![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersA while back I read "The Monkey King" -- an excerpt of the French writer Albert Robida's novel, 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 (1879), published in Brian Stableford's News from the Moon and Other French Scientific Romances. This playful parody of Verne's famous books, featuring an appearance by Captain Nemo and other Verne characters, was so much fun that I decided to try another of Robida's works, The Twentieth Century, which was translated into English for the first time and published by Wesleyan University Press a couple of years ago. Robida is not well-known amongst readers of English-language science fiction, but this novel was apparently very famous in France in its day and over the decades went through many editions. Perhaps even in France now, however, Robida's reputation has shrunk into the shadow of Verne, and he is remembered more for his illustrations than for his writing.
As it turns out, The Twentieth Century was also an appropriate follow-up to Verne's novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century, which I wrote about recently. Verne's semi-dystopia wasn't published for over a century after it was written, and it is unlikely that Robida read the manuscript. However, both books look to the marvels of the future with a satirical eye, and both feature protagonists who are out of step with the brave new world of the next century. This seems to be an attempt to give the reader an avatar in the story, eternally at a loss at the changes and strangeness she or he faces. Unfortunately, both characters come across as a bit slow because of this narrative gambit. They've been raised in this world and yet they don't seem to understand a thing about it! Verne tries to finesse this by making his character reject his era and long for the past, whereas Robida instead focuses on the exasperation of the other characters who have to explain everything to the eternally clueless Hélène. Through this we get an encyclopedic look at various aspects of the future, without much concern for plot, in the manner of a Utopia.
I have to confess that I'm not a big fan of Utopias, so this novel was bit tedious at times for me. It's helped by the extensive illustrations, done by Robida himself. I don't think there's a two-page spread that doesn't have a sprightly drawing of some kind in it, and as the translator, Philippe Willems, points out in his introduction, the illustrations frequently contain information that isn't in the text, so they have something of a life of their own. Like Verne, Robida imagines a future that was already very much on the engineering drawing board at the time, with electricity being the prime source of speculative imagination. However, new modes of transportation are also heavily featured, ranging from subways (including a system being built beneath the Atlantic) and, more fancifully, air cars of various types. It is his wilder flights of engineering extrapolation that I found most engaging, but alas the book has little of that and, in the manner of satires, is more focused on taking digs at social and political trends of the day.
Not that this satire is without interest. To modern eyes, the amount of comment on feminism is quite fascinating. One of the main characters is Mrs. Ponto, who is a politician in the feminist party who is constantly on the go organizing for her cause and, quite amusingly, running against her rich banker husband for representation of their district. (She wins.) However, the generally sympathetic slant on feminism is undercut by Hélène's passive course through the story, especially in the way that her inability to find a job is resolved through marriage. Also of interest is the idea that revolution has been institutionalized into a grand civic drama occurring every ten years in which the current government is thrown out and a new one installed. Some of the satire is actually very funny in an outlandish way, too, as in the colonization of Britain by American Mormons. On the other hand, much of the satire on such things as prison reform and journalistic ethics is pretty dull stuff. Perhaps it went down easier when the novel was originally serialized in fifteen parts and thus could be digested in smaller lumps.
Because so much of the story is poking fun at the manners and customs of the day, it often doesn't feel much like science fiction to me -- which is true of Utopian fiction in general, or at least the nineteenth-century variety. In the very last chapter, we get a couple of big engineering ideas thrown at us that begin to remind me of John Jacob Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds (1894). The moon is pulled closer to the Earth, and a new continent is built in the Pacific. Unlike Astor, however, Robida doesn't seem to be really interested in the scientific examination of these ideas. There's no discussion of the gravitational effects of changing the moon's orbit, for example. Instead, he seems to throw these ideas in to create a sense of a grand finale and a bit of a slingshot effect toward the idea that the future beyond the twentieth century will be even more stupendous than what we've seen in this book. To that extent, Robida is grappling with the very nature of science fiction, which attempts to peer into the future but can only do so via the imaginary and thus ends up in the realm of the fantastic, not the realistic. For my tastes, it's a pity he didn't go further down that road, rather than serving up so much mundane commentary on the collision of human nature with new electrical devices. So perhaps I'm just the wrong reader for this kind of work.
As it turns out, The Twentieth Century was also an appropriate follow-up to Verne's novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century, which I wrote about recently. Verne's semi-dystopia wasn't published for over a century after it was written, and it is unlikely that Robida read the manuscript. However, both books look to the marvels of the future with a satirical eye, and both feature protagonists who are out of step with the brave new world of the next century. This seems to be an attempt to give the reader an avatar in the story, eternally at a loss at the changes and strangeness she or he faces. Unfortunately, both characters come across as a bit slow because of this narrative gambit. They've been raised in this world and yet they don't seem to understand a thing about it! Verne tries to finesse this by making his character reject his era and long for the past, whereas Robida instead focuses on the exasperation of the other characters who have to explain everything to the eternally clueless Hélène. Through this we get an encyclopedic look at various aspects of the future, without much concern for plot, in the manner of a Utopia.
I have to confess that I'm not a big fan of Utopias, so this novel was bit tedious at times for me. It's helped by the extensive illustrations, done by Robida himself. I don't think there's a two-page spread that doesn't have a sprightly drawing of some kind in it, and as the translator, Philippe Willems, points out in his introduction, the illustrations frequently contain information that isn't in the text, so they have something of a life of their own. Like Verne, Robida imagines a future that was already very much on the engineering drawing board at the time, with electricity being the prime source of speculative imagination. However, new modes of transportation are also heavily featured, ranging from subways (including a system being built beneath the Atlantic) and, more fancifully, air cars of various types. It is his wilder flights of engineering extrapolation that I found most engaging, but alas the book has little of that and, in the manner of satires, is more focused on taking digs at social and political trends of the day.
Not that this satire is without interest. To modern eyes, the amount of comment on feminism is quite fascinating. One of the main characters is Mrs. Ponto, who is a politician in the feminist party who is constantly on the go organizing for her cause and, quite amusingly, running against her rich banker husband for representation of their district. (She wins.) However, the generally sympathetic slant on feminism is undercut by Hélène's passive course through the story, especially in the way that her inability to find a job is resolved through marriage. Also of interest is the idea that revolution has been institutionalized into a grand civic drama occurring every ten years in which the current government is thrown out and a new one installed. Some of the satire is actually very funny in an outlandish way, too, as in the colonization of Britain by American Mormons. On the other hand, much of the satire on such things as prison reform and journalistic ethics is pretty dull stuff. Perhaps it went down easier when the novel was originally serialized in fifteen parts and thus could be digested in smaller lumps.
Because so much of the story is poking fun at the manners and customs of the day, it often doesn't feel much like science fiction to me -- which is true of Utopian fiction in general, or at least the nineteenth-century variety. In the very last chapter, we get a couple of big engineering ideas thrown at us that begin to remind me of John Jacob Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds (1894). The moon is pulled closer to the Earth, and a new continent is built in the Pacific. Unlike Astor, however, Robida doesn't seem to be really interested in the scientific examination of these ideas. There's no discussion of the gravitational effects of changing the moon's orbit, for example. Instead, he seems to throw these ideas in to create a sense of a grand finale and a bit of a slingshot effect toward the idea that the future beyond the twentieth century will be even more stupendous than what we've seen in this book. To that extent, Robida is grappling with the very nature of science fiction, which attempts to peer into the future but can only do so via the imaginary and thus ends up in the realm of the fantastic, not the realistic. For my tastes, it's a pity he didn't go further down that road, rather than serving up so much mundane commentary on the collision of human nature with new electrical devices. So perhaps I'm just the wrong reader for this kind of work.
