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BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY LÉON DAUDET
The Bacchantes: A Dionysian Scientific Romance
The Napus: The Great Plague of the Year 2227
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2012 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
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