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French 'merveilleux-scientifique' fiction reframed reality
With brain swaps and death rays, a little-known French sci-fi genre explored science’s dark possibilities a century ago
Le fulgur(1909) by Paul de Sémant pays homage to Jules Verne with a search for ocean treasure and fighting sea creatures – but Maurice Renard rejected such ‘scientific exploration’ stories/cover by Marin Boldo, Paris, Ernest Flammarion While Renard depicted the threats that may arise from the unknown, including sciences not yet mastered, his stories did not focus on hypothetical futures, as he underlines in his archives: ‘I don’t want to anticipate, I’d rather pretend to spill out, if I had the slightest pretension.’ On the contrary, he engaged with his readers to offer them new tools to think about the world. At the same time, the French astronomer Camille Flammarion speculated on what he called ‘unknown natural forces’ and dedicated several writings to metempsychosis (the reincarnation of the soul), as well as to psychometry (the ability to access the memory of objects by mere contact), while Pierre and Marie Curie attended séances with the medium Eusapia Palladino to observe her communicating with spirits.
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