sex-crazed robot, and its nubile toy, around the planetoid. They've just got that little problem sorted, and the girl nestled in secondary character lover's broad muscly arms when a strange ship appears. A lot of blue-skinned, blank white-eyed humanoids step out and, in a couple of hurried paragraphs, whisk the whole lot of them off to part two of the book which takes place in a different galaxy... gosh!
Part 2
In the different galaxy our protagonists find themselves the unwilling guests of Yao'K the despotic ruler of the blue-skinned humanoid android types. I cannot shake the idea of an evil Papa Strumph (Smurf). He wields fantastical powers of construction and destruction over a fabulous city. The source of his powers? Dreams stolen from the humans of the Milky Way Galaxy because the beings in his galaxy either don't dream or have dreams of vastly inferior quality.
The illusions that Yao'K wreaked on Titania were as nothing to what he has in mind. He plans to Mwahahahaha! Rule the Universe! He takes a group of three of the soon to be reduced to a hollow brainless husk secondary characters on a guided tour of his dream extraction machinery. They watch strange, fantastical swirlings in glass domes. Films of dreams. To cut a not very long (but incredibly well-padded) story short: one of these secondary heroes, guided by Coqdor's mental woo, wheeks Yao'K's blaster from Yao'K's belt and blasts away destroying the domes. The dreams escape. BUT! Somehow the transgalactic photons of their construction have fused with the Silver Nitrate used to fix the films (I'm pretty sure that's what I read) and has rendered them tangiable! Within a page Yao'K has family-sized Krellian Monsters From the Id stomping all over Yao'Kberg and eating its citizens.
After some running up and down corridors the surviving humans and Yao'K end up on his ship. The humans trick Yao'K into showing them how to use the ship's hyperblaster and they destroy his facility and stop the endless supply of new nightmares spewing out of it. Faced with the problem of getting back to their own galaxy Coqdor makes a psychic link with Axel, one of their number who has fallen into a semi-cataleptic state after being presented, back on the Planet of the Strumph's, with a manifestation of his deepest subconciousness's dream woman. Somehow, because she is some sort of Platonic Ideal, she knows how the bad guys' space ship works and she gives them the schematics. They discover from her that part of Yao'K's ship has a hyperdrive. The ship is built like a bunch of grapes. They detach that bit and off they go. With no idea how to steer the thing they end up in an uncharted interglactic void with no points of reference. Oops!
Coqdor comes up with another plan. It's just so crazy it had better work because there are only three pages of the book left. He makes contact with Ideal Perfect Woman deep in Axel's subconcious and using her as 'an antenna' sends a powerful psychic SOS and passes out from the exertion. He wakes up on the last page. They have been rescued and are back in their the Solar System.
Fin
Curious coincidence or later nod and wink? A French comic book series I am fond of, called Le Vagabond des limbes, has a central character called Axel who falls in love with his ideal dream woman who he only sees the once in a machine that forms images from the dreamer's unconcious mind. Le Voleur de rêves was published five years before volume 1 of Le Vagabond des limbes and I can't find any references to this coincidence (if it is one) anywhere on line.
On to the next....
This is going to be a little shorter than usual because I started this book over a month ago, got distracted by something shiny, and only just picked it up to finish the final few pages last night. My memory of what happened in the first part of the book is pretty sketchy.
It's another Coqdor story (the 14th of his adventures.). I think the fact that he is not mentioned on the back cover blurb means that his presence as a character was not a great selling point back in the day.
All weirdness has broken loose on the Uranian moon Titania - earthquakes and tempests and all sorts of heck wipe out a great part of the population as the people of the Solar System helplessly watch their TVs. Nearer home le chevalier Coqdor is going to the earth orbiting Hospital Station 22 (wittily named HS22) to investigate a strange outbreak. Otherwise healthy people go to sleep and don't wake up after their brains cease to function in any meaningful way. As he approaches the hospital the staff there suffer a sudden collective madness and he has to crash into the airlock and escape through the torn metal. There's a lot of running up and down corridors as mobs of hitherto rational medical staff and patients turn into rampaging mobs and the humanoid robots turn into psychopathic killers - apart from the one who grabs the only female character (a nurse) and carries her unconscious body around like Robbie the Robot never did for the poster for Forbidden Planet:
Suddenly! HS22 is whisked out of orbit by some unknown force, a rescue ship is destroyed with a huge interstellar wall of flame! The Hospital ship hurtles across the vast voidiness of interplanetary space towards the asteroid belt - where it lands on a planetoid with a breathable atmosphere. (Here our author confidently demonstrates his total lack of understanding of solar mechanics by telling us the Earth and the Moon are still visible to the naked eye as faint crescents in the sky.) More running around, this time chasing the sex-crazed robot, and its nubile toy, around the planetoid. They've just got that little problem sorted, and the girl nestled in secondary character lover's broad muscly arms when a strange ship appears. A lot of blue-skinned, blank white-eyed humanoids step out and, in a couple of hurried paragraphs, whisk the whole lot of them off to part two of the book which takes place in a different galaxy... gosh!
Part 2
In the different galaxy our protagonists find themselves the unwilling guests of Yao'K the despotic ruler of the blue-skinned humanoid android types. I cannot shake the idea of an evil Papa Strumph (Smurf). He wields fantastical powers of construction and destruction over a fabulous city. The source of his powers? Dreams stolen from the humans of the Milky Way Galaxy because the beings in his galaxy either don't dream or have dreams of vastly inferior quality.
The illusions that Yao'K wreaked on Titania were as nothing to what he has in mind. He plans to Mwahahahaha! Rule the Universe! He takes a group of three of the soon to be reduced to a hollow brainless husk secondary characters on a guided tour of his dream extraction machinery. They watch strange, fantastical swirlings in glass domes. Films of dreams. To cut a not very long (but incredibly well-padded) story short: one of these secondary heroes, guided by Coqdor's mental woo, wheeks Yao'K's blaster from Yao'K's belt and blasts away destroying the domes. The dreams escape. BUT! Somehow the transgalactic photons of their construction have fused with the Silver Nitrate used to fix the films (I'm pretty sure that's what I read) and has rendered them tangiable! Within a page Yao'K has family-sized Krellian Monsters From the Id stomping all over Yao'Kberg and eating its citizens.
After some running up and down corridors the surviving humans and Yao'K end up on his ship. The humans trick Yao'K into showing them how to use the ship's hyperblaster and they destroy his facility and stop the endless supply of new nightmares spewing out of it. Faced with the problem of getting back to their own galaxy Coqdor makes a psychic link with Axel, one of their number who has fallen into a semi-cataleptic state after being presented, back on the Planet of the Strumph's, with a manifestation of his deepest subconciousness's dream woman. Somehow, because she is some sort of Platonic Ideal, she knows how the bad guys' space ship works and she gives them the schematics. They discover from her that part of Yao'K's ship has a hyperdrive. The ship is built like a bunch of grapes. They detach that bit and off they go. With no idea how to steer the thing they end up in an uncharted interglactic void with no points of reference. Oops!
Coqdor comes up with another plan. It's just so crazy it had better work because there are only three pages of the book left. He makes contact with Ideal Perfect Woman deep in Axel's subconcious and using her as 'an antenna' sends a powerful psychic SOS and passes out from the exertion. He wakes up on the last page. They have been rescued and are back in their the Solar System.
Fin
Curious coincidence or later nod and wink? A French comic book series I am fond of, called Le Vagabond des limbes, has a central character called Axel who falls in love with his ideal dream woman who he only sees the once in a machine that forms images from the dreamer's unconcious mind. Le Voleur de rêves was published five years before volume 1 of Le Vagabond des limbes and I can't find any references to this coincidence (if it is one) anywhere on line.
On to the next....
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Irimanthe - par J&D LeMay Fleuve - Noir Anticipation #436 (1970)
I am in a slight state of shock. This one wasn't bad.
The president of an alien slugly caterpillar race enjoys an evening's illicit entertainment watching a couple of humans, a man and a woman, 'dancing'. The nature of the dance isn't specified but both are naked. For some inexplicable reason the rhythms and biochemical emanations of human 'dancing' send the aliens into a blissful trace state. Nothing to do with sex - the aliens are hermaphrodites (again with the Fleuve Noir's tick box hermaphrodites!) It's just one of those things. Thinking about it, it's comparable to some of us humans finding orchids sublimely beautiful when all the flower wants is a hummingbird or moth to come along and give a good slurping*.
Next day the president is surprisingly and suddenly dead - the Head of Security and corrupt sluggything who set up the illegal dance session investigates. Other high ranking members of the sluggythings' upper echelons die in similar circumstances. The Head of Security finds a common link: the female dancer Irimanthe and her strange golden bird companion pet. He tries to get them off planet before her presence can be linked to it but she is kidnapped on her way to the spaceport by (it thinks) its erstwhile companions in crime, the local people smugglers. These guys belong to an entirely different humanoid species. Rapidly loosing grip of the situation, the local hedonistic elite are dropping like slugs, and the new, incorruptible president is breathing down his... whatever connects a sluggything's head to the rest of it. On page 93 of 230 the Head of Security calls in Interco, the interstellar police, and we meet what may well be a couple of recurring characters. This is the 10th of the authors' Enquêtes Galactiques (Galactic Enquieries) books all set (I think) in the same universe.
The human cops arrive and one of the problems they have is they can't tell any of the catapillar/sluglike aliens from any of the anothers. Which is a bit of a problem when it comes to identifying suspects, and leads to them accidentally arresting the Head of Security alien sluggything when it decides to go undercover to the people smuggler's den. (The people smugglers can't tell the sluggy people apart either so they hadn't noticed.) It's all very intriguing and entertaining. The detectives detect, go on a raid, rescue the girl, meet another (possibly recurring) human detective who has been working undercover as an exotic 'dancer' all along trying to bust open the people smugglers. It's like one of Ed Bain's 87th Precinct novels - in space! Eventually the lab turns up an interesting virus previously only found on a far distant planet. So off they go. The planet has a peaceful agrarian society, a former human colony that has turned its back on technology. They have no wish to become anything else. The detectives discover the girl was originally from that planet, (though she has no memeory of this). The symbiotic birdlike animal, an intelligent indiginous life form with which many of the local humans have bonded, had lost its human partner and used Irimanthe as a tool to get its revenge and destroy the slaving ring .
The bird thing was the guilty party.
Justice is meted out when the bird, at its own request is dumped into space, and the girl gets to return home.
Fin
The second of the Enquêtes Galactiques I have read and better than the first - though that did have one effective sequence in it which stood out far above the usual fare in these books. Again, not great literature, but a solid, well-paced piece of genre-mixing pulp fiction that would not have been out of place between any two Ace paperbacks of the period.
* "Oh yeah! give it to me, little bird!"
I am in a slight state of shock. This one wasn't bad.
The president of an alien slugly caterpillar race enjoys an evening's illicit entertainment watching a couple of humans, a man and a woman, 'dancing'. The nature of the dance isn't specified but both are naked. For some inexplicable reason the rhythms and biochemical emanations of human 'dancing' send the aliens into a blissful trace state. Nothing to do with sex - the aliens are hermaphrodites (again with the Fleuve Noir's tick box hermaphrodites!) It's just one of those things. Thinking about it, it's comparable to some of us humans finding orchids sublimely beautiful when all the flower wants is a hummingbird or moth to come along and give a good slurping*.
Next day the president is surprisingly and suddenly dead - the Head of Security and corrupt sluggything who set up the illegal dance session investigates. Other high ranking members of the sluggythings' upper echelons die in similar circumstances. The Head of Security finds a common link: the female dancer Irimanthe and her strange golden bird companion pet. He tries to get them off planet before her presence can be linked to it but she is kidnapped on her way to the spaceport by (it thinks) its erstwhile companions in crime, the local people smugglers. These guys belong to an entirely different humanoid species. Rapidly loosing grip of the situation, the local hedonistic elite are dropping like slugs, and the new, incorruptible president is breathing down his... whatever connects a sluggything's head to the rest of it. On page 93 of 230 the Head of Security calls in Interco, the interstellar police, and we meet what may well be a couple of recurring characters. This is the 10th of the authors' Enquêtes Galactiques (Galactic Enquieries) books all set (I think) in the same universe.
The human cops arrive and one of the problems they have is they can't tell any of the catapillar/sluglike aliens from any of the anothers. Which is a bit of a problem when it comes to identifying suspects, and leads to them accidentally arresting the Head of Security alien sluggything when it decides to go undercover to the people smuggler's den. (The people smugglers can't tell the sluggy people apart either so they hadn't noticed.) It's all very intriguing and entertaining. The detectives detect, go on a raid, rescue the girl, meet another (possibly recurring) human detective who has been working undercover as an exotic 'dancer' all along trying to bust open the people smugglers. It's like one of Ed Bain's 87th Precinct novels - in space! Eventually the lab turns up an interesting virus previously only found on a far distant planet. So off they go. The planet has a peaceful agrarian society, a former human colony that has turned its back on technology. They have no wish to become anything else. The detectives discover the girl was originally from that planet, (though she has no memeory of this). The symbiotic birdlike animal, an intelligent indiginous life form with which many of the local humans have bonded, had lost its human partner and used Irimanthe as a tool to get its revenge and destroy the slaving ring .
The bird thing was the guilty party.
Justice is meted out when the bird, at its own request is dumped into space, and the girl gets to return home.
Fin
The second of the Enquêtes Galactiques I have read and better than the first - though that did have one effective sequence in it which stood out far above the usual fare in these books. Again, not great literature, but a solid, well-paced piece of genre-mixing pulp fiction that would not have been out of place between any two Ace paperbacks of the period.
* "Oh yeah! give it to me, little bird!"
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JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Quatre "diables" au paradis by Richard-Bessier Fleuve Noir #438
Another recurring character series. This time 'une adventure de Sydney Gordon'. I would guess that Sydney Gordon's name sold books because unlike those featuring Sir Coqdor it says 'UNE ADVENTURE DE SYDNEY GORDON' in big letters on the back cover. (Not that a Sir Coqdor story would advertise itself as a Syd Gordon story but you know what I mean.) Just in case you had missed any the narrator does a bit of fourth wall breaking for a few pages and quickly reminds us what jolly japes he and his friends have got up to in the previous volumes including the time Martians invaded the Moon, and when they travelled to a parallel world and met every literary hero since the beginning of time and so on. La Machine venue d'ailleurs is the only one I have read and I quite enjoyed it.
There is one adventure I am now desperate to get hold of after reading :
This time...
Syd is taking a few days off from his job as a reporter - or trying to. Things keep getting in his way. For one thing he is being pestered by a salesman from a company called Paradise For All - a company which, when the sales man finally get to meet him face top face by just walking into his house past his wife, promises a purely scientific, totally non-religious afterlife for the princely sum of a mere 200 dollars a month up front! Payable from the moment they sign up until their death. The salesman and his assistant wear strange, shimmering metallic clothes and big belts so Syd assumes they are 'short-haired hippies' trying to enrol him in a cult. They tell him no, they're serious and want him to give them a good write up and thus lots of publicity. He throws them out - but not before they have pointed an odd device at him and his wife.
His boss from the paper calls just as they about to leave the house with friends to go for a meal. Could he just pop by his local church and get an interview with the demon that the priest reports is hiding in his bell tower, please? So off they go not believing a word of it but strike me pink there is a demon horns, hooves, and tail the works, in the bell tower. It's quite happy to see Syd and warns him in a vague, disjointed and rambling manner about a terrible danger menacing humanity; Paradise For All is more than it seems!
The demon vanishes. Syd, Mrs Syd, and their two friends drive off to their meal but skid off the road, hit a tree and die.
Syd wakes up in Paradise (or a reasonable simulacrum of it) and is met by the salesman who gives him a guided tour. There are streams that run with milk and honey, and others with whisky and gin, and there are cigarette trees and all manner of delights. He points out some of the other residents, Hitler, Robespierre, Diogenes... Look! there's Sigmund Freud pretending not to watch girls through the holes cut in his newspaper. Paradise For All is not a new operation. It has been operating for centuries. After a quick interdimensional phone call to his office, in which his secretary confirms he is dead, Syd meets up with his wife and friends. They meet an old friend who died a few years before who tells them the whole set up is fishy and there is a tree at the centre of paradise that no one is allowed to go near. That night they go look and find the giant apple tree is stuffed full of electronic monitoring equipment. They are captured by the salesmen and his cohort of blue angels and sent off to another parallel world - Purgatory! where they spend endless shifts on production lines doing things like punching holes in pieces of paper then glueing them back in. After discovering even more electronic equipment they are dispatched to hell where they slave breaking rocks and bathing in scalding hot water while being tormented by devils with pitchforks. One of the devils turns out to be the demon Syd met in the bell tower. He is not a real demon but a human soul transplanted into a fake body. He used to be priest. Luckily he has a stolen interdimensional hopping device so off they all pop to the next parallel world / universe which is populated by the WORD, letters, mathematical formuli and musical notation who do some serious info dumping at our heroes.
Paradise For All is run byLectroids from the Eight Dimension Ghorkiens from yet another dimension, a race so enfeebled and degenerate they need regular grafts of 'being' to keep them alive. Humans are a handy dandy, oven ready, perfectly compatible source - albeit with a bit of psychic immunosuppressives in the mix.
To return to Earth our chums have to retrace their steps. The interdimensional dingus only works in single stages and the WORD world is the end of the line. On their way back they are captured by the baddies and taken to Paradise For All HQ where Khanhapapohic (head poo-ba and chief scientist) is in need of some sweet human soul juice before he expires. Syd is volunteered. He wakes up in Khanhapapohic's body and after a bit of a tussle gains control. He (as Khanhapapohic) gets his friends soulsucked into the same body and, using the remnanats of Khanhapapohic's memory, they twiddle knobs and recalibrate the doohicky of temporal whatsit and blow everything up and return in time (and to their old bodies) at the moment just before they climb into the car to go for their meal.
This time they don't crash and die on the way.
The End.
A pretty quick read - for one thing the line spacing stretched the text to 25 lines per page rather than the 30 per page of Irimanthe - the last one I read. And there was a lot of dialogue, and occasional chunks of poetry both of which eat into the words per page ratio. When this book was reprinted (!) it shrank from 240 pages to 192. I guess the reprint was less generous with its line spacing.
Four of those pages it has to be said would, I imagine, be accounted for by the reprint maybe not including the two pretty unispired full page illustration - each backed by a blank page - of the original .
Another recurring character series. This time 'une adventure de Sydney Gordon'. I would guess that Sydney Gordon's name sold books because unlike those featuring Sir Coqdor it says 'UNE ADVENTURE DE SYDNEY GORDON' in big letters on the back cover. (Not that a Sir Coqdor story would advertise itself as a Syd Gordon story but you know what I mean.) Just in case you had missed any the narrator does a bit of fourth wall breaking for a few pages and quickly reminds us what jolly japes he and his friends have got up to in the previous volumes including the time Martians invaded the Moon, and when they travelled to a parallel world and met every literary hero since the beginning of time and so on. La Machine venue d'ailleurs is the only one I have read and I quite enjoyed it.
There is one adventure I am now desperate to get hold of after reading :
(You still remember the mysterious toys of "Don't touch the Borloks" and I'm sure you've been careful ever since in the choices you make for Christmas gifts.)
This time...
Syd is taking a few days off from his job as a reporter - or trying to. Things keep getting in his way. For one thing he is being pestered by a salesman from a company called Paradise For All - a company which, when the sales man finally get to meet him face top face by just walking into his house past his wife, promises a purely scientific, totally non-religious afterlife for the princely sum of a mere 200 dollars a month up front! Payable from the moment they sign up until their death. The salesman and his assistant wear strange, shimmering metallic clothes and big belts so Syd assumes they are 'short-haired hippies' trying to enrol him in a cult. They tell him no, they're serious and want him to give them a good write up and thus lots of publicity. He throws them out - but not before they have pointed an odd device at him and his wife.
His boss from the paper calls just as they about to leave the house with friends to go for a meal. Could he just pop by his local church and get an interview with the demon that the priest reports is hiding in his bell tower, please? So off they go not believing a word of it but strike me pink there is a demon horns, hooves, and tail the works, in the bell tower. It's quite happy to see Syd and warns him in a vague, disjointed and rambling manner about a terrible danger menacing humanity; Paradise For All is more than it seems!
The demon vanishes. Syd, Mrs Syd, and their two friends drive off to their meal but skid off the road, hit a tree and die.
Syd wakes up in Paradise (or a reasonable simulacrum of it) and is met by the salesman who gives him a guided tour. There are streams that run with milk and honey, and others with whisky and gin, and there are cigarette trees and all manner of delights. He points out some of the other residents, Hitler, Robespierre, Diogenes... Look! there's Sigmund Freud pretending not to watch girls through the holes cut in his newspaper. Paradise For All is not a new operation. It has been operating for centuries. After a quick interdimensional phone call to his office, in which his secretary confirms he is dead, Syd meets up with his wife and friends. They meet an old friend who died a few years before who tells them the whole set up is fishy and there is a tree at the centre of paradise that no one is allowed to go near. That night they go look and find the giant apple tree is stuffed full of electronic monitoring equipment. They are captured by the salesmen and his cohort of blue angels and sent off to another parallel world - Purgatory! where they spend endless shifts on production lines doing things like punching holes in pieces of paper then glueing them back in. After discovering even more electronic equipment they are dispatched to hell where they slave breaking rocks and bathing in scalding hot water while being tormented by devils with pitchforks. One of the devils turns out to be the demon Syd met in the bell tower. He is not a real demon but a human soul transplanted into a fake body. He used to be priest. Luckily he has a stolen interdimensional hopping device so off they all pop to the next parallel world / universe which is populated by the WORD, letters, mathematical formuli and musical notation who do some serious info dumping at our heroes.
Paradise For All is run by
To return to Earth our chums have to retrace their steps. The interdimensional dingus only works in single stages and the WORD world is the end of the line. On their way back they are captured by the baddies and taken to Paradise For All HQ where Khanhapapohic (head poo-ba and chief scientist) is in need of some sweet human soul juice before he expires. Syd is volunteered. He wakes up in Khanhapapohic's body and after a bit of a tussle gains control. He (as Khanhapapohic) gets his friends soulsucked into the same body and, using the remnanats of Khanhapapohic's memory, they twiddle knobs and recalibrate the doohicky of temporal whatsit and blow everything up and return in time (and to their old bodies) at the moment just before they climb into the car to go for their meal.
This time they don't crash and die on the way.
The End.
A pretty quick read - for one thing the line spacing stretched the text to 25 lines per page rather than the 30 per page of Irimanthe - the last one I read. And there was a lot of dialogue, and occasional chunks of poetry both of which eat into the words per page ratio. When this book was reprinted (!) it shrank from 240 pages to 192. I guess the reprint was less generous with its line spacing.
Four of those pages it has to be said would, I imagine, be accounted for by the reprint maybe not including the two pretty unispired full page illustration - each backed by a blank page - of the original .
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JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Bases d'invasion by Pierre Courcel Fleuve Noir 454
Not a lot so say about this one. Supercientists working on some super-science new weapon push it to its limits and accidentally kill a passing janitorial type who, it quickly turns out, is an alien in disguise. Military special forces are a little perturbed by this as he has been working in their super secret base for 20 odd years. They find the base is riddled with self-destructing alien spy devices. As they watch the dead alien's isolated house, wondering if his wife and son are also alien spies, the house explodes and a rocket zooms out of the garage and off before anyone can stop it. The son is found dead in the rubble and turns out to be human - though with a suspiciously HUGE pineal gland (...or pituitary... one of those).
Another pair of aliens with a son are identified and arrested in simultaneous raids. The male alien wills himself to death and the female is drugged and hypnotised and becomes a valuable supplier of plot driving info. The son turns out to be an adopted human and also has a huge brainy gland. He had no idea his 'parents' were alien spies. Our Special Forces hero is having terrible headaches.
The Special Forces instigate a brainy gland scanning operation and it turns out the hero is another of the super gland not aliens. His 'parents' died in an accident when he was very young.
Because our hero is our hero and in no way under any suspicion at all for being the 'son' of alien spies he gets to keep on being the hero, and, for no apparent reason, the other not at all suspicious 'son' becomes his sidekick. They both acquire girlfriends (for plot purposes) then blow up a bit of the Fijian islands because that's where the alien base is. (Thank you off-page drugged alien captive informant.)
Then they go off into space; to another planet and attack the aliens next biggest base. But the aliens have kidnapped the girls (told you!) and the hero has to go in to the base alone. He renders everyone unconscious by combining some special cigarettes and some fluid in a flask the aliens carelessly let him bring in with him - and when he wakes up the book is over and everything has been resolved in his absence.
Not very good, very thin, and very inconsistant. At one point, for dramatic reasons, the aliens are telepathic and can read people's minds... and then, for the rest of the book, they can't because then the author would have had to have come up with some way for the hero to get close enough to them carry out his two part chemical knockout gas plan without them just knowing about it. They do give the hero headaches from time to time as they try to use his enlarged brain bump to bend his will to theirs but that never really even gets started as a subplot before it's forgotten about on the next page.
The author, a pseudonym for Roger Jean Tribot, only only wrote 3 books for the Anticipation SF series but, from what I can gather, wrote some 114 novels in total. Mostly spy and cops and robbers stuff under a variety of names. It shows. He wasn't at home with SF.
Not a lot so say about this one. Supercientists working on some super-science new weapon push it to its limits and accidentally kill a passing janitorial type who, it quickly turns out, is an alien in disguise. Military special forces are a little perturbed by this as he has been working in their super secret base for 20 odd years. They find the base is riddled with self-destructing alien spy devices. As they watch the dead alien's isolated house, wondering if his wife and son are also alien spies, the house explodes and a rocket zooms out of the garage and off before anyone can stop it. The son is found dead in the rubble and turns out to be human - though with a suspiciously HUGE pineal gland (...or pituitary... one of those).
Another pair of aliens with a son are identified and arrested in simultaneous raids. The male alien wills himself to death and the female is drugged and hypnotised and becomes a valuable supplier of plot driving info. The son turns out to be an adopted human and also has a huge brainy gland. He had no idea his 'parents' were alien spies. Our Special Forces hero is having terrible headaches.
The Special Forces instigate a brainy gland scanning operation and it turns out the hero is another of the super gland not aliens. His 'parents' died in an accident when he was very young.
Because our hero is our hero and in no way under any suspicion at all for being the 'son' of alien spies he gets to keep on being the hero, and, for no apparent reason, the other not at all suspicious 'son' becomes his sidekick. They both acquire girlfriends (for plot purposes) then blow up a bit of the Fijian islands because that's where the alien base is. (Thank you off-page drugged alien captive informant.)
Then they go off into space; to another planet and attack the aliens next biggest base. But the aliens have kidnapped the girls (told you!) and the hero has to go in to the base alone. He renders everyone unconscious by combining some special cigarettes and some fluid in a flask the aliens carelessly let him bring in with him - and when he wakes up the book is over and everything has been resolved in his absence.
Not very good, very thin, and very inconsistant. At one point, for dramatic reasons, the aliens are telepathic and can read people's minds... and then, for the rest of the book, they can't because then the author would have had to have come up with some way for the hero to get close enough to them carry out his two part chemical knockout gas plan without them just knowing about it. They do give the hero headaches from time to time as they try to use his enlarged brain bump to bend his will to theirs but that never really even gets started as a subplot before it's forgotten about on the next page.
The author, a pseudonym for Roger Jean Tribot, only only wrote 3 books for the Anticipation SF series but, from what I can gather, wrote some 114 novels in total. Mostly spy and cops and robbers stuff under a variety of names. It shows. He wasn't at home with SF.
Considering the size of the country, 68 millions people, we can't have, mathematically speaking, the same number of authors of SF as in America, USA being more than four times numerous, inevitably, the number of everything being reduce in France, including SF authors.
Meanwhile, we have some authors of SF, but some aren't translated into english, and on today letterature scene, American editors are interested only by French authors who are best-selling authors in their country. That is to say, in France, selling at least 100 000 copies, which is quasi never the case of SF author in France.
But, through history, yes we have René Barjavel, Stefan Wul, Gérard Klein, Alain Damasio, Michel Jeury, Robert Merle. For exemple, René Barjavel wrote the first story, as far as I know, of black-out (no more electricity), in the novel Ravage (1943).
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
L'Horreur Tombée du ciel - by Robert Clauzel Fleuve Noir #455
Lousy cover. Even by the naff standards of Fleuve Noir covers of the period this is rectangle of blobby nothing.
Germain Laurent, architect and rally driver (neither of these occupations feed into the events of the story) stops off for a drink at his local Relais Routiers. It's late winter, cold and dreich. On the drive home his car breaks down and as he's fixing it something big and glowing and weird descends from the sky in the field nearby. It's like a huge cage with a glowing ball on top. 'Things' start coming down the translucent bars of the cage to the ground. Then, suddenly, it's gone.
He reports the incident to the police who don't believe him but, next morning do their duty and go over the ground with him. They find nothing.
Germain becomes obsessed with the idea that, though there was nothing to be seen above ground, maybe there is something buried in the field. He rents a room in the inn sees another glowing light out of his window hovering over the same place. He starts digging holes and trenches in the field. Eventually he find a strange huge gelatinous blob. He takes photos of it - it doesn't show on film! Channier, the patron of the inn, is an SF fan (he's 'read everything by Richard-Bessier') accompanies Germain to verify his story. The blob is there. It dissolves half the shovel they poke at it... then all of Channier when he touches it.
This time the police take Germain a little more seriously - but, because the blob has vanished, now think he's a homicidal nutjob who has killed Channier and buried him. They are doing a reconstruction of Germain' account of events when suddenly the blob heaves up out of the ground. Germain yells, "Don't touch it!" One of the cops does - and vanishes even faster than Channier did. "Holy sh*t!" say the rest of the cops and run away.
This first part wasn't bad things were set up nicely characters (who it turns out we don't meet again) are gently introduced the ambience is suitably gloomy and paranoid - there are implications that the police are following Germain, or is someone else? There's a mood of uneasy weird.
Part 2
A short while later the combined military scientific might of the word has thrown a re-enforced concrete bunker around the THING and are alternately throwing bombs at it or studying it depending on how they are feeling that morning. Nothing seems to affect it in any way. Other different THINGS appear forcing their way though the concrete and fuse with it. Internal changes take place and the THING starts to subdivide. The science types conclude it is an organism and what they are seeing is fertilization and embryonic development.
People start acting oddly. Knife fights break out and there is more than one murder. A character staggers into the book through a doorway strangely coppery coloured, collapses and disintegrates into metallic lumps, then sand which then vanishes as if it had never existed. That's a bit rum. It's pretty soon worked out there's an inverse square law thing going on and the nearer the THING you get the worse things get.
Experts from all nations are assembling a vast machine to bombard the THING with quarks. (Because quarks had only just been discovered three years before the book was written and sounded really science fictiony - especially if you could fire them in a concentrated laser-like beam at an alien THING... )
Germain is still involved in the investigation - why isn't explained, though who knows when the particular skill set of architect and rally driver might be required. Not having a lot to do he goes to visit a professor who has written books on UFOs. Maybe he's got some ideas.
"I can't help you but maybe I know someone who can!" says the kindly, sad old professor.
"Really?"
"Yes! you see my daughter married a reporter and they were on an expedition to south America but they vanished... and we all thought they were lost but then I started getting communications from her over the computer. They met some aliens and now live on the other side of the universe, hundreds of light years away, in a society thousands of years in advance of ours!"
At this point any sane character would have been edging out of the door resisting the speaker's efforts to shove leaflets in their pockets. Any sane reader would turn to the book's cover to see if they were reading the sequel to something - or look for one of the thuddingly obvious footnotes French pulps go in for*. I found neither which made this the weirdest, most blatant, out of the left of leftfield piece of WTF?!ery I have read for a while. Anyhow, Germain thinks this is all perfectly unsurprising and suggests that they ask the nice aliens if they have any advice.
The reply is pretty instantaneous as the aliens have tapped into the Omnichron field which resonates quasi-instantaneously across the entire universe:
Their message boils down to: "Ho boy are you guys in trouble! Okay don't do anything stupid and we'll nip over and see what we can do."
Back at the bunker the quarkinator is just about ready when the professor arrives with a new message from his friends.
"When we say "don't do anything stupid " we mean don't fire quarks at it. For heaven's sake don't fire quarks at it! That's the last think you should do!"
The scientists have no idea who this madman is.
"What? Who are you?"
"I write books on UFOs and my friends from the other side of the galaxy have sent me a message..."
"SECURITY...!"
Needless to say the scientist power up the quarkinator, zap the THING and instantly vaporise themselves, their equipment, the bunker, and just about everything else in a half kilometre radius. Apart from the THING. The THING just sits there, subdividing, and growing bigger, as if nothing has happened.
The aliens arrive on time and we are told (in a footnote) that we are in fact reading a sequel and the whole daughter going off into space with aliens thing didn't come from quite as far out leftfield as it had first appeared.(Though telling us this on page 182 was odd.) It turns out the quarkinator has done more than blow a hole in a field in France. I has also shifted the entire solar system to somewhere else and the sun is 'in the wrong constellation', glaciers grow at extraordinary rates, sea levels drop, snow blankets the tropics, wolves prowl around even the biggest cities. It's the end of the world, folks.
But!
The arrived aliens and their human friends don't actually do much to help apart from info dump that this sort of thing has happened before and possibly in our solar system too. One of the assembled scientists has a rush of brains to the head as he watches one of the female characters admiring themselves in a mirror (women eh?) he notices the lettering on her jacket is reversed. (Scientists, where would we be without them?) What if....! Every molecule, he theorises, has a right and left hand version. What if this THING has chosen Earth to breed because our chemistry is right-handed? If we could (to misquote Doctor Who) 'reverse the polarity of the nutrient flow' and feed it a diet of pure left-handed molecules?! It's crazy but it might just work! Soon 200k litres of left-handed amino acid soup have been knocked up and delivered in giant tankers. Luckily the THING is sitting at the bottom of a huge crater (thanks to the quarkinator) so all they have to do is pour it in and hope it doesn't soak away too quickly. How to deliver this anti-gazpacho? We could get someone to take a pipe to the edge of the pit and drain each tanker in turn - thus avoiding prolonged exposure to the short-range malevolent psychic evil emanating from the THING - or - we could get our hero to reverse each of the five tankers one by one to the increasingly fragile edge of the pit and open the tap on the back of each one in turn...
Guess which option they go for. Go on, guess!
After five trip our hero falls into the pit, is seduced by the short range malevolent psychic evil emanating from the THING, and swims towards it only pausing at the last second as the minor female character who he has the hots for cries "Don't do it!" from the edge of the pit. He passes out.
Heroes in Fleuve Noir books often pass out in the final chapter to then wake up and have all the plot resolving stuff that happened while they were unconscious explained to them.
The THING is dead, the Solar system is(somehow) back where it should be and the friendly aliens have gone back whence they came but not before one of them has waffled on for a couple of pages about an 'Endless war between Being and Anti-Being creatures', and how the THING that had landed on his home world had destroyed it totally and left it the cloud-shrouded hell that we Earthicans know as 'Venus'. Did I, wonders the hero as he contemplated the thinly-disguised religious metaphor hidden behind all the endless war between Being and Anti-Being creatures guff, did I when I was in the pit about to touch the THING... did I really smell SULPHUR? (Three Dramatic Chords Here!)
FIN
I'm glad that one's over. The first couple of chapters were nice and moody and were setting things up nicely but what it set up was crap and not worth the effort.
*Instead of the kind of discrete superscript asterisk you find in Anglophone books, French Pulps bludgeon you with a three, full-size character marker like this: (1).
(1) Authentique!
Lousy cover. Even by the naff standards of Fleuve Noir covers of the period this is rectangle of blobby nothing.
Germain Laurent, architect and rally driver (neither of these occupations feed into the events of the story) stops off for a drink at his local Relais Routiers. It's late winter, cold and dreich. On the drive home his car breaks down and as he's fixing it something big and glowing and weird descends from the sky in the field nearby. It's like a huge cage with a glowing ball on top. 'Things' start coming down the translucent bars of the cage to the ground. Then, suddenly, it's gone.
He reports the incident to the police who don't believe him but, next morning do their duty and go over the ground with him. They find nothing.
Germain becomes obsessed with the idea that, though there was nothing to be seen above ground, maybe there is something buried in the field. He rents a room in the inn sees another glowing light out of his window hovering over the same place. He starts digging holes and trenches in the field. Eventually he find a strange huge gelatinous blob. He takes photos of it - it doesn't show on film! Channier, the patron of the inn, is an SF fan (he's 'read everything by Richard-Bessier') accompanies Germain to verify his story. The blob is there. It dissolves half the shovel they poke at it... then all of Channier when he touches it.
This time the police take Germain a little more seriously - but, because the blob has vanished, now think he's a homicidal nutjob who has killed Channier and buried him. They are doing a reconstruction of Germain' account of events when suddenly the blob heaves up out of the ground. Germain yells, "Don't touch it!" One of the cops does - and vanishes even faster than Channier did. "Holy sh*t!" say the rest of the cops and run away.
This first part wasn't bad things were set up nicely characters (who it turns out we don't meet again) are gently introduced the ambience is suitably gloomy and paranoid - there are implications that the police are following Germain, or is someone else? There's a mood of uneasy weird.
Part 2
A short while later the combined military scientific might of the word has thrown a re-enforced concrete bunker around the THING and are alternately throwing bombs at it or studying it depending on how they are feeling that morning. Nothing seems to affect it in any way. Other different THINGS appear forcing their way though the concrete and fuse with it. Internal changes take place and the THING starts to subdivide. The science types conclude it is an organism and what they are seeing is fertilization and embryonic development.
People start acting oddly. Knife fights break out and there is more than one murder. A character staggers into the book through a doorway strangely coppery coloured, collapses and disintegrates into metallic lumps, then sand which then vanishes as if it had never existed. That's a bit rum. It's pretty soon worked out there's an inverse square law thing going on and the nearer the THING you get the worse things get.
Experts from all nations are assembling a vast machine to bombard the THING with quarks. (Because quarks had only just been discovered three years before the book was written and sounded really science fictiony - especially if you could fire them in a concentrated laser-like beam at an alien THING... )
Germain is still involved in the investigation - why isn't explained, though who knows when the particular skill set of architect and rally driver might be required. Not having a lot to do he goes to visit a professor who has written books on UFOs. Maybe he's got some ideas.
"I can't help you but maybe I know someone who can!" says the kindly, sad old professor.
"Really?"
"Yes! you see my daughter married a reporter and they were on an expedition to south America but they vanished... and we all thought they were lost but then I started getting communications from her over the computer. They met some aliens and now live on the other side of the universe, hundreds of light years away, in a society thousands of years in advance of ours!"
At this point any sane character would have been edging out of the door resisting the speaker's efforts to shove leaflets in their pockets. Any sane reader would turn to the book's cover to see if they were reading the sequel to something - or look for one of the thuddingly obvious footnotes French pulps go in for*. I found neither which made this the weirdest, most blatant, out of the left of leftfield piece of WTF?!ery I have read for a while. Anyhow, Germain thinks this is all perfectly unsurprising and suggests that they ask the nice aliens if they have any advice.
The reply is pretty instantaneous as the aliens have tapped into the Omnichron field which resonates quasi-instantaneously across the entire universe:
Their message boils down to: "Ho boy are you guys in trouble! Okay don't do anything stupid and we'll nip over and see what we can do."
Back at the bunker the quarkinator is just about ready when the professor arrives with a new message from his friends.
"When we say "don't do anything stupid " we mean don't fire quarks at it. For heaven's sake don't fire quarks at it! That's the last think you should do!"
The scientists have no idea who this madman is.
"What? Who are you?"
"I write books on UFOs and my friends from the other side of the galaxy have sent me a message..."
"SECURITY...!"
Needless to say the scientist power up the quarkinator, zap the THING and instantly vaporise themselves, their equipment, the bunker, and just about everything else in a half kilometre radius. Apart from the THING. The THING just sits there, subdividing, and growing bigger, as if nothing has happened.
The aliens arrive on time and we are told (in a footnote) that we are in fact reading a sequel and the whole daughter going off into space with aliens thing didn't come from quite as far out leftfield as it had first appeared.(Though telling us this on page 182 was odd.) It turns out the quarkinator has done more than blow a hole in a field in France. I has also shifted the entire solar system to somewhere else and the sun is 'in the wrong constellation', glaciers grow at extraordinary rates, sea levels drop, snow blankets the tropics, wolves prowl around even the biggest cities. It's the end of the world, folks.
But!
The arrived aliens and their human friends don't actually do much to help apart from info dump that this sort of thing has happened before and possibly in our solar system too. One of the assembled scientists has a rush of brains to the head as he watches one of the female characters admiring themselves in a mirror (women eh?) he notices the lettering on her jacket is reversed. (Scientists, where would we be without them?) What if....! Every molecule, he theorises, has a right and left hand version. What if this THING has chosen Earth to breed because our chemistry is right-handed? If we could (to misquote Doctor Who) 'reverse the polarity of the nutrient flow' and feed it a diet of pure left-handed molecules?! It's crazy but it might just work! Soon 200k litres of left-handed amino acid soup have been knocked up and delivered in giant tankers. Luckily the THING is sitting at the bottom of a huge crater (thanks to the quarkinator) so all they have to do is pour it in and hope it doesn't soak away too quickly. How to deliver this anti-gazpacho? We could get someone to take a pipe to the edge of the pit and drain each tanker in turn - thus avoiding prolonged exposure to the short-range malevolent psychic evil emanating from the THING - or - we could get our hero to reverse each of the five tankers one by one to the increasingly fragile edge of the pit and open the tap on the back of each one in turn...
Guess which option they go for. Go on, guess!
After five trip our hero falls into the pit, is seduced by the short range malevolent psychic evil emanating from the THING, and swims towards it only pausing at the last second as the minor female character who he has the hots for cries "Don't do it!" from the edge of the pit. He passes out.
Heroes in Fleuve Noir books often pass out in the final chapter to then wake up and have all the plot resolving stuff that happened while they were unconscious explained to them.
The THING is dead, the Solar system is(somehow) back where it should be and the friendly aliens have gone back whence they came but not before one of them has waffled on for a couple of pages about an 'Endless war between Being and Anti-Being creatures', and how the THING that had landed on his home world had destroyed it totally and left it the cloud-shrouded hell that we Earthicans know as 'Venus'. Did I, wonders the hero as he contemplated the thinly-disguised religious metaphor hidden behind all the endless war between Being and Anti-Being creatures guff, did I when I was in the pit about to touch the THING... did I really smell SULPHUR? (Three Dramatic Chords Here!)
FIN
I'm glad that one's over. The first couple of chapters were nice and moody and were setting things up nicely but what it set up was crap and not worth the effort.
*Instead of the kind of discrete superscript asterisk you find in Anglophone books, French Pulps bludgeon you with a three, full-size character marker like this: (1).
(1) Authentique!
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JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Concerto pour l'inconnu (opus 71) by Richard-Bessiere Fleuve Noir Anticipation #461
A masterpiece of padding. After a preface by Leopold Kovarski (chef d'orchestre Orchestre symphonique de Boston) extolling the brilliance of the book -which must have been more impressive in the days before the internet made finding out that Leopold Kovarski (chef d'orchestre Orchestre symphonique de Boston) doesn't ever seem to have existed a very easy thing to do. Then a four line quote from Wagner that takes up a page (blank on back), then a title page (blank on back) so by the time we get to the text of the story we're already on page 21! Not that the text is very dense when we get to it.
The book opens with our hero deep in a cave where he has spent the last week alone having a fit of the sulks because his girlfriend left him. His support team who, were supposed to be there at an arranged time and help him up the last difficult ascent, don't turn up and he has difficulty getting out. When he finds the support team they seem less than apologetic, they are unenthusiastic about anything, lethargic and uninterested. Angrily our hero decides to go to High Lands, the ranch he's inherited from his uncle. (The book is set in the US.) On the way he stops at a country gas station and the attendant seems weirdly uninvolved in his task - a woman sits on the veranda of the house. That's my mother, says the attendant. She's been dead for ten days. Our hero drives on. Something weird is happening.
Things get exponentially weirder at the ranch.
He starts to hear faint discordant music just at the edge of his hearing but cannot find its source, clouds of 'crickets' mass in the sky and the rain goes green, a ragged man appears on his doorstep and offers him a bottle of green liquid, a disembodied hand terrorises him before leaping through a window and escaping. He finds a reproduction of his bedroom in a field near his house. This is all a bit rum and weird, he thinks so drives across country to see an old chum, a scientist who specialises in ultrasound research after previously being a neuropsycholgist - so we get great chunks of wonderfully space-wasting stuff like this page of word association as our hero is hypno thingy psychoanalysed.
Phew! 75 words!
The hero, the prof, and his obligatory beautiful daughter, go back to High Lands and find the hero had left his tape recorder running and has recorded the music - he wasn't hallucinating! further investigation finds the Green Rain causes hypokalaemia; contact with it causes all the potassium in your body to fall out. And the 'crickets' are in fact alien thingies - mindless alien thingies that do pointlessly odd things like overnight construct a huge building in the prof's back garden filled with an assortment of human machines and products and populated by humanoids - attempting to communicate with the humanoids with a couple of dog whistles - the prof has become convinced the crickets communicate ultra sonically - they accidentally hit on the frequency which makes alien crickets and everything they make disintegrate into harmless dust. Everything in the warehouse, including the humanoids, were bunches of crickets reshaping their molecular structure and becoming multicelled organisms mimicking household human products. And humanoids. (They are like the Replicators from Stargate. Not a bad or totally stupid SF idea but totally wasted here.)
Egad! Someone had better go to Washington and tell the President! So off our hero goes through a rapidly decaying society - he holds up a passenger in the airport toilets to get a ticket. He doesn't get to see the president but he does somehow just walk into the Senate Building and address the senators before being told to f*ck off and bring some proof next time.
So back home he goes. A totally pointless diversion which filled a few pages.
It's all looking a bite dire because plants are getting their potassium leached out too and soon there will be no uncontaminated Pepsi or beer left to drink and all life on Earth is DOOMED... when a totally random old friend turns up and tells them the author couldn't think of any other way to get them over to the '8th Experimental Base' near Roswell (that's where all the big brains are at) so would they mind going there in the next chapter please? Having delivered his request he promptly vanishes from the book. What a good well-trained minor character he is.
Overland they go. Told that they will have to go the long way round because a bridge is down they are surprised to find the bridge isn't down but half way across discover the bridge is a replica made by the alien beasties. They gingerly cross... and find themselves in an alien beasty replica of the town they just left! It starts to Green Rain so they do the only sensible thing they can think of - which is to hide in the sewer....
...okay...
...where they discover millions of the alien beasties absorbing the potassium washed out of Earth's ecosystem into their greedy little alien tummies! Pretty amazing deduction to make with the naked eye, down in a sewer, under an alien replica of a midwestern town but that's what a good cross-disciplinary scientific training will get you.
Their discoveries are welcome at '8th Experimental Base' and everyone feverishly gets to work:
It soon becomes obvious that having everyone in the world blow dog whistles at random household objects isn't really going to work. What if we could build satellites that would emit ultra-sound and blanket the world and destroy the crickets! Brilliant! but we haven't got enough time! I know, says the hero, why don't we convince the crickets to build them for us! Golly you're firing on all cylinders tonight aren't you? Luckily the hero is a bit psychic and there's this amazing brainwave amplification device they'd been working on for years waiting for something like this to happen! But a senator turns up and tells them to stop! And then the White House phone up to tell them to go ahead! End of chapter.
Start of next chapter it's two weeks later and the aliens have gone so I guess it must have worked.
What a piece of merde.
FIN
There are 18 blank pages in total throughout the book (excluding front and end matter). By the time they got round to reprinting it 20 years later (when it had shrunk, due to typesetting, from 240 to 192 pages) they had managed to shrink Richard-Bessiere's name down as small as contractually possible, and promoted it as 'presented by Jimmy Geiue'. Jimmy G obviously being, then, a better selling name than the authors'.
A masterpiece of padding. After a preface by Leopold Kovarski (chef d'orchestre Orchestre symphonique de Boston) extolling the brilliance of the book -which must have been more impressive in the days before the internet made finding out that Leopold Kovarski (chef d'orchestre Orchestre symphonique de Boston) doesn't ever seem to have existed a very easy thing to do. Then a four line quote from Wagner that takes up a page (blank on back), then a title page (blank on back) so by the time we get to the text of the story we're already on page 21! Not that the text is very dense when we get to it.
The book opens with our hero deep in a cave where he has spent the last week alone having a fit of the sulks because his girlfriend left him. His support team who, were supposed to be there at an arranged time and help him up the last difficult ascent, don't turn up and he has difficulty getting out. When he finds the support team they seem less than apologetic, they are unenthusiastic about anything, lethargic and uninterested. Angrily our hero decides to go to High Lands, the ranch he's inherited from his uncle. (The book is set in the US.) On the way he stops at a country gas station and the attendant seems weirdly uninvolved in his task - a woman sits on the veranda of the house. That's my mother, says the attendant. She's been dead for ten days. Our hero drives on. Something weird is happening.
Things get exponentially weirder at the ranch.
He starts to hear faint discordant music just at the edge of his hearing but cannot find its source, clouds of 'crickets' mass in the sky and the rain goes green, a ragged man appears on his doorstep and offers him a bottle of green liquid, a disembodied hand terrorises him before leaping through a window and escaping. He finds a reproduction of his bedroom in a field near his house. This is all a bit rum and weird, he thinks so drives across country to see an old chum, a scientist who specialises in ultrasound research after previously being a neuropsycholgist - so we get great chunks of wonderfully space-wasting stuff like this page of word association as our hero is hypno thingy psychoanalysed.
Phew! 75 words!
The hero, the prof, and his obligatory beautiful daughter, go back to High Lands and find the hero had left his tape recorder running and has recorded the music - he wasn't hallucinating! further investigation finds the Green Rain causes hypokalaemia; contact with it causes all the potassium in your body to fall out. And the 'crickets' are in fact alien thingies - mindless alien thingies that do pointlessly odd things like overnight construct a huge building in the prof's back garden filled with an assortment of human machines and products and populated by humanoids - attempting to communicate with the humanoids with a couple of dog whistles - the prof has become convinced the crickets communicate ultra sonically - they accidentally hit on the frequency which makes alien crickets and everything they make disintegrate into harmless dust. Everything in the warehouse, including the humanoids, were bunches of crickets reshaping their molecular structure and becoming multicelled organisms mimicking household human products. And humanoids. (They are like the Replicators from Stargate. Not a bad or totally stupid SF idea but totally wasted here.)
Egad! Someone had better go to Washington and tell the President! So off our hero goes through a rapidly decaying society - he holds up a passenger in the airport toilets to get a ticket. He doesn't get to see the president but he does somehow just walk into the Senate Building and address the senators before being told to f*ck off and bring some proof next time.
So back home he goes. A totally pointless diversion which filled a few pages.
It's all looking a bite dire because plants are getting their potassium leached out too and soon there will be no uncontaminated Pepsi or beer left to drink and all life on Earth is DOOMED... when a totally random old friend turns up and tells them the author couldn't think of any other way to get them over to the '8th Experimental Base' near Roswell (that's where all the big brains are at) so would they mind going there in the next chapter please? Having delivered his request he promptly vanishes from the book. What a good well-trained minor character he is.
Overland they go. Told that they will have to go the long way round because a bridge is down they are surprised to find the bridge isn't down but half way across discover the bridge is a replica made by the alien beasties. They gingerly cross... and find themselves in an alien beasty replica of the town they just left! It starts to Green Rain so they do the only sensible thing they can think of - which is to hide in the sewer....
...okay...
...where they discover millions of the alien beasties absorbing the potassium washed out of Earth's ecosystem into their greedy little alien tummies! Pretty amazing deduction to make with the naked eye, down in a sewer, under an alien replica of a midwestern town but that's what a good cross-disciplinary scientific training will get you.
Their discoveries are welcome at '8th Experimental Base' and everyone feverishly gets to work:
It soon becomes obvious that having everyone in the world blow dog whistles at random household objects isn't really going to work. What if we could build satellites that would emit ultra-sound and blanket the world and destroy the crickets! Brilliant! but we haven't got enough time! I know, says the hero, why don't we convince the crickets to build them for us! Golly you're firing on all cylinders tonight aren't you? Luckily the hero is a bit psychic and there's this amazing brainwave amplification device they'd been working on for years waiting for something like this to happen! But a senator turns up and tells them to stop! And then the White House phone up to tell them to go ahead! End of chapter.
Start of next chapter it's two weeks later and the aliens have gone so I guess it must have worked.
What a piece of merde.
FIN
There are 18 blank pages in total throughout the book (excluding front and end matter). By the time they got round to reprinting it 20 years later (when it had shrunk, due to typesetting, from 240 to 192 pages) they had managed to shrink Richard-Bessiere's name down as small as contractually possible, and promoted it as 'presented by Jimmy Geiue'. Jimmy G obviously being, then, a better selling name than the authors'.
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JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
As I understand it books in France can be described as 'black' or 'white' literature. White is literary posh grown up stuff; black, 'noir', is pulp and lowbrow. Fleuve noir 'black river' is the name of the publishing house. Anticipation was their SF line. They published other series too: spy novels, crime stories etc. under different series titles.
Although "The Other Side of the Mountain" (Michel Bernanos) is more Weird Fiction, one could probably also count it as SF. Jean-Pierre Andrevon was also a fairly popular author in his time (70ies, 80ies), one of which (Gandahar) was adapted into film by Rene Laloux. I read a volume of his short stories called Neutron a few years ago, which I recall as being quite good.
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JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Ebooks libres et gratuits is a Francophone Project Gutenberg type thing and has a few SF books in the 'Fantastique et SF' section: Some are translations of American or British works but there are home grown stuff too:
Le Docteur Oméga by Arnauld Galopin (1906) looks fun. A mad scientist travels to Mars with two companions and has thrilling adventures:
Le Docteur Oméga by Arnauld Galopin (1906) looks fun. A mad scientist travels to Mars with two companions and has thrilling adventures:
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