"The Monkey King" by Albert Robida
Dec. 9th, 2007 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersMy anonymous housemate recently picked up a copy of News from the Moon and Other French Scientific Romances edited and translated by Brian Stableford. This is a collection of nine French proto-science fiction stories from 1768 through 1887. What caught my eye was this in the backcover blurb: "The book also includes Albert Robida's classic novella in which Saturnin Farandoul, shipwrecked as a baby and raised by apes on a Pacific Island, visits the Mysterious Island and joins forces with Captain Nemo to battle the pirate hordes of Bora Bora." Tarzan of the Apes meets Captain Nemo? Pirates?! That was a good enough hook for me.
The Robida novella is called "Le roi de singes" ["The Monkey King"] and is the first part of a serial called Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul dans les 5 ou 6 parties du monde, et dans tous les pays connus et même inconnus de Monsieur Jules Verne [The Very Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnin Farandoul in the World's five or six Continents, and in all the Countries known and even unknown to Monsieur Jules Verne], which was published in 1879. It ends up being a delightful satire on any number of things, including epic South Seas adventure stories and European colonialism. As such, it has less in common with Tarzan of the Apes than with Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel, La planète des singes, a.k.a. The Planet of the Apes.
Saturnin Farandoul is raised by apes after a shipwreck, is rescued as an adolescent by a French merchant ship, falls in love with the beautiful daughter of a Malyasian pirate king, and with the aid of an army of apes, conquers Australia, where he intends to create a Utopia for all primates. While the depiction of the apes is more than a bit fanciful, it is all in the service of satirizing humanity's animal failings, particularly when it comes to exploiting those it considers inferior. (For a contemporary American reader, one of the ape generals, Makako, evokes the infamous "macaca" slur that sank the senatorial campaign of George Allen in 2006.) However, delusions of grandeur afflict all primates, whether two-handed or four-handed. The tone of the piece is sprightly and knowing, even when tragic. Some of the humor is quite, um, broad, as in the character named Dick Broken.
It's not clear to me how Robida was able to use Captain Nemo as a character, let alone name Verne in the title of the serial. Possibly this was put out by Verne's publisher, Hetzel, with the consent of all involved. The science fictional aspects of the story (as opposed to the merely fantastical) are mostly centered around the Nautilus and various diving-related contraptions, mostly farcical in nature. There is a hilarious episode involving a whale who swallows Saturnin's beloved while she still in a diving suit, which does not in fact suit the whale's digestion.
Stableford makes the argument in the introduction to the collection that "of all the native traditions [of science fiction], the French has the longest history and made the most rapid early progress," although he goes on to acknowledge that the tradition subsequently faltered and fell behind the British and American traditions. (As always, he is eager to push back at the "coca-colonization" of science fiction by the Americans and to promote the European tradition of scientific romance against it.) This early advantage of the French seems to be reflected in both books of George Griffith I've read, where his characters make reference to works of Camille Flammarion and Jules Verne, and in Garrett P. Serviss' A Columbus of Space (1909), which is dedicated "to the readers of Jules Verne's romances." Stableford says he hopes to publish further volumes of French scientific romance. Meanwhile, I'll be looking for the Wesleyan edition of Robida's 1883 novel Le Vingtième Siècle [The Twentieth Century], which is said to be a remarkable work of ironic futurology.
The Robida novella is called "Le roi de singes" ["The Monkey King"] and is the first part of a serial called Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul dans les 5 ou 6 parties du monde, et dans tous les pays connus et même inconnus de Monsieur Jules Verne [The Very Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnin Farandoul in the World's five or six Continents, and in all the Countries known and even unknown to Monsieur Jules Verne], which was published in 1879. It ends up being a delightful satire on any number of things, including epic South Seas adventure stories and European colonialism. As such, it has less in common with Tarzan of the Apes than with Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel, La planète des singes, a.k.a. The Planet of the Apes.
Saturnin Farandoul is raised by apes after a shipwreck, is rescued as an adolescent by a French merchant ship, falls in love with the beautiful daughter of a Malyasian pirate king, and with the aid of an army of apes, conquers Australia, where he intends to create a Utopia for all primates. While the depiction of the apes is more than a bit fanciful, it is all in the service of satirizing humanity's animal failings, particularly when it comes to exploiting those it considers inferior. (For a contemporary American reader, one of the ape generals, Makako, evokes the infamous "macaca" slur that sank the senatorial campaign of George Allen in 2006.) However, delusions of grandeur afflict all primates, whether two-handed or four-handed. The tone of the piece is sprightly and knowing, even when tragic. Some of the humor is quite, um, broad, as in the character named Dick Broken.
It's not clear to me how Robida was able to use Captain Nemo as a character, let alone name Verne in the title of the serial. Possibly this was put out by Verne's publisher, Hetzel, with the consent of all involved. The science fictional aspects of the story (as opposed to the merely fantastical) are mostly centered around the Nautilus and various diving-related contraptions, mostly farcical in nature. There is a hilarious episode involving a whale who swallows Saturnin's beloved while she still in a diving suit, which does not in fact suit the whale's digestion.
Stableford makes the argument in the introduction to the collection that "of all the native traditions [of science fiction], the French has the longest history and made the most rapid early progress," although he goes on to acknowledge that the tradition subsequently faltered and fell behind the British and American traditions. (As always, he is eager to push back at the "coca-colonization" of science fiction by the Americans and to promote the European tradition of scientific romance against it.) This early advantage of the French seems to be reflected in both books of George Griffith I've read, where his characters make reference to works of Camille Flammarion and Jules Verne, and in Garrett P. Serviss' A Columbus of Space (1909), which is dedicated "to the readers of Jules Verne's romances." Stableford says he hopes to publish further volumes of French scientific romance. Meanwhile, I'll be looking for the Wesleyan edition of Robida's 1883 novel Le Vingtième Siècle [The Twentieth Century], which is said to be a remarkable work of ironic futurology.
