An Unknown World Read online

  An Unknown World:

  Two Years on the Moon

  by

  Pierre de Sélènes

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Un Monde inconnu, deux ans sur la Lune by “Pierre de Sélènes,” here translated as An Unknown World: Two Years on the Moon, was originally published by Ernest Flammarion in an undated edition attributed to 1896 by the Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue. That publication date is undoubtedly correct, as numerous reviews of the book appeared in periodicals in the last few months of 1896, but the internal evidence of the text, which places the action in the 1880s, suggests that most of it, at least had been written more than a decade earlier. The book was dedicated to Jules Verne, and is, in effect, a sequel to Verne’s two-part novel De le Terre à la Lune (1865) and Autour de la Lune (1870), initially translated into English in a single volume as From the Earth to the Moon direct in 97 hours 20 minutes, and a Trip Around It (1873).

  The catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale records that the pseudonym attached to the book was that of “A. Betolaud de La Drable.” Some other sources give the author’s birth-date as 1863, although it is not clear what evidence there is for that attribution; it appears to derive from a catalogue annotation of the 1898 Spanish translation of the book, and may well be an invention or an error. If it is correct, then the author was presumably the grandson of Armand-Ludovic-Eugène Betolaud de La Drable (1808-1888) and his wife Louise, née Tillette de Mautort (1820-1895). The name A. Betolaud de La Drable appears in a number of directories published after 1896, including a membership list of the Parisian Astronomical Society, but as some of the directories in question also list a Madame Betolaud de La Drable, née Tillette de Mautort, resident at the same address, one might be inclined to wonder whether the references are to a living individual. It is not inconceivable that the Armand Betolaud who died in 1888 is the person belatedly indicated in the directories, and the author of the book, although it might also be the case that his similarly-named son or grandson had simply married a cousin (as one of the heroes of the novel does).

  Wherever the author actually figures in the Betolaud family tree, there is no doubt that he belonged to the old French aristocracy, to a family that, as the popular expression puts it, went back to the Crusades, and had long been in the habit of marrying the members of other families of similar aristocratic descent. That is of some significance because Un Monde inconnu is a curious hybrid story, which deliberately fuses the Vernian romance from which it takes it immediate inspiration with an older tradition of utopian romance—older being the operative word, in this case, because it differs from almost all the other utopian romances written in France since the mid-18th century in taking a rather reactionary view of the ideas that prompted and succeeded the 1789 Revolution, embedding its supposed commitment to liberty, equality and fraternity within a stratified, hierarchical society equipped with a “natural” aristocracy and a similarly “natural” religious culture.

  The eccentricity of the utopian model featured in Un Monde inconnu does not stop there; again, it is by no means the only French utopian novel to propose that Earthly humankind is ill-fitted for a utopian existence for physiological reasons, but the modifications it proposes are a peculiar mixture of the radical and the conservative. The author follows a proposal advanced by Camille Flammarion in several of his other-worldly visions, that it would be more convenient for a species with ambitions toward perfection if it could do away with the messy business of nutrition, defecation and urination and obtain its nutrition by way of respiration, excreting wastes by exhalation. Flammarion was, however, fully aware of the fact that such a variation would require adaptation to an atmosphere radically different from that of Earth, and considerable physiological and anatomical adaptations of the species enjoying that exotic ecology. The author of Un Monde inconnu, wanting his utopians to live up to standards of human beauty in no uncertain terms, and to allow human visitors to their world to breathe the same air, fudges those issues in a decidedly unconvincing fashion, although such imaginative audacity is perhaps not out of keeping with the initial hypothesis that the Moon might be inhabited by human beings, internally if not externally.

  Some license, of course, must be granted to utopian writers, on the grounds that the strategies they employ for locating their hypothetical societies are convenient literary devices rather than rational hypotheses, and it is a matter of opinion whether any such device can really be said to be exceeding legitimacy. If any can, however, the one employed in Un Monde inconnu must be a strong candidate, perhaps all the more so because of its attempt to plunder the apparent plausibility of Jules Verne’s novel, which did try hard to pretend to rational plausibility, even though few people have ever been convinced that one really could travel safely to the Moon and back by means of a projectile fired by a gigantic cannon.

  The novel’s faults do not stop there; it was the author’s only book, and that shows. The text is prolix and repetitive, and frustratingly inclined to devote detailed consideration to trivia, while sidestepping more pertinent matters, in both the dialogue and the narrative commentary. Such faults are not unusual in speculative fiction, and are illustrative of the enormous difficulty of writing such fiction, and, as in many other cases, that kind of gaucherie is compensated here by the ardent desire on the author’s part to imagine and describe things that no one had ever imagined or described before, in the quest to widen the horizons of the imagination. Many other writers made a better fist of it than he did, but there is a sense in which every book of this kind has some value and interest by virtue of its obligatory uniqueness. Nobody else had ever written a book like Un Monde inconnu before, and nobody has done so since; if it is a monster, in more ways than one, it is nevertheless an intriguing monster.

  The novel has inevitably received something of a bad press from lovers of Jules Verne, who consider its very existence to be a crime of lèse-majesté. The fact that the novel’s basic narrative device is borrowed, is, however a subsidiary issue; if authors of speculative fiction were deemed to have intellectual property rights in the novelties that they invent, entitled to maintain them free of infringement, the genre would be infinitely poorer than it is, whole subgenres having been condemned. Un Monde inconnu is unusually detailed and specific in its borrowing, perhaps to the point of breach of copyright, although not of plagiarism, but there is a sense in which, in science fiction as in science, ideas have to be treatable as common property if progress is to be conceivable, let alone feasible. There does not seem to be any record of Ernest Flammarion consulting Verne before publishing the book, but it is not improbable that he did, and not improbable, either, that Verne told him that he had no objection. Whether the novel has any right to exist or not, it does, and is therefore available for consideration.

  French interplanetary fiction was, in general, an extremely hesitant subgenre in the 19th century—considerably more so than in Britain, where several authors took a much more robust attitude to the possibility of interplanetary flight, if only as a matter of arming a narrative device with a gloss of plausibility. Verne’s work, classic as it is, stops short of allowing his tourists actually to land on the Moon, and when he attempted a much bolder interplanetary fantasy in Hector Servadac (1877; tr. as Off on a Comet) his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who was always striving mulishly to keep Verne on a tight imaginative rein, insisted that he changed the ending in order to conform with his own idiotic notion of plausibility, although the alteration only succeeded in reducing the text to incoherence. Either the author of Un Monde inconnu suffered a remarkable failure of nerve at the end of his own novel, or Ernest Flamm
arion followed Hetzel’s example, fortunately with less ruinous consequences (although the reader will probably find it advantageous to ignore the last few paragraphs of the text). That endemic tentativeness did not last long after the publication of the present text, although it required crucial examples from abroad, in translations of H. G. Wells, to blow it away completely, but Un Monde inconnu came closer than any other domestic product, including Verne’s, to breaking the mold, and deserves some credit for that.

  All things considered, Un Monde inconnu is primarily interesting as an exotic historical specimen rather than a viable work of art, but it holds a significant place in the history of French interplanetary fiction, and interplanetary fiction in general. Of all the fictional developments of Charles Cros’ suggested program for interplanetary communication, first outlined at Camille Flammarion’s salon in 1869 and subsequently reprinted as a pamphlet and in the periodical Cosmos, it is the most detailed and the most enthusiastic. It is perhaps also the one that has the most accurate appreciation of the difficulties that such communication would entail, even if it fares no better the any other in suggesting ways of overcoming such difficulties. The problem was to be explored in earnest a century later by the scientists who took up the notion in connection with the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) program, but they had better technology on which to base their ingenuity; the strongest reason for believing that Un Monde incomnu was written in the 1880s rather than the 1890s is that it has no inkling of the possibility of wireless telegraphy. Of all the proto-SETI fantasies written in the absence of that narrative convenience, it is perhaps the most thought-provoking, precisely because of the conscientiousness of its hopeless struggle.

  The following translation was made from the version of the Flammarion edition reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website.

  Brian Stableford

  An Unknown World

  PART ONE

  I. The Announcement in the New York Herald

  “Yes, my dear Marcel,” said Jacques, placing his elbows on the table and putting his head in his hands, “You see in me the most unfortunate of men, and I really don’t know whether it wouldn’t be wiser for me to go dive head first into the Seine than continue to drag out a miserable and henceforth aimless existence. That’s what I was thinking, seriously, when you ran into me just now and brought me in here.”

  “What! You’re reduced to that, my old Jacques? Two years ago, when I left for the Rocky Mountains, I left you so valiant and confident in the future, and now I find you as desperate as this! After brilliant medical studies crowned with countless successes in your examinations, along with a personal fortune—which doesn’t hurt—that gave you time to build up a clientele, you were able to envisage life without anxiety, and now you’re defeated in advance without having battled!”

  “Oh, you don’t know how I’ve suffered. Listen, and see whether I’ve got reason to be absolutely discouraged. You know that, having been an orphan since I was fourteen, I was brought up by my guardian, my mother’s brother, the French scientist François Mathieu-Rollère, known throughout Europe for his astronomical work and his famous paper on the satellites of Uranus. But what you don’t know is that I was brought up in his house with his daughter Hélène, my cousin; that we lived together in close proximity, and that from that pleasant communal life a sentiment was born that gradually became an ardent and profound love. We swore ourselves to one another. It’s in that hope that I’ve lived, and it’s to assure Hélène of a future worthy of her, in order that she could be proud of her husband, that I’ve devoted myself to dogged labor, and that I wanted to become one of the foremost physicians of the new school.”

  “But it seems to me,” Marcel put in, “that you’ve succeeded rather well.”

  “Yes, perhaps—but what good has it done me? When I made my request of Hélène’s father, he looked at me with a surprised expression. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘I’ve devoted my life to science; my daughter will only ever marry a man who has as a dowry some striking discovery of an astronomical order.’ I was amazed by that declaration; nothing had led me to anticipate such an obstacle. Utterly preoccupied by my love and my future, I hadn’t realized that my uncle’s passion for science was gradually turning to obsession and mania. Now it was all-consuming; the disease was incurable.

  “In vain, the woman I loved and I tried to change his mind; his resolution was as immutable as the course of the stars he observes. Weary of my persistence, he banned me from his house and told me not to appear before him again until I’ve fulfilled the condition that his scientific egotism had imposed on me. Too meek to resist paternal authority, Hélène could only weep before the obstinate refusal that broke her heart. I left her desperate, not knowing whether she’d ever be allowed to see me again.”

  “And you haven’t made any attempt to satisfy the intractable scientist?” asked Marcel, with an expression that seemed to be pierced by a slight irony.

  “What could I have done? Devoted to the study of a science to which I’ve devoted myself entirely and to the extreme limits of which I’ve advanced, how could I have started a life of study over again, with a different goal? To reach the point where a mind can extend the boundaries of a science and realize some great conquest of the unknown, it’s first necessary to have absorbed all the knowledge that humankind has stored up in that order of ideas. That required ten years of ardent study, with no guarantee of success. No, the struggle is impossible; I renounce it, and abandon myself to my unfortunate destiny.”

  “Man of little faith,” said Marcel, smiling, “I thought you were braver and more resolute. How love can weaken a soul and soften courage! Well, I can bring you salvation.”

  “You?” exclaimed Jacques.

  “Yes, me. Look.”

  And he unfolded before his eyes the fourth page of an American newspaper dared 1 June 188*, which he took from his pocket, and on which the following announcement was made with a headline in gigantic letters:

  NATIONAL SOCIETY

  OF INTERSTELLAR COMMUNICATIONS

  SALE BY PUBLIC AUCTION FOLLOWING BANKRUPTCY

  Sir Francis Dayton, receiver in the bankruptcy of the National Society of Interstellar Communications, incorporated in Baltimore (Maryland), has the honor of informing the public that he will proceed, on 10 February next, in the main hall of the Baltimore Auction Rooms, with the sale by auction of:

  1. The gigantic cannon known as the Columbiad, founded and established by order of the Gun Club of the said city of Baltimore, which served to send to the Moon the projectile in which the celebrated voyagers Barbicane, Nicholl and Michel Ardan took their places on 4 December 186*;

  2. The aluminum projectile, cylindro-conic in form, equipped with portholes, protective plates and bolts, and interior padding, which enabled the aforementioned voyagers to effect the said voyage;

  3. The hangars and various constructions erected in the vicinity of the Columbiad, having served as storage facilities and workshops during the first experiment;

  4. The lifting-apparatus—blocks, pulleys, cranes and chains—having served for the loading of the said shell, still in a perfect state of conservation, as well as the electric batteries, piles, coils, conductive wires, etc., employed for the deflagration of the Columbiad’s charge.

  The aforesaid sale will be made in a single lot, with a reserve price of two hundred thousand dollars.

  The sale will take place under the surveillance of the honorable Harry Troloppe, legal commissioner.

  Jacques returned the newspaper to Marcel.

  “What’s the meaning of this joke?”

  “It’s not a joke,” Marcel relied, “and if you care to listen, I’ll explain it briefly.

  “I left, as you’ll recall, at the beginning of 187- for the Rocky Mountains. I thought I had recognized significant deposits of copper on a previous voyage to the northern territory of Missouri. I had resolved to verify those initial observations and, if my anticipations w
ere not mistaken, to attempt a large-scale exploitation.

  “To that end, equipped with adequate authorizations, I organized a small expedition to complete the work. I spent two years of the harshest existence in that arid and mountainous country, in the middle of a desert, incessantly obliged to fight for my life against the Indians in the midst of whom I was camped, who accused me of violating the sacred lands of the ancestors with my endeavors. At every moment, in fact, my drilling operations were sabotaged and my assaying workshops destroyed; I had to start over continually.

  “I would have died of boredom if the mountain of Long’s Peak hadn’t risen up some twenty miles from the deposits I was exploring—twenty miles is nearby in that scarcely-inhabited area.

  “You doubtless haven’t forgotten that during the famous attempt made in 186* to reach the Moon, the Baltimore Gun Club had constructed on that summit, one of the highest in the mountains, a giant telescope designed to follow the audacious explorers in their flight.1 A friendship was established between the astronomers at the observatory and me. In that remote station, 4,350 meters above sea level, they didn’t often encounter anyone to talk to, and gave me the most gracious and attentive welcome. All the free time that the explorations I had undertaken left me, I spent with them. I usually stayed there for several days in succession, during which I considered myself not as a guest but as one of the observers attracted to the astronomical post.

  “I had felt a very pronounced liking for the science of the heavens awakening within me, and soon, the manipulation of meridian circles, reflecting and refracting telescopes had become familiar. My imagination was excited by memories of 186-, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the ocular of the big telescope. That admirable instrument brought the Moon to a closer distance than the most powerful optical instruments previously constructed.