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INTRODUCTION, by Brian Stableford

Le Napus, fléau de l’an 2227 by Léon Daudet, here translated as The Napus: The Great Plague of the Year 2227, was originally published in Paris by Ernest Flammarion in 1927. Although Léon Daudet had published a previous satire with a biomedical theme in Les Morticoles (1894), and was to go on to write two further novels involving innovative scientific speculations in Les Bacchantes (1931; tr. as The Bacchantes) and Ciel de Feu [Sky on Fire] (1934), Le Napus must have seemed to Daudet’s readers in 1927 to be a radical departure from the vague pattern established by the twenty-eight contemporary and historical novels he had published between 1895 and 1926. It is, however, very much a product of its time, being one of a number of ambitious futuristic novels published in the decade following the end of the Great War of 1914-18, reflecting on the historical significance of that war by projecting its lessons forward in hypothetical time.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the observation that “the only thing that anyone ever learned from history is that no one ever learns anything from history” had become an accepted truism, albeit a fairly dubious one, and various further aphorisms had been spun off from it, including the rule that “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it,” and the later addendum “first as tragedy, then as farce.” It is within that context of thought that almost all the speculative novels attempting to deal with the lessons of the Great War operate, and such was the nature of the lessons involved that novels dealing in tragedy and farce—more often combined than sequential—inevitably did so in terms of deep tragedy and black farce. Le Napus is one of the most striking and one of the most ambitious, in both its depth and its blackness, and it remains one of the most bizarre works of futuristic fantasy ever penned.

Works reflecting on the legacy of the Great War by attempting to imagine what future wars might be like were produced in various countries in Europe, and also in the United States of America, and in broad terms they all reflect the particular experiences that the various nations had during the war. America, involved in the war belatedly and at long distance, not only suffered relatively lightly in terms of casualty figures, but came out of the war with its economic situation on the world stage vastly improved, possessed of an economic hegemony that it would not lose for at least a century in spite of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. Britain came off much worse, both in terms of political economy—losing a hegemony that it had previously enjoyed and beginning a long slide into irrelevance that similarly lasted for more than a century—and in terms of sacrificial slaughter. France, however, suffered even more than Britain, by virtue of providing a large fraction of the terrain in which and under which the war was actually fought, having the whole sorry affair crushing it for four long years. To make matters worse, the war broke out when the nation had not yet fully recovered from the economic aftereffects of the Franco-German War of 1870, which was still smarting in the memory of its older generation and its literature. Given these difference, it is not surprising that British future war fiction of the 1920s is much blacker than American future war fiction, and that French future war fiction is the blackest of all.

In the USA in 1927, in fact, futuristic fiction in general had just passed what can be seen in retrospect as a landmark in the history of that genre. In 1926 Hugo Gernsback had founded Amazing Stories, the “magazine of scientifiction,” from which the marketing genre of “science fiction” eventually sprang, slowly building a huge edifice of ideas and images in which, for the most part, dark events only featured as interims, unfortunate preludes to new progressive dawns. Future war became a significant theme almost as soon as “scientifiction” was born, but its tragic and farcical aspects were given short shrift, and the heroes of scientifiction were not only in those wars to win them, but to do so spectacularly, with the aid of shock and awe. In 1928 two significant future war stories appeared in the same issue of Amazing Stories: “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” by Philip Francis Nowlan, which introduced the science fiction genre’s first archetypal hero, Buck Rogers—whose adventures were extensively continued in the nascent comic strip medium—and the first episode of The Skylark of Space by Edward E. Smith, which blithely took the future of humankind, including warfare, on to a vast galactic stage ripe for adventure, colonization, and conquest, those three items being viewed as a natural sequence of development.

In Britain the situation was very different. Britain had already had a thriving genre of future war fiction prior to 1914, initially launched into popularity by George Chesney’s alarmist account of The Battle of Dorking (1871), which drew stern lessons from the Franco-Prussian War, and given a spectacular boost by George Griffith’s extravagant account of world war waged by heroic Terrorists, The Angel of the Revolution (1893). Most such fiction took it for granted that the next war would not be long in coming, and that the most likely enemy by far was Germany, but almost without exception, and quite naturally, the authors looked forward to a resounding British victory. In a sense, they were right; the next war was imminent; Germany was the enemy; and the British did end up on the undefeated side—but the victory anticipated in fiction did not resemble the actual victory at all, which turned out to be ruinously expensive and exceedingly hollow. In the run-up to the actual war, the fictitious anticipations had billed it as a war to end war, and a war for the salvaging of civilization, but it was acutely obvious by 1918 that it had been nothing of the sort: that it had, in fact, not only been disastrously costly in human and economic terms but had achieved nothing in terms of making future wars less likely. Indeed, people possessed of clear sight could see that it almost certainly made a future war on an even larger scale inevitable—a result that added a blackly ironic absurdity to its manifest tragedy.

In those circumstances, it is not surprising that futuristic fiction, and the ideas that it had celebrated, suffered something of a backlash in Britain. The briefly-thriving genre of scientific romance, which had been spun off from the future war genre in the 1890s, was dragged down with its parent into suspicion and ignominy. It never disappeared, but it lost the precarious popularity that it had briefly enjoyed and became esoteric. It also became, in the main, deeply and bitterly pessimistic. Such future war novels as The People of the Ruins (1920) by Edwards Shanks, Theodore Savage (1922) by Cicely Hamilton, and Ragnarok (1926) by Shaw Desmond were all tragic and frankly apocalyptic, and they all had a brutal ironic edge. In 1927 the entire genre of futuristic fiction was still in the doldrums in Britain, but it did contrive a comeback of sorts, and a new burst of energy after 1930, when the edge of bitter irony in the treatment of future wars became more pronounced, sometimes extending all the way to black farce, in such novels as The Seventh Bowl (1930) and The Gas War of 1940 (1931) by “Miles” (Stephen Southwold, better known as Neil Bell), Tomorrow’s Yesterday (1932) by John Gloag, and Gay Hunter (1934) by J. Leslie Mitchell.

The French genre of the roman scientifique had also undergone a boom of sorts in the 1890s, when it also featured a good deal of future war fiction of a markedly jingoistic and ultimately triumphalist stripe, but the prior evolution of the genre and the subgenre had been markedly different, and the parentage was the other way around. French speculative fiction had first emerged in the context of the Voltairean conte philosophique, so an ironic, skeptical and satirical dimension was built into its historical foundations, and it re-energized Utopian fiction as well as giving birth to its skeptical counterpart, which took a long time to acquire the label of “dystopian fiction.” French roman scientifique also received an extremely important inoculation of black farce at a relatively early date when the writer and illustrator Albert Robida published La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1883; revised 1887; tr. as War in the Twentieth Century), whose grotesquely exaggerated machines of war colored the imagery of French future war fiction even for writers who had no sympathy at all for Robida’s determined pacifism.

Robida was the fastest writer out of the blocks in publishing a reflective imaginative response to the Great War in L’Ingénieur von Satanas (1919), but others inevitably followed his lead. In France, remarkably, future war fiction of a sort had even been produced during the war, apparently as a deliberate propagandistic strategy, albeit within controlled circumstances that did not permit satirical hostility or any thought of ultimate defeat. Thus, such novels as Rouletabille chez Krupp (1917; tr. as Rouletabille at Krupp’s) by Gaston Leroux also helped lay groundwork for the post-war backlash, by introducing imaginary superweapons that could not be used, but nevertheless gave a hint of awesome possibilities to come. The potential destructive capacity of such superweapons was rapidly displayed in such extravagant post-war novels such as Henri Allorge’s Le Grand cataclysme (1922; tr. as The Great Cataclysm).

The most striking and significant reaction to the Great War cast in the form of bitter futuristic fiction was Ernest Pérochon’s Les Hommes frénétiques (1925; tr. as The Frenetic People), and it its possible that it was that novel which prompted Daudet to write Le Napus, not as a copy but as a political correction, Pérochon having strong socialist and pacifist principles, while Daudet was at the opposite end of the political spectrum, as one of the leading lights of the strident right-wing periodical Action Française. Pérochon had the advantage of a certain philosophical consistency in his work that Daudet did not have—it is far easier for a pacifist to represent war as a thoroughly bad thing than for a man committed to uncompromising toughness to make out a case for high-tech war being something with which people simply have to get used to living—but that only made the latter’s task more interesting in imaginative and narrative terms, and encouraged a further tipping of the balance between tragedy and farce.

It is not an exaggeration, nor is it uncomplimentary, to say that Le Napus is the most farcical of all the future war novels of the 1920s. Modern readers will might well find it a deeply troubling book in terms of its political slant, especially its crude and now-discomfiting racism (the publisher who issues most of my translations declined to publish this one on the grounds that “Léon Daudet was not a nice man”—a principle which, if universally applied, would slim down the literary tradition considerably), but that does not detract from its historical significance, nor from its remarkable bizarrerie. Daudet had no sympathy at all for such avant-gardist literary movements as surrealism, but Le Napus makes it clear that he was not uninfluenced by surrealism in his choice of motifs and his methods of deploying them. Like all unique books, it deserves some attention by virtue of that fact alone, but there is also much in its arguments—especially the absurd ones—that is worth taking seriously, if only to strengthen disagreement and disapproval by virtue of dynamic tension.

Along with most of the writers of future war fiction in the 1920s, Daudet suggests that the very nature of war had undergone a fundamental shift during the war of 1914-18, presaging the inevitability that future wars would involve whole populations rather than armies, and that long-range weapons would be routinely used against both military and civilian targets. He names that new kind of warfare after an anecdote first related by the Classical satirist Lucian, who claimed (more than three hundred years after the event) that during the Siege of Syracuse by the Romans in 214-212 B.C., a Roman fleet had been destroyed by a kind of heat ray devised by the city’s most famous son, the great engineer Archimedes. Later writers who mistook this obvious item of fiction for earnest historical truth (a not-uncommon problem with Classical writings viewed from a Medieval standpoint) suggested that Archimedes might have used a parabolic array of metallic mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on the ships, thus setting fire either to their sails or—more likely—the tar with which their hulls were caulked, although modern attempts to perform such a feat have all failed. The point is, however, that Archimedes’ “heat ray” entered the mythology of warfare, and assumed a new importance in the early twentieth-century imagination, when the discoveries of X-rays and radium made the idea of “ray guns” of various kinds exceedingly fashionable in speculative fiction.

In Le Napus, a German writer named von Herzius is said to have written a book called Archimedes, setting out a prospectus for future warfare in which enemy nations can be devastated by various kinds of innovative long-range weapons, including ingenious projectiles—missiles and bombs—and scientific devices for causing, earthquakes, floods, violent storms, and so on: a prospectus enthusiastically taken up in the novel by a resurgent German Empire, in spite of the extremely high cost of such weapons. The great bugbear of the era, in terms of actual anxieties, was poison gas delivered by air fleets, but that only plays a minor role in Daudet’s expansive scheme, which is more various as well as more grandiose, also involving economic warfare of an ingeniously ludicrous variety.

Superweapons had long featured in French speculative fiction, which had begun to take aboard in the 1850s the notion that technological progress would eventually permit the invention of weapons so powerful that making war would become “unthinkable.” It is, however, very noticeable in hindsight—and must have been obvious even in the 1920s—that notions of what might constitute a weapon so dreadful as to make its use in war “unthinkable” were forced to undergo a considerable melodramatic inflation as actual weaponry advanced in its destructive potential. Daudet was by no means the first person to realize that there is, in fact, no conceivable weapon so destructive that military men would not eagerly deploy it, even at the cost of destroying civilization, the human race, or the planet, but he was the first to assume that such deployments would eventually become routine, only restrained by their enormous cost and the fact that, being untestable before use, the weapons in question would always be likely to misfire, at least to some extent.

Fortunately for Daudet, that last point dovetailed very well with his general attitude to science, which had been permanently soured in the 1890s when he was thwarted in his first career plan, to become a physician. Although he passed all the necessary examinations, he did not survive his initial training as an intern, being thrown out for a theoretical unorthodoxy that his superiors considered as blatant and gross insubordination (he was a fan of homoeopathy and did not believe that diseases are caused by “microbes”). Following his famous father into a literary career was a fallback position, and although he developed that career very successfully, he never lost the rancor that his initial setback had generated, nursing it so affectionately that it eventually grew into a fully mature obsession.

Le Napus, in building of a future in which scientific knowledge has continued to progress, takes it for granted that much of that science will be intellectually bankrupt, and that the fraction that is not will be largely deleterious to the quality of human life. It is one of very few science-based speculative novels to assume that much contemporary theoretical knowledge is seriously mistaken, and that the theories that replace contemporary ones will be just as arbitrary and liable to supersession. In the world of Le Napus, it is not only the Archimedean superweapons that routinely misfire—while still doing enormous damage and inflicting serious mortality—but all the efforts of scientists, especially and most importantly in confrontation with the Napus itself: a new and utterly mysterious “plague,” which adds an extra dimension of complication to the war.

If the world featured in the novel is perverse to the point of paradoxicality, so is the narrator through whose eyes we see it: the result of an experiment in selective breeding that was supposed to produce idealized humans but—inevitably, in this context—went awkwardly awry. As heroes go—and his notion of himself as a modest hero is by no means entirely mistaken—Polyplast 17,177 is certainly peculiar, but only an unreliable narrator in an unreliable world could stand any chance at all of acquiring a measure of paradoxical reliability. There is a sense in which his is the ideally perverse viewpoint from which to obtain a measure and grasp of the perverse society in which he lives. Even readers who cannot sympathize with him, let alone identify with him, might nevertheless find a certain interest in his gradual evolution towards a more humane humanity—as, indeed, they should.

The specific technological anticipations featured in Le Napus now seem very primitive, but that is inevitable given its date. In 1927 telegraphy was still mostly wire-based and radio broadcasting had yet to begin. Medicine was still largely ineffective; the first antibiotic, penicillin was not discovered until 1928, and although vaccines had been in use for a century their development had not yet been systematized and their utility was still dubious. Aviation was still relatively primitive, and so was the cinema. Daudet realized that much more technological development was to be expected from ondes (waves) and the electromagnetic equipment involved in their generation and control, but his vision of those possibilities was inevitably vague, and when it became specific, doomed to be mistaken.

These factors should not detract, however, from a proper rational appreciation of the effort involved in writing a futuristic novel in 1927, or from a proper esthetic appreciation of the devices that Daudet “invented” in his imagination. Most of those devices never actually came to be, but they are interesting nevertheless. His notion that there would be a fusion of cinema and text, so that in the world of Le Napus, which has no television, people can read “cinébouquins” (cinebooks) with moving illustrations complementary to the text, is particularly intriguing. Such ideas, which have been sidestepped by actual history, have recently begun to acquire a certain literary charm as the substance of “steampunk” fiction dealing with obsolete versions of yesterday’s tomorrows, and of all the antique novels to have been retrospectively reclad in a steampunkish gloss, Le Napus is one of the quirkiest. If it is not as steamy, or as punkish, as the author’s subsequent novel Les Bacchantes, it makes up for that deficit by virtue of its much greater extravagance, which is a far more important aspect of steampunk style and ambition.

Le Napus could not have been written in America in 1927, and if, by some freak of chance it had, it could not have been published or appreciated there; it is not surprising that it has had to wait nearly a century to be translated, and if political correctness were an excluding factor, that time would never have arrived at all. It would, therefore, be entirely inappropriate to look at Le Napus as if it were a “science fiction” novel and to try to wedge it belatedly into the historical canon of science fiction. It has much closer affinities with the tradition of British scientific romance, but the French tradition of the roman scientifique, although vaguer, was far more prolific, sophisticated and robust than either of the parallel English-language traditions, and it would be more reasonable to view the English works in the composite genre as eccentric offshoots of the French canon rather than the other way around. To be properly appreciated, Le Napus needs to be seen not as something faintly reminiscent of works with which English readers are already familiar, but as an example of something truly and intriguingly alien.

This translation should not, therefore, be viewed as a belated and eccentric contribution to the genre of science fiction, or even that of scientific romance, but rather as a twisted classic, of sorts, of the gloriously exotic roman scientifique: a book that, although carrying forward an evident tradition, and extending many of the fibers of thought holding that tradition together, is nevertheless a book like no other, a unique entity. It is, in consequence, potentially precious to all those pataphysically-inclined readers who prefer to study exceptions rather than rules, and delight in the unfamiliar rather than the familiar, especially when it is provocatively uncomfortable rather than soothingly soporific.

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This translation has been taken from a copy of the original Flammarion edition. It poses the usual problem of translation applicable to antique futuristic fiction, in that the terminology subsequently developed in the real world to describe the technologies anticipated in the book is markedly different from the terminology that the author was compelled to invent, but I have resisted the temptation to substitute the real-world terminology even when it would seem appropriate to a modern reader, thus avoiding such terms as “radio,” even though its omission might now appear odd, in the interests of attempting to preserve the eccentric flavor of the original.