The Fiery Wheel Read online

  The Fiery Wheel

  by

  Jean de La Hire

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  La Roue fulgurante by “Jean de La Hire” (Adolphe d’Espie), here translated as The Fiery Wheel, was first published as a feuilleton serial in the daily newspaper Le Matin, between 10 April and 23 May 1908, and was reprinted in book form later that year by Tallandier. Further editions appeared from various publishers in 1922, 1929, 1938, 1942, 1952 (as La Soucoupe volante [The Flying Saucer]), 1973 and 1998. The serial was a radical new departure for both the author and for the newspaper. La Hire became one of Le Matin’s leading provider of serials for some time thereafter, and although La Roue fulgurante was not the only item of roman scientifique [scientific fiction] he supplied to the paper, or even the only one with an interplanetary theme, it remained the most adventurous, and might have been even more adventurous had he not opted—perhaps in response to editorial pressure—to provide it with the kind of ending that he did.

  The novel remains a work of considerable historical interest, as the first work of fiction to feature the theme of “alien abduction,” all the more so as the abduction is effected by means of a vehicle not dissimilar to the “flying disks” or “flying saucers” that were later to be credited with so many supposedly-real abductions of that sort in the second half of the twentieth century. That coincidence is not the only remarkable thing about it, however, and its timing seems, in retrospect to be highly significant because of the strong thematic links it has with two other novels published in France in 1908: Aventures merveilleuses de Serge Myrandhal sur la planète Mars: Sur la planète Mars, by-lined H. (for Henri) Gayar, published on 15 June of that year and Le Prisonnier de la planète Mars by Gustave Le Rouge, published on 1 July.

  Both of the latter novels were planned as the first parts of series, and Gayar followed up his publication on 15 July with the second volume of the Aventures merveilleuses de Serge Myrandhal, Les Robinsons de la planète Mars, while Le Rouge’s La Guerre des vampires appeared the following year.1 Although it seems inconceivable that any direct imitation was involved, Pierre Versins pointed out in an article appended to a 1976 reprint of La Guerre des vampires that an intended third part of Gayar’s series did not appear in 1908, and that when Gayar eventually issued a heavily revised version of his enterprise in a single volume as Les Robinsons de la planète Mars (1927), by-lined “Cyrius,” he removed many of the elements that overlapped with Le Rouge’s original novel, evidently intent on reducing the similarity.

  The timing does leave open the possibility that both Gayar and Le Rouge had been prompted to embark on their own ventures by La Hire’s serial in Le Matin, and that they both elected to differentiate their endeavors from his by parallel narrative moves, but Versins also refers to other precedents that probably had a significant influence on the narrative strategies of all three writers—most significantly Theodore Flournoy’s best-selling Des Indes à la planète Mars (1900; tr. as From India to the Planet Mars), an account by a Genevan psychologist of revelations produced by a medium, “Hélène Smith” (actually Elise Müller) while supposedly entranced, by the method of “automatic writing.” Flournoy attributed the revelations in question to the medium’s imagination—much to her displeasure—but she regarded them as accounts of actual other lives that she had lived in various locations, including India and Mars.

  All three novelists would have been aware of the experiments with automatic writing previously carried out in the vicinity of Paris by the famous French popularizer of astronomy Camille Flammarion, in which some of his collaborators—most notably the playwright Victorien Sardou—had also produced visions of life on other planets, where human beings might be reincarnated. All three of them would also have been familiar with Flammarion’s series of philosophical dialogues Lumen, first published in the 1860s but updated in several subsequent editions, which describes the supposed revelations of a disembodied soul free to roman the universe, observing and experiencing incarnations of other worlds very different from Earth, and with his similarly best-selling follow-up volume Uranie (1889; tr. as Urania), which contains an elaborate description of a reincarnation on Mars.

  It is, however, very obvious that in La Roue fulgurante and its two swift successors, the inspiration of Camille Flammarion is combined with another, equally powerful if not quite as explicit: that of the English writer H. G. Wells. Wells’ early scientific romances, published in England between 1895 and 1901, had been rapidly and extensively translated into French, initially in the popular science magazine La Science Illustrée, which had a regular section feuilleton section under the rubric Roman Scientifique, and then in the upmarket literary periodical Le Mercure de France, founded as an organ of the Symbolist Movement, as well as in book form. Both periodicals had serialized translations of The War of the Worlds, which became the best-known of Wells’ scientific romances in France.

  Although the French naturally considered that the one and only true pioneer and paragon of roman scientifique was Jules Verne, there could be no doubt that Wells had injected considerable new life and energy into the genre, having never been subjected to the restraining hand of the publisher who had Verne under contract, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who always wanted him to exercise stern imaginative moderation. Oddly enough, the nascent genre of scientific romance that formed around the nucleus of Wells’ work in England was, to a large extent, similarly hampered and channeled by editorial reticence, with the result that the examples provided by his two interplanetary novels, The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon, were only followed up significantly in fiction aimed at juvenile readers and a handful of vanity publications. That was not the case in America, where interplanetary fiction was popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs after 1912 and eventually became the core of generic “science fiction,” and there was a brief moment—specifically, in 1908—when it seemed possible that French roman scientifique would take the same direction, led in fairly spectacular fashion by La Roue fulgurante.

  In fact, it did not, and the trio of novels that attempted to fuse the influences of Flammarion and Wells into a distinctly French kind of space fiction flattered mainly to deceive. In France as in Britain, the entire genre of speculative fiction—and the interplanetary subgenre in particular—having been tested, was deemed to have insufficient mass appeal, and moved to the margins of the literary marketplace. At least it was tested, however, and very fairly, Le Matin being the best showcase it could possibly have had. Nor was the rejection sudden; La Hire tried very hard indeed to establish roman scientifique as a standard genre in Le Matin’s repertoire, and to establish interplanetary fiction as a central pillar of that genre, but he was only partly successful. The paper’s star feuilletonist, Gaston Leroux, whose career ran alongside La Hire’s, became far more celebrated for his detective stories, but he routinely introduced elements of roman scientifique into his thrillers, even though he fought shy of interplanetary fiction, and his work was far more inventive than that of La Hire’s immediate predecessor, Michel Zevaco—the dedicatee of La Roue fulgurante—who specialized in “cape et épée” historical romances of the kind developed half a century earlier by Paul Féval.

  La Hire wrote cape et épée fiction and crime fiction too, as well as working in other genres on a prolific scale, but he made a swift return to roman scientifique in the pages of Le Matin with the earthbound L’Homme qui peut vivre dans l’eau [The Man Who Could Live Under Water] (1908; reprinted 1910), to which he provided an interplanetary sequel in Le Mystère des XV (1911)2, which is also an explicit sequel to Wells’ The War of the Worlds. That was his last throw of the Wellsian dice for
some time, however, and although the hero of Le Mystère des XV was reincarnated for a long-running series in 19203, when the interruption of the Great War had concluded—shortly after La Hire had published a Wellsian novel, Joe Rollon, l’autre homme invisible [Joe Rollon, the Other Invisible Man] (1919 as by Edmond Cazal)—the elements of roman scientifique that were initially prominent in the series were gradually de-emphasized relative to its more conventional thriller components as it extended further. As the 1920s wore on, La Hire was gradually marginalized himself, eventually no longer able to address himself routinely to Le Matin’s vast readership.

  Just as La Hire was not the only author to attempt a fusion of Wellsian and Flammarionesque ideas, so Le Matin was not the only mass-market newspaper to experiment with roman scientifique. Its chief rival, Le Journal, which fostered a more sophisticated image, gave a much higher priority to short fiction than long serials, and that restricted the scope of the more extravagant forms of roman scientifique considerably, but it did feature a number of very striking short serials by Edmond Haraucourt between 1906 and 1910, translations of which can be found in the Black Coat Press collection Illusions of Immortality.4 There too, however, the eventual verdict was negative, and such imaginative boldness had been eclipsed even before the social context was dramatically transformed in August 1914 by the outbreak of the Great War. Writers who experimented with roman scientifique in book form also found it difficult to follow up their initial experiments, including Maurice Renard, who published Le Doctor Lerne, sous-dieu in 1908 5 and might also have taken a hint from La Hire in writing his far more sophisticated—but conscientiously earthbound—fantasy of alien abduction Le Péril bleu (1912).6

  It is not surprising, in retrospect, that the experiment connected by La Hire and Le Matin failed, in spite of the rapid support it obtained from a handful of other writers, including Gayar and Le Rouge—the former of whom only wrote a handful of conspicuously unadventurous novels after abandoning his projected Martian trilogy, while the latter drastically reduced the scope and frequency of the roman scientifique component of his subsequent work. Indeed, some of the reasons for that failure are glaringly obvious in the pages of La Roue fulgurante, and must have seemed so in immediate retrospect as well as more distant and studied contemplation. The story, borne along by its own zestful impetus, runs head-first into all the problems innate in imaginatively ambitious exercises in futuristic speculation, discovering a series of logical impasses, and provoking a set of narrative problems, all of which were to cast a long shadow over the future development of French roman scientifique, British scientific romance and American science fiction—and continue to afflict them, in spite of the fact that the American genre eventually contrived to obtain an enduring toehold in the bosom of mass culture.

  The temptation to fuse elements of scientific and occult speculation was not entirely due to the influence of Camille Flammarion, although the existence in France of such a high-profile figure equally interested in astronomy and “spiritism,” certainly enhanced the attractiveness of the fusion to writers of imaginative fiction. Indeed, the entire “occult revival” of the fin de siècle had been based on exactly such a fusion, whose duality was the philosophical core of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy and the avid activities of the Society for Psychical Research. Given that the fundamental basis of the appeal of such hybrid notions was esthetic rather than rational, it is not surprising that it appealed to litterateurs willing to bite the bullet of testing the limits of imaginative fiction. The coincidence linking La Roue fulgurante with the novels by Gayar and Le Rouge is not the only one worth pointing out, and it is worth noting that its publication was intermediate between the British scientific romance Lieutenant Gullivar Jones—His Vacation (1905) by Edwin Lester Arnold and the ground-breaking American pulp magazine serial “Under the Moons of Mars” (1912), initially by-lined “Norman Bean,” by Edgar Rice Burroughs, reprinted in book form as A Princess of Mars. Both of those novels employ a “psychic” means of space travel and both of them describe hectically colorful adventures on other planets in much the same cavalier spirit as La Roue fulgurante. In literary terms, La Hire has stronger affinities with Arnold and Burroughs than with H. G. Wells or Camille Flammarion, and the same is true of Gayar and Le Rouge.

  Again, the coincidence is certainly just that; the strong similarities between the British and American works are probably due to the common influence of Rider Haggard, whose She (1887) had provided the first classic hybrid of occult and quasi-scientific speculation, but which was not translated into French until 1920, delaying its influence there considerably. Setting that element aside, however, the elements common to all three interplanetary romances are entirely due to parallel thought process and similar responses to new horizons of literary possibility. The fact that the American experiment proved spectacularly successful, whereas the British and French experiments failed, is probably due to a complex network of social and marketing factors, and certainly has little or nothing to do with relative differences in narrative plausibility or literary sophistication.

  The difficulties involved in providing a plausible narrative framework for interplanetary fiction had been illustrated well enough by Jules Verne, whose conscientiousness would not let his voyagers in De la Terre à la Lune (1865; tr. as From the Earth to the Moon) contrive a landing on the Moon because there was no way for them to come back, and whose farther-ranging travelers in Hector Servadac (1877; tr. as Off on a Comet) eventually find their entire adventure called into question by an ending that is both enigmatic and paradoxical. La Hire was undoubtedly aware of these awkward precedents—as were Gayar and Le Rouge, and perhaps Arnold and Burroughs—and his own devices are perhaps best regarded as an attempt to get around them without having recourse to the solution that had by then become traditional in England, of inventing an arbitrary “antigravity device,” as employed by the pseudonymous Chrystostom Trueman, Percy Greg and others before Wells used it—and was roundly criticized by Verne for doing so—in The First Men in the Moon. The device La Hire employs to bring his travelers back from Mercury is certainly no improvement on that arbitrary invention, but the means of getting them there—the “roue fulgurante” itself—is certainly a bold and fascinating improvisation.

  Because modern UFO-enthusiasts have co-opted chapter 1 of the Biblical book of Ezekiel into their lore, it is tempting to think that La Hire might have borrowed his notion from there, but the word fulgurante does not occur in French versions of the relevant scriptural text, the description of the peculiar vortices seen by Ezekiel does not match La Hire’s description of his interplanetary craft, and the angels associated with Ezekiel’s “wheels” bear no resemblance whatsoever to the supposed Saturnians aboard La Hire’s, so any influence can only have been remotely suggestive. The aliens in question are fascinating in themselves; although Flammarion’s Lumen had set a high standard with regard to the imagination of radically alien physiques adapted to radically alien environments, La Hire makes a good stab in La Roue fulgurante of rising to that challenge, and although his Mercurians are not nearly as far-fetched, they do have a certain determined peculiarity that saves them from mere triviality. In that matter too he was to be outdone by a far more sophisticated writer, when J.-H. Rosny Aîné produced the Martians features in Les Navigateurs de l’infini (1925)7, but like Maurice Renard, Rosny was probably not unaware of Le Matin’s serialization of La Roue fulgurante, even if it was not a newspaper he read. The principal problem with La Hire’s inventions is that the author could not follow them through, and was eventually content to leave almost everything about his aliens and their technology pusillanimously unelaborated as well as frustratingly unexplained. Renard and Rosny did far better, but it cannot be said that they overcame the difficulties completely.

  La Hire’s inability to make sense of his own inventions as soon as he tried to examine their logical corollaries is unfortunate, but by no means unusual for its time, and there is a certain wry virtue in the fact that h
e did not let it put an immediate brake on his inventive spirit, at least until he reached the climax of his story—after which, alas, the reticence he had cultivated during the writing of La Roue fulgurante blighted the rest of his career, insofar as his contribution to the development of roman scientifique is concerned. All the subsequent “wheels” he invented were considerably less fiery, but no less likely to fall off in transit and leave his plots stranded. He was one of many pioneers of speculative fiction whose imaginative reach far exceeded their logical grasp, but if that is a sin, it is more venial than deadly—at least in the eyes of readers and critics who think the reach more important, or more interesting, than the grasp. La Roue fulgurante is not a good book, but it is a brave one, and its flashes of ambition allow it sometimes to rise above the silliness and defy the confusion that eventually bog it down. It is, at any rate, an essential piece in the evolutionary jigsaw of 20th century speculative fiction, without which the picture would be incomplete.

  This translation was made from a copy of the 1973 reprint of La Roue fulgurante published by J.-C. Lattès.

  Brian Stableford

  THE FIERY WHEEL

  PART ONE

  THE SATURNIANS

  Chapter One

  In which humans see something never seen before

  It happened on the eighteenth of June. The first man to see the Fiery Wheel was a captain in the Spanish frontier-guards named José Mendès.

  Preceded by his daughter Lolla and his manservant Francisco, who was carrying a heavy suitcase on his shoulder, he was calmly coming down from the fort at Montjuic toward Barcelona. The three of them were going to the railway station del Norte to catch the four-fifty train to Saragossa. The road, steep and picturesque, passes through the gardens of Miramar, overlooks the sea and the coal docks of the merchant port from a height, and then falls abruptly to the bottom of the hill, where it becomes an insanitary street.