The Martian Epic Read online

  It is these undoubtedly-collaborative aspects of the portmanteau Martian Epic that make it highly distinctive as a work of imaginative fiction, and ensure its continued interest to modern science fiction enthusiasts, but it is also worth noting the distinctive variety of philosophical introspection displayed within it, which is probably due almost entirely to Varlet. Especially in its later stages—notwithstanding the blatant artificiality of the author’s attempts to spice those stages liberally with conventional melodrama—the “epic” has a deeply personal flavor, which sometimes approaches the stream-of-consciousness effect of “automatic writing” more closely than any of the late romans feuilletons beloved by the surrealists. Although it is arguable that Varlet’s fondness for verb-less sentences and for continual shifts from past to present tense do not work entirely to the advantage of the novel’s coherency or readability, they certainly allow what had probably started out, in Joncquel’s version, as a conspicuously distanced narrative, to acquire an intense intimacy.

  This intimacy becomes particularly obvious, and markedly odd, at points when the story has manifestly lost all contact with rational plausibility—which it is always rather prone to do. There is a sense which the entire work is so dream-like that it begs to be treated as a nightmare, progressing unsteadily from horror to absurdity, but it never dissolves to the point at which its protagonist becomes uninvolved, or to the point at which the reader can no longer take his involvement seriously. In that respect, as in those already cited, the work is rather remarkable—and in order for the reader to appreciate that aspect more fully, it is worth going into a little more detail regarding the identity and career of its progenitor, Théo Varlet.

  Léon Louis Etienne Théodore Varlet was born on March 12, 1878, in the city of Lille in Northern France. His father was a lawyer, but the wider family was unusually well-off, by virtue of having property and business interests in Russia, and he grew up feeling that there was no particular need for him to make a living. He decided, instead—following in the footsteps of many other fashionably disenchanted sons of the newly-prosperous bourgeoisie—to dedicate himself to a literary vocation. He published poetry and criticism in a wide range of literary periodicals—and, like almost every other person of similar inclination, founded one himself, in collaboration with two friends.

  Varlet published four collections of poetry before the outbreak of the Great War, beginning with Heures et rêves [Hours and Dreams] in 1898. Although he arrived on the scene too late to participate in the Decadent Movement, Charles Baudelaire was one of the more obvious influences on his work, and seems to have served as a powerful role-model in other ways; Varlet cultivated a quasi-Baudelairean reputation as a resolutely determined non-conformist, embracing a fervent pacifism that won him an easy isolation and a certain notoriety when war eventually broke out. He made a particular point of attempting to follow up Baudelaire’s “research” in the use of drugs to attain “artificial paradises,” reporting extensively on his own experiments with hashish, opium and—most dangerously—ether. In Au paradis du haschisch; suite à Baudelaire (1930), he catalogued more than 100 such experiments conducted between 1908 and 1914, including illusory out-of-body experiences that took him into remote regions of outer space and illusions of existing in another person’s body—both of which experiences are reproduced in the plot of L’agonie de la Terre.

  Given Malfère’s claim that only one “amusing incident” survived into L’agonie de la Terre from “La fin des mondes,” it can probably be taken for granted that Varlet’s involvement with the entire text of the Martian Epic became increasingly more intense as he gradually abandoned the distanced narrative he had been given—which is probably rendered more or les straightforwardly in Chapter I of Les Titans du ciel—and that his transfiguration relied increasingly heavily on his own experience of “altered states of consciousness.” Although it not only the acknowledged hallucinatory sequences of Les Titans du ciel that contribute a striking phantasmagoric feel to that part of the story, there is a sense in which L’agonie de la Terre is quite distinct in its narrative method, and can be read in its entirety as a “drug novel.”

  In spite of Varlet’s non-combatant status, the war contrived to ruin him anyway, by making the Russian Revolution possible. The family fortune, which had provided his living expenses while he made little or no money as a writer, went up in smoke, and—like many other initially-vocational writers before him—he was confronted by the necessity of making a living from his pen. Novel writing was, however, something of a last resort; he had to be persuaded into it, and never achieved any conspicuous success in commercial terms. For the remainder of his life, his primary source of income was translation work; from the outset, he made a particular specialty of Robert Louis Stevenson, translating the great majority of the Scot’s works of fiction, but he was also the French translator of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, J. K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and many other popular works, including novels by Herman Melville, Rudyard Kipling, Hilaire Belloc and Pearl S. Buck. One thing he never seems to have involved himself with is the translation of British scientific romance, but that was probably not a matter of policy. The decade following the end of the Great War, when Varlet was busiest, was a very thin time for scientific romance; little of note was published and almost none of it was translated into French. By the time the British genre became prolific again, in the 1930s, Varlet had been forced to slow down because of ill health.

  The only volume of prose that Varlet published in advance of the Martian Epic was the Malfère collection of short fiction, La Bella Venere, some of whose contents were recycled in the later and better-known collection Le dernier satyre [The Last Satyr] (1922). His collaboration with André Blandin, which Octave Joncquel allegedly saw as a betrayal, was a timeslip romance, La belle Valence [Valencia the Beautiful] (1923). He subsequently published three solo novels, including two scientific romances, the Vernian Le roc d’or [The Golden Rock] (1927) and the ambitious apocalyptic fantasy La grande panne [tr. as The Xenobiotic Invasion] (1930; available from Black Coat Press). A further scientific romance, Aurore Lescure, pilote d’astronef [Aurore Lescure, Spaceship Pilot] was issued posthumously in 1940. He died in Cassis, where he had been based for the greater part of his adult life, on October 6, 1938.

  Many aspects of Varlet’s own experience are echoed in the Martian Epic: his holidays in Saint-Valery, his ambiguous attitude to his native city of Lille, his affection for Cassis and the nearby city of Marseilles, and—perhaps most of all—his fascination for astronomy. Although he undoubtedly knew and respected Flammarion’s works, he had a particular fondness for the popular astronomy books written by Abbé Théophile Moreux (1867-1954), the director of an observatory at Bourges, and himself the author of a science fiction novel, Le Miroir sombre [The Dark Mirror] (1911), and paid homage to his mentor by giving him a thinly-disguised part in the Martian Epic as the director of the Mont Blanc Observatory, Abbé Romeux, who eventually becomes the political and spiritual leader of the Last Men.

  Although the fall-out of Octave Joncquel’s lawsuit prevented the Martian Epic from being reprinted, as most of Varlet’s subsequent novels were, during his own lifetime, the Amiens-based firm Encrage eventually reissued it, rather handsomely, as the first volume of a projected series, entitled Oeuvres Romanesques I (1996)—although no others have appeared as yet. The volume includes a number of essays on the Martian Epic, and Varlet’s work in general, including the one by Alfu previously quoted, which summarizes what is known of Octave Joncquel’s life, and a painstaking analysis of the text and its context by Michel Meurger, “Les Martiens sont là” [The Martians Are Here]. Meurger wonders in one section of his essay whether the Martian Epic might qualify as a roman à clef; as well as identifying the model of Romeux as Moreux and emphasizing Varlet’s personal reasons for wanting to portray Bolsheviks in the worst possible light, he suggests that Léon Rudeaux’s other mentor, Ladislas Wronsky, might have been based on the Polish mys
tic Josef-Maria Wronski (1776-1853), who is known to have influenced Baudelaire. This seems unlikely, however, and it is more probable that Wronsky, along with Gideon Botram, was inherited from Joncquel’s original text. Meurger does not attempt to find a model for the other characters who might conceivably be drawn from life: the ruthlessly pragmatic medical practitioner from Lille, Doctor Goulliard, who is ever-ready to do the “dirty work” for which Abbé Romeux is too squeamish while the Last Men are fighting for survival. Whether it qualifies as a roman à clef or not, though, there is no doubt that Varlet threw himself into his work of revision wholeheartedly, and that the published volumes would have been very different had Joncquel’s manuscripts been turned over to a more orthodox editor.

  This translation has been made from the Encrage edition of 1996, but I have compared that text with the London Library’s first editions, and it seems to be identical, save for the omission of the synoptic account of the plot of Les Titans du ciel that precedes the first edition of L’agonie de la Terre (which I have similarly omitted, for the same reason—that it is unnecessary in an omnibus edition).

  The task of translation was not straightforward, but I have attempted to reproduce the net effect of the stylistic flourishes and tics of Varlet’s narrative style—the verb-less sentences, the tense shifts, the fondness for argot, the inordinately long-winded sentences, and so on—without becoming so stubbornly literal in the replication of grammar and punctuation as to make the text too difficult to read in English. Any work of antique science fiction is bound to cause problems in terms of obsolete and mistaken science, improvised terminology and neologisms; I have tried to resist the inevitable temptation to correct even minor scientific errors, although I have footnoted some of the more egregious mistakes, and I have also tried to resist the similar temptation to translate invented terms in such a way that they seem more prophetic than they are. I have taken a slight liberty in translating “foudroyant” as “blaster,” as a translator working in 1921-22 would have been unlikely have done, without the example of pulp science fiction cliché to suggest the term, but I have tried to play fair with respect to the various kinds of aircraft and spacecraft described, stubbornly translating “obus” as “shell,” as it would certainly have been translated in 1922, even when “missile” or “spaceship” would have been warranted by the context, and leaving “volvite” alone rather than construing it as “jet” or “rocket-ship.” (Varlet has trouble with the volvites himself, initially describing them as a type of “rotatif” [helicopter] even though their main distinguishing feature is their lack of rotor blades.)

  Brian Stableford

  THE TITANS OF THE HEAVENS

  “At any rate, whether we expect another invasion or not,

  our views of the human future must be greatly modified by these events.

  We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding-place for Man; we can never anticipate

  the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.”

  H. G. Wells

  The War of the Worlds

  Part One: The Season of the Torpedoes

  I. Before the Opposition of Mars in 1978

  The Great War, in which the greater number of the civilized nations hurled themselves upon one another at the beginning of the 20th century, had been the last.

  One invention, anticipated for some time, combined with the initiative of a few bold intellectuals and men of action, accomplished what the spectacle of death and vain devastation, the declamations of pacifists and the reasoning of economists, had been unable to do. The savage and ferocious instincts that had marked humankind since the legendary Cain with the stigmata of its animal origins, and had hindered the development of intelligence incessantly with its periodic explosions, constraining humans to organize mass murder instead of devoting themselves to the peaceful conquest of the planet, were conclusively strangled and reduced to impotence.

  The solution of the “problem of war” was, so to speak, a two-step process. In the beginning, what was known as “universal disarmament” remained utopian, insofar as it was supposed that it had to emerge from mutual good will. The sudden attack in 1932 by the allied Japanese and Chinese, which had militarized 20 years before—the famous “yellow peril” about which the incredulous Europeans joked until the very last minute—almost overwhelmed the West, which had scarcely recovered from its previous war, but the Great Discovery, perfected in the most absolute secrecy by a committee of men who combined scientific genius with the noblest plans for the future of humanity, thwarted the invasion and, at the same time, struck the first mortal blow against militarism.

  Controlled at a distance by telemechanical waves, hundreds of “deflagrators”—silent helicopters working in relays—flew over the Asian hordes by night, bathing them in high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. Under that influence, powerful sparks sprang forth in every direction from metal objects. Cartridges exploded spontaneously in their cases, girdling soldiers on the march with fatal fire, and shells exploded in their boxes in every ammunition dump, arsenal and munitions factory. In a few hours, like Sennacherib’s army mowed down by the Archangel’s flaming sword, the soldiers of the Nipponese and Celestial Empires were strewn in millions upon the plains of Siberia. Europe was saved, without suffering any other losses than a German advance-guard that had already arrived in proximity to the invaders, whose munitions had been subjected, without any differentiation, to the effects of the incendiary waves.

  Emboldened by this success and the unique possibilities that it offered, the government of France—or, rather, the CSP (Committee for Science and Progress), whose members had the frightened politicians at their mercy—faithful to the immortal principles of 1789, immediately revived the old idea of general disarmament and, in the name of definitive peace, proposed urbi et orbi the immediate creation of a United State of Europe under the nominal presidency of His Highness the Prince of Monaco. The ultimatum, supported by the tacit threat of the teledeflagrators, was accepted at once. All the munitions of every country were transported to remote regions, the areas surrounding the depots was evacuated, and, on a given day, the fatal helicopters circulated silently, under the sole control of directive antennae, along all the meridians and parallels of Europe, which resounded for several hours with millions of explosions of every magnitude.

  The United States of Europe was founded once and for all. Gradually, the ex-nations learned to consider themselves as members of the same human fraternity, having no more interest in going to war with one another than the people of the Bouches-du-Rhône against those of the Pas-de-Calais or Londoners against Glaswegians.

  It is true that the bellicose instinct occasionally reared up its ugly head, in the beginning. Attenuated by the suppression of firearms, on the powers of which it had supported itself like a millionaire on the virtue of his banknotes, such instinct was nevertheless profoundly anchored in the depths of human nature. Under various pretexts of rivalry, sporadic skirmishes took place—and, since airborne patrols of deflagrators circulated on a regular basis, prohibiting the use of cannons, rifles or revolvers, people fell upon one another with swords, pikes, lances, bows and arrows, as in ancient times.

  The CSP, however, soon contrived to suppress these whims, and, by the same token, reduced the scourge of war conclusively. As soon as the news of these disturbances reached the central government, the aerodrome at La Turbie sent a helicopter which descended from the sky above the combatants and hovered a few meters above the ground. A Senegalese leaned out of the cockpit, armed with no other apparent weapon than a sort of white baton, like the ones carried by traffic police, but terminating in a small parabolic reflector. After three instructions had been ignored, he pointed his mysterious staff at the most persistent combatants; a long jet sprang forth and, with a dazzling explosion, those it touched fell where they stood, not so much blown apart as volatilized without the least residue, utterly annihilated.

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nbsp; No resistance was possible. Whether or not they were hypnotized—as some people claimed—these black gendarmes were as devoted to their masters as the famous Assassins once were to the Old Man of the Mountain. Rather than give up the secret of their “blasters,” they would blow them up by means of a special trigger, together with themselves and their assistants.

  Besides, the submission imposed by this sort of scientific dictatorship was not too hard to bear. The CSP was soon transformed into the Paris-based Terrestrial Directorate. By virtue of the forced incorporation of every country into the United States of the World, it only used its police for the purpose of maintaining the order and peace necessary for the integral development of humankind. The terrible “blasters” themselves were merely the first application of a new principle, whose generalization soon permitted the replacement of coal, oil and other combustibles, saving the enormous human effort employed in their extraction. In effect, the means had been discovered of releasing at will, in a matter of seconds, all the powerful intra-atomic energy embodied in radium. It was anticipated that the same “activator” might be applied to other, less scarce, metals, allowing their energetic produce to be industrialized.