French Science Fiction Authors

F*ck me! that was bonkers. The most amazingly compressed piece of fever-dream SF Gothic (145 or so pages) and it didn't stop for a second.

And then you say...

I like Wul's books.

Which says a lot about your state of mind :)
 
F*ck me! that was bonkers. The most amazingly compressed piece of fever-dream SF Gothic (145 or so pages) and it didn't stop for a second.

And then you say...

I like Wul's books.

Which says a lot about your state of mind :)

You're everso right. As I have said somewhere before I like being bewildered. It's such an odd state of mind and quite difficult to achieve (without medical assistance). It's not quite like being puzzled, or intrigued, or baffled, or tantalised, or anything else. But it is all of those and ingredient X. Ingredient X is becoming harder to find as I get older. When I was a kid the novels of Philip K Dick used to supply it and van Vogt's less polemic books. The films of David Lynch, The Brothers Quay and Fellini all gave me that feeling that there is some time-suspended dream logic thing in there that I can't quite grasp hold of.

Reading Wul's books, in which things like the human race powering space ships by wiring themselves up in series to generate enough voltage, or having all the organic matter in the solar system absorbed into one protoplasmic mass of teenage girl, or the hero becomes a superintelligent superbeing capable of reordering matter throughout the universe (and bringing the dead back to life) after eating the brains of a giant mutated octopus.... and in a language I can just about read them in, is a pretty damn good way of getting there these days.
 
I'm afraid that 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Planet of the Apes are the only two French sci-fi books I've read, just like The Neverending Story and Momo are the only German fantasy books I've read. With French speculative fiction, I do tend to be reminded of both wonder and subtle mystery. The aforementioned books by Verne and Boulle are easily some of my favorite sci-fi novels, and I love Michael Ende, too. I'm a bit xenophilic towards foreign works.

J.-H. Rosny aîné is also becoming of interest to me already.
 
I swithered between putting this here, or the Reading Around in Old SF Magazines thread. The coin flip put it here.

Fiction magazine was the French edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In addition to translations from stories selected from the English language version there were reviews and news from the French SF scene, editorials, and intros to stories from the local editor. From the start (or very early on) they also published original French stories. I'll just be looking at the French stories.

Issue 24 November 1955.
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Rever un homme (To Dream a Man) by Alain Doremieux a gentle eight page pastiche / homage of the the Ray Bradbury Martian stories in which a young Martian girl dreams into reality a Man who, to her surprise, claims to be the first being to have come to Mars from Earth. In the end she gets annoyed with him and his ludicrous story and stops dreaming him and he vanishes. Maybe she will try again some other day. Meanwhile on Earth preparations are made for the second mission.

Not badly done but nothing that Bradbury hadn't done much better in the originals.

This issue also contains the Alfred Bester story 'Fondly Fahrenheit' here renamed 'L'Android assassin', a title which does rather spoil the story somewhat, and because no one outside of the US uses F°...

Et le thermomètre ce soir-la enregistrait glorieusement , 33° centigrades.

Issue 25 December 1955.

fiction025-1955.jpg


Two stories in this issue:

Le Foulard qui remuait (The Scarf that Moved) by Yves Dartois. A couple wanting to spend the night at a lonely house get to read the diary of the last occupant who has problems with a haunted scarf before the diary cuts short and they are told he was found dead at the bottom of a cliff. They stay the night but creaky creaky... and then, dear reader, I awoke to find the the scarf across my throat! etc. etc.

Very run of the mill ghost (or was it?) story.

L'oeuf D'Elduo (The Egg of Elduo) - The universe is explored and only one planet, Elduo, has been overlooked. An expedition sets out to have a poke as the whole of the human race watches. They don't find much. No life at all. Some ancient ruins and that's about it. Just as they are about to return one of the explorers finds an egg. It doesn't appear to be a fossil or anything like that it's just an egg and no one sees any reason why it shouldn't hatch. They take it back with them to Earth. It doesn't hatch. People wait. The whole galaxy becomes obsessed with this enigma. Books are written, long academic discussions are had but for some inexplicable reason the egg does not hatch. A 'celebrated savant' comes up with an idea. He gets permission to try an experiment, and live on television before everyone, he promptly cooks and eats the thing....

While he is getting seven kinds of crap kicked out of him and thrown into jail we have a brief interlude in italics from the POV of an alien creature curling up on Elduo and waiting for fresh prey to turn up...

Three dramatic chords please.

The 'celebrated savant' gets belly aches, then cramps, and then dies. During the autopsy a hideous winged thingie emerges and starts absorbing one of the medical staff. Gas and 'triple plexilaine' bullets have no effect. It breaks free of the room - humanity is doomed! but luckily they have one last... a 'disintegration rifle' is fired at the flying beast from a spaceship and it dies. But did it lay any eggs before it did...?

Three more dramatic chords please.

Given that the beastie escaped and was then shot down dead in a mere seven lines doesn't exactly make me think that any new monsters are going to prove to be much of a problem really, so the open question ending is a bit wasted.

The itallicy alien bit was straight out of Van Vogt's The Black Destroyer and the end made me think of The Giant Claw (which was still two years in the future when this was written) with a, long time before it was written, bit of Alien thrown in too.

A very early story from Curval who went on to write much better stuff.
 
Azraëc de Virgo by Pierre Barbet (Fleuve Noir Anticipation n° 471 1971)

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I gave up on this one about half way through. Just so much Meh! you can take. A contemporary review in Fiction magazine wasn't impressed either:
Denis Phillipe Fiction 216 said:
'On ne peut pas dire qu'on s'ennuie à la lecture de ce livre, mais il serait bien difficile d'en retrouver une séquence ou une image vivace une fois qu'on l'a refermé.'
'One cannot say that you'll be bored reading this book, but it would be very difficult to recall a sequence or vivid image once you've closed it.'

I'm afraid I got bored reading it.
 
Issue 26 November 1956.

fiction026-1956.jpg


Civilisation 2190 by Gérard Klein - A very early story (first or second published from what I can find) from one of the big names of French SF.

Another Bradbury inspired story in which an exploratory team discover an intact library on a long devastated Earth and are excited to finally be able to find out what the greats like "Shakespeare, and Poe, and Cervantes, Cicero, Goethe, Homer and Anderson and Pirandello" had actually written. Only their names had survived the holocaust. Over the few pages of the story it slowly becomes clear that the library full of books printed on real paper contain only pulps and popular novels with titles like You Don't Wriggle in a Coffin and some bound magazines including The Psychology of Spiders ("With graphics and statistics!") .

The researchers depart knowing that they have at last found the true masterworks of humanity (why else print them on precious paper?!) and that the names that they had been handed down had produced nothing worth saving.
 
Annee 500.000 by Daniel Piret Fleuve Noir No. 490 1972

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After a introductory chapter in which our hero, 20 century Professor Simon Weinach, has a day like any other. He comes home, eats his supper, falls asleep while working, wakes up late for class. He is rushing down the stairs from his apartment to get to his first class when suddenly everything goes a bit wobbly and he wakes up in chapter two. He is now somewhere else entirely. Somewhere where it is very hot with no signs of life of any kind, except what he takes to be some distant ruins next to a strangely calm and unruffled sea. Suffering heat exhaustion he faints - and wakes up again in the kind of blank room that heroes of cheap SF novels always seen to wake up in in chapter two. Standing over him is a giant of a man with a HUGE head. Soon the two are chatting away telepathically and Weinach gets a guided tour of The World of Tomorrow!!!! And it all gets very Jules Verney for a bit. In this far distant future Earth the surface is uninhabitable and everyone (well nearly) lives in underwater cities. The cities are populated by "Real Men" big giant brained types and "Untermen" who look pretty much like our hero remembers people in the 20th century look like. The Real Men are the masters, Untermen are a valuable resource because not only do they do the menial grunt work but they also get to donate their (personality wiped) brains to be transplanted into the humanoid robots that do most of the skilled work. Untermen women (Unterwomen?) are necessary because no Real Men women are born. So, to keep their race alive, Real Men have to impregnate Unterwomen. For obvious reasons the Unterpeople are not educated, allowed to form trades unions, given much in the way of rights, or any of that other stuff that might make them wonder why they put up with this sh*t. There are another couple of types of Untermen who live in caves and farm mushrooms under the supervision of human-brained robots.

Amazingly the Real Men people have convinced themselves, despite their gigantic noggins and superior brainy power, that they and the Unterpeople are separate species and they have always lived in underwater cities. Weinach's revelations that he comes from the past and that the Real Men are mutants and the same species as the Untermen comes as a bit of a culture shock. And it all gets a bit Planet of the Apes (1967 movie version) as religious certainty comes in conflict with heretical truth. Weinach is taken to the Real Man leader who is an Unterman with a Real Man's brain grafted on. (When the body gets worn out the big man's brain gets transplanted onto another body - which I seem to recall is an idea from one of Edgar R Burrough's Mars books but I may be wrong).

Big Brain Real Boss Man is horrified but unconvinced - then, in a coincidence so far fetched it broke my WTF?!ometer, Weinach's submarine bumps into a coral reef as he is exploring where he thinks North America should be and uncovers the metallic torpedo-like time capsule buried by Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company at the 1964 World Fair. And not only THAT! but he was there when it was buried and he remembers with clarity all the things that went into it! He tells the Real Man Grand PooBah what he will find when it is opened and when he is proved right The Real Man Grand PooBah believes him and starts a radical reorganisation of society.

Which lasts all of half a chapter before regressive forces overthrow him and start wiping out all evidence of Weinach's revelations and, as Weinach quickly surmises, Weinach himself. He goes on the lam - taking with him his heavily pregnant Untergirlfriend, Saara. Aided by one of the few Real Men loyal to the old regime they flee to the surface and then to one of the mushroom farming cave systems. The new rulers are happily massacring most of the Untermen and pulling the plug on just about anything that can be unplugged when Saara gives birth to a Real Man Baby (dying in the process) and Weinach just falls out of the book. To wake up a raving lunatic in the year 2827... and dies two pages later.

Fin.

One of the most abrupt and "Huzzah! I've got to my required page count so I can stop!" endings I have come across in a long time. I'm pretty used to Fleuve Noir books ending in a quick flurry of post-resolution infodumping. It seems like every other book I read the hero will pass out in the penultimate chapter and wake up in hospital a page later to have the resolution explained to him by any other surving characters but this time? wow! It was a real handbrake turn and off the cliff ending. Nothing resolved, nothing explained... and with a single bound he was dead!

This was the author's first book. It's readable and pages turning but he either had no idea how to end the story or was told to cut it drastically by his editors. He went on to get another 46 published so he was obviously doing something that made people come back for more.
 

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