SF in different countries

Some years ago I had a phone call from one of my sons, Benoit, about his memoir for his master’s degree, which was to be in the compared literature field. So he had thought of dealing with the imaginary worlds in the American and French literature. By imaginary worlds he meant worlds built by the author from scratch, and not a mere description of another epoch or of an unknown continent. Of course, we are there in the science-fiction domain, and since he knows I am a SF fan, he asked me to help him, especially by giving him names of French works answering his criteria, when he had already plenty of American works to choose. So I told him I would think about that and answer him the next evening.

But as I searched among what I know of French literature, I discovered that it was very hard to find a mere ten novels that would match Benoit’s criteria. There are scarcely examples of French authors who created an entire world with a different set of rules, whereas you can find a lot of examples in the English literature and many more yet in the US one. In the French classical literary realm, I searched hard to find three stories: Gargantua from Rabelais – the story of the adventures of a giant, written in 1534, nearly two centuries before Gulliver’s Travels –, Voyages dans la Lune (Travels to the Moon) from Cyrano de Bergerac, written in 1657, and Micromegas from Voltaire, written in 1752. And watching closely those imaginary worlds, I found the first universe was a simple copy of our own, and the two others were short stories where the dramatis personae are just pretexts to allow a strong critic of our social habits. Even in Jules Vernes’ novels I could not really find something like an entirely different world. The adventures of his heroes take place in the world of his time without any significant modification, except perhaps Voyage to the Centre of Earth, which depicts an underworld very similar to the earth one hundred million years ago. Using Brian Aldiss’ words, I would say that these stories are more transpositions of reality than fantasies. Scanning the twentieth century, I remembered only two or three French modern novels, such as Rosny Aîné’s two excellent stories: “La mort de la terre” (Death of the World) and Xipehuz, written around 1910, the latter being one of the finest descriptions of aliens I ever found; but unfortunately it is only a very short story; I thought also of René Barjavel’s La nuit des temps, (The Night of Times) which Benoit chose finally.

On the other hand, the English spoken literature displays a huge number of authors –mostly American, but some new good English authors as well – who tried to invent new worlds. Among the old classics, I can think for instance about the worlds created in Bishop Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone (1638), Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World called the Blazing World (1666) or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1721). Or, in a more inward sense, I could cite Mary Shelley’s Frankestein (1818) and the tales from Edgar Allan Poe (between 1832 and 1845). Nearer us in time, to find an imaginary world I can search into H. G. Wells’ novels such as The Time machine (1895) or, in a lesser extent, into Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931). I could add Olaf Stapledon’s powerful works of imagination such as First and Last Men (1932) or Star Maker (1937).

And in the modern era, there are hundreds of novels dealing with imaginary worlds; just from memory I can cite Franck Herbert’s Dune, Arthur Clarke’s Rama series, Larry Niven’s Ringworld, Smoke Ring or Mote series, Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series, David Brin’s Uplift series, Greg Bear’s Eon, its prequel Legacy and it sequel Infinity, J.J. Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring series, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series or Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg and so on…