Albert Robida (1848–1926)

Brian Stableford’s “Introduction” is particularly useful in this novel. This is the third Robida volume published by Black Coat Press, so there is not so much autobiographical material here. Instead, Stableford places these stories in the context of literature and Robida’s career. “Un Potache en 1950”, “A Schoolboy in 1950”, was published in 1917 and Un Chalet dans les airs, Chalet in the Sky, Robida’s last novel, was published in 1925.

In the 1890s, when technology allowed the easy printing of photographs in newspapers, Robida’s career as a writer and illustrator began to be crimped, and that accelerated with World War One. He began to write for younger markets where his humorous illustrations were still favored. In his heyday, he was well known for his garish illustrations of future warfare and life in the 20th century. Eventually, he found himself doing a lot of illustrations for other people’s work. A pacificist, he came to hate illustrating seriously speculative tales of war. When the Great War started, the market for illustrating future war or even doing illustrations on life in the future largely evaporated. The exception was the juvenile market which still wanted to shield chilcren from the horrors of war and maintain morale.

The public school story was a genre that started with Tom Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays in 1857 though Stableford says it wasn’t established as a genre until the late 1880s with the work of Talbot Baines Reed. It had already been parodied in 1882 with F. Antsey’s Vice Versa. In 1906, Angela Brazil expanded the genre with stories about a girls school.

While these British works were translated into French, French writers didn’t write in the genre. Stableford says Robida’s genius recognized two things: the school story is sort of a utopian fantasy and that, decades before J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the genre could be enlivened by introducing fantastic elements.
In the 1880s, Robida started to produce works on life and war in the year 1950. That world of 1950, especially with its aviation technology, seemed a good fit for a school story. After Robida got the post-war bile and vitriol out of his system with The Engineer von Satanas in 1918, Robida did “In 1965”. It was intended for adults and not very well received.

Stableford says of “A Schoolboy in 1950” “its Utopian ideals are tarnished, if not frankly deceptive. The disasters featured in the novel are the results of accidental breakdown rather than malice, but that only serves to make their threat seem more ominous, especially in combination with the story’s visit to England, and the discovery there of the continuing thrust of the Industrial revolution.”

As with his other stories set in 1950, Robida’s story is not as “optimistic as it seemingly wants or tries to be”. Its obvious moral is that it’s dangerous to rely on technology. Chalet in the Sky was intended for a juvenile market, but Robida couldn’t resist introducing a more adult-themed story, and it ended up not being in a juvenile series. Stableford says of the novel that it is far from Robida’s best work. It has repetitions and contradictions, but it is still of interest.

I suspect “A Schoolboy in 1950” is as much a parody of the English as it is of the English school story.
Our hero is Gustave Turbille of the Chambourcy open air school, a lad of fourteen and a half. He’s been assigned by his father to watch out for Alfred Koufra, a black African student from a French colony in the Congo. Naturally, Gustave being Gustave, the fact of Koufra being the son of a notary is inflated so that now Khoufra is the son of an African chieftain.

Gustave is mad for invention and mechanical things. That includes various ways of trying, unsuccessfully, to cheat on his exams or speed up the playing time of audiovisual lectures. Like nearly all his acquaintances, he’s sports mad though one of is friends is a poet determined to get in the French Academy by age 30. Only Koufra is a serious student though he always gets ensnared in Gustave’s schemes.

There are aerial races, competitions between Chambourcy and the nearby girl’s school, agronomy classes that feature a plowing race, and a duel fought on rowboats. Greek grammar courses are interrupted by rugby games.
Gustave is a self-professed innovator and finds “the materials and paraphenlia of civilization” “hardly functional”.

One girl is constantly harangued on pending career choices by her various uncles – who all advise her not to pursue their profession.

There is a great deal of personal aerial travel including by Gustave on a sort of flying motorcycle. There are also high speed tube trains, and we hear about a catastrophe on the Paris-Naples run.

The students mount a revolt at the two schools.

A teacher says Koufra is a good student, but Gustave is a disappointment and “too sporty” cultivating muscles more than brains. Supremely self-confident and somewhat fatuous, Gustave says he cultivates muscles because he is too intellectual.

An airship break down strands the students on a school trip into the French Alps. Gustave actually does save the day by getting a radio at the resort working and summoning help. The students’ accounts of their time standed all widely vary in accuracy.

They stop at a heavily mined region of Belgium which seems to make one teacher sad. Koufra finds a fossil in a coal mine – except it isn’t. In England, a business course involves observing a deal for rice. Gustave piggybacks on a deal of his father for pocket knives from England by adding personal razors.
At the end, when the “phono-whisperer” intended to provide test answers, fails spectacularly, Gustave gets his comeuppance. Koufra is awarded best student – “meekly falling in with the old routine, without seeking something better” says Gustave. He’s convinced his father will look at his athletic scores and think fondly of his business deal and won’t notice his bad academic remarks. (However, a teacher does approach Gustave hoping he’ll invent a device to grade exams automatically.)

But Gustave’s father does notice his bad grades. At story’s end, Gustave says

“I really can’t launch myself into large-scale industry to exploit the ideas that I might have, nor enter the Académie des Sciences for a number of years yet, so there’s no urgency; I have all the time I need for a little learning. I’m returning to old-fashioned work—it’s decided!”

But Gustave has no humility and much gradiosity:

“To begin with, here’s a rather extensive program of scientific research; it’s a matter of finding, if not by the start of next term, then as soon as possible, firstly the machine for correcting assignments that will give so much pleasure to Monsieur Radoux, then an automatic machine for rich rhymes, a machine for shortening winter, a machine for extending vacation time, etc., etc.”

At story’s end, Gustave wishes Koufra a good break and that he’ll see him next term. It’s mildly amusing, but there’s nothing really extraordinary about the story.

Chalet in the Sky is set in about the year 2893.

Our protagonist, Monseiur Chabol (a scholar with 42 works in progress), says, at the novel’s beginning:

“The world is becoming uninhabitable, alas. Our planet is being sabotaged. No solidity anywhere, in Europe and America, or in the scarcely-tranquil hidden corners of Central Africa. The perforated, worn-out soil, creviced in all directions by quakes, subsidence, shocks and slippages, former mines collapsed or invaded by subterranean seas, forests destroyed… I’m not making recriminations; doubtless the imprudence of our ancestors is to blame, but our globe is getting old as well, and it’s aging terribly badly.”

The Great Pyramid has almost sunk into the ground. A sixth continent was built at the end of the 20th century – and blown up accidentally (a fragment is in space near the moon). Switzerland now has port cities. The Caucuses were leveled, and the soil taken to build a new island chain. An asteroid, part of a planet destroyed by a distant exploding sun, landed in the Pacific with its dinosaur-like creatures still on it to plague the Japanese administrators who took over after unsuccessful English and American expeditions to the islands. New York City is a massive, very noisy place.

The Reconstruction Works’ projects occasionally discover things like a train lost for 800 years in a French train tunnel. ZZZ rays have allowed the capture of other celestial bodies in the solar system.

Chabol did try to take a vacation on the moon once, but a flu epidemic put him in quarantine for the whole trip. This time he’s going to take his chalet, which he’s taken a loan out for, to interesting parts of the world. Basically, it’s an aerial rv. He’s even got a pilot for it – though the drunken pilot tries to steal it which causes a delay in New York City and legal entanglements involving the theft. Basically, the pilot, after all his years working, just wanted to take it to a lake and fish. Perhaps Robida is saying that even a master of advance technology will eventually grow weary of it and want the simple life.

On the trip, Chabol takes his nephews Moderan and Andoche. Their parents, members of the French government involved in the Reconstruction Works, call them frequently, and Chabol, with the help of the onboard Cine-Phon university, is to educate and prepare them for exams.

There are some thematic ties-ins to Robida’s earlier “A Schoolboy in 1950”. Mention is made of work being done on a machine to grade exams, and the train lost for 800 years brings to mind the train disaster in the earlier story.

In another example of French romans scientifique’s concern with synthetic food, the chalet is stocked with many pills for food and liquor. The boys’ mother even says about the meals of we ancients,

“Imagine what fabulous delays the old modes of alimentation must have inflicted on Progress and Civilization!”… (mais)

This is one of those futuristic novels that doesn't have a story per se, but is more an exploration/travelogue of a fantastic future. It's a mix of utopianism and satire and deadly warnings-- some things are awesome, other things less so (emancipated women are so un-feminine they even have harsh names!), and other things are just supposed to be funny (the president is an automaton, which I feel like is the nineteenth-century equivalent of Futurama's disembodied heads). There's sky pirates and telephonic courtship and attempts at a fun revolution, but Nihilist bombings destroyed Russia so utterly there's neither Nihilists nor Russians anymore, and Italy has become a theme park for American tourists. There are also air-wars, but they seem more exciting than frightening.

Sometimes long-winded (seriously, very long), but the real highlight is that Robida illustrated it himself, so you get to see his fun futurism brought to life in a lively fashion on page after page. The text translated here is from the first French edition, but editor Arthur B. Evans selected illustrations from every edition in order to get the best set possible. More fun to look at than to read, but then, Robida was more illustrator than novelist.… (mais)

En la villa de Flyssemugue hay una torre con cuatrocientos veinticinco escalones, en lo alto de la cual Narcisse Gurdebeke, acompañado de su mujer y de sus siete hijos, acaba de estrenar sus funciones como vigilante, encargado del carillón, archivero y director de la banda municipal. Debido a sus obligaciones, y desanimado por la larguísima escalera que le separa del suelo, no encuentra nunca el momento de descender de su aérea residencia. Pero la añoranza de la tierra bajo sus pies y el anhelo de ser autosuficiente le harán recrear en su nuevo entorno esa vida campestre que tanto echa de menos. Así, irá construyendo poco a poco sobre la plataforma de la torre una granja, un huerto, y hasta un arroyo en miniatura. Todo con el máximo secreto, a espaldas de sus conciudadanos…
En lo alto de la torre (1895) es una inteligente y preclara fábula en la que, con pionera intuición ecologista, Albert Robida reflexiona sobre cómo vivir en armonía con la naturaleza y disfrutar con respeto de todo aquello que tan desinteresadamente nos brinda.… (mais)

“That slut Science!”

Some novels have memorable taglines. That’s the one for the centerpiece of this omnibus, Albert Robida’s The Engineer von Satanas.

I doubt that Robida, writing in 1919, seriously thought that World War One would start up again in 1920.

But I don’t doubt the sincerity of this amazing work of vitriol and bitterness.

Robida the artist and writer did two short, illustrated stories called “War in the 20th Century”. One was published in 1883 and the other in 1887. Both are breezy japes full of future tech. While this book reprints Robida’s illustrations for The Engineer von Satanas, it omits his art for those earlier stories.

The first details the Australo-Mozambique War of 1975 started by Australians manipulating the Mozambicoville Stock Exchange. The weapons are submarines, “mobile fortresses” (essentially a very large tanks), balloons, “rocket-torpedoes”, balloons, railway artillery, “asphyxiating shells”, electrical weapons that induce epilepsy, and machine guns. The casualties are high but merely accepted. 290,000 Australians die at the final battle of Mayazamba. The whole thing is written as a piece of future hero with no central character.

Stableford notes that Robida narrows the distance between his contemporary reader and the story’s world in each iteration of his future war. The second story is even more comic than the first. It relates the exploits of Fabius Molinas, a French bachelor and reservist in the 18th Territorial Aeronauts. His vacation is interrupted by a war in 1945. The opponent is unnamed, but it’s pretty obvious it’s Germany. At story’s end, the Fabius ends up in Mexico and marries into the local aristocracy. The weapons are largely the same. The “mobile fortresses” of the 1883 version have become “mobile blockhouses”. The idea of an Offensive Medical Corps is introduced and they employ a variety of bacteriological munitions. Mediums show up as weapons: “… the most powerful magnetizers and suggestionists in Paris … marched slowly toward the enemy lines, emitting torrents of fluid by means of energetic processes.” There is more variety of chemical agents in this story.

One senses that most of the political speculation of Robida’s stories are there for mere comic preposterous, inversions of contemporary politics. “A great African nation” and Australia, both colonies in 1883, fighting a great war! How deliciously absurd! In the 1887 version the Danubian Empire is undergoing a civil war, an American attack on the coast of France has been repelled, and a Chinese naval expedition foundered on the rocks of Corsica. The only seeming sincerity seems a passing complaint about the high taxes that empire necessitates

The Engineer von Satanas opens with a couple of prologues. The first introduces us to the sinister Brother Schwarz. He’s been disturbing a medieval monastery with his alchemical pursuits and ultimately gives a local aristocrat the secret of gunpowder. The second prologue, set at the fictitious 1909 Peace Conference in the Hague, has the famous engineer von Satanas, who looks a lot like Brother Schwarz, showing delegates the military potential of new technologies, “all the ingenious things of which use would obviously never be made”.

Then we get the main story, the return to civilization of our hero Paul Jacquemin, a naturalist who left on an arctic exploration in April 1914. He returns to Europe after 15 years of being stranded with his fellow expedition members. The seas are strangely empty, the lighthouses dim. And then their ship hits a mine, and all but Jacquemin die. Floating in the sea, Jacquemin meets Marcel, the survivor of another sunken ship.
The two wash ashore and are immediately grabbed by the locals, bags put over their heads, and they’re whisked off to a cellar (to avoid a gas attack, it turns out). They meet the locals whose origins and injuries are tokens of the war’s reach and misery.

Paul also meets Robida’s mouthpiece, Dr. Christiansen. And, almost from his first words, he states what will become the refrain of book: "You’re a man of science? Me too, unfortunately. I’m not paying you any compliment – oh no! We’re colleagues, then; I’m a poor devil of a Danish scientist. Doctor of medicine and many other things … very repentant and disillusioned, I assure you. Oh that slut Science! The harlot! The whore!"

In the rubble, the survivors of that war scavenge for goods, hunt, and carry on with their lives. A love triangle even forms with Marcel and a local man wooing a woman in the “Age of Burrows”. Christiansen rails against science. Professor Jollimay rails against “the folly of domination … the imperialism of despots, their rage of domination and hegemony … the furious domination of a race of prey!” Imperialism, Robida says, seems to have had a high price.

In the end, Paul’s convinced and accepts the indictment against that “slut Science”. A novel that, apart from Paul’s comrades drowning at sea, has been free of onstage death, ends with Paul and his new comrades, armed with bows and arrows, off to assault the Boche holed up in the Palace of Peace.

The volume includes the reactions of two other French writers to the Great War.

Adrien Bertrand thought the war threatened something precious, so, even though he was a socialist and pacifist, he joined the French army immediately upon France being invaded. Shrapnel wounded his lungs in October 1914, and he ultimately died of those wounds in 1917. But, during that failed recovery, he managed to write the famous French war novel L’Appel du sol and some short pieces including “The Rain that surprised Candide in his Garden”.

That story is a post-mortem philosophical discussion that Vaissette, Bertrand’s alter-ego and also the hero of his novel, has with several characters from famous works of literature.

Besides mocking Homer and Achilles (who, it is pointed out, participated in very little combat), Bertrand talks of how he reconciled his pacifism with war to protect society from the “pillagers, the uncivilized, friends of vice, rapine and brigandage”.

And Bertrand talks of the beauty of commanding men running towards death: “ … I know that, deaf and blind in the unleashed tempest, while the heavens were exploding over our heads and the earth was being torn apart under our feet, we experienced the horror of a sacred frission!”
Bertrand, of course, died before peace – however temporary – began. But Vaissette speaks for Bertrand in hoping there will be a better “new order of things”, a wonderful harvest from peace.”

More in the way of a technocratic policy proposal wrapped in the gloating presentation of the victorious German General von Stick is Louis Baudry de Saunier’s “How Paris was destroyed in six hours on Easter Sunday, 20 April 1924”. Like Bertrand, Saunier was a journalist, pacifist, and socialist, but he also possessed a great interest in technology. He started out writing about bicycles and then moved to aviation and, during the war, wrote about the artillery and radio. Saunier’s story has the French throwing away their lead in aviation technology while the Germans, under the cover of developing a civil aviation industry, develop critical dual use technologies they use to knock out the political and logistical heart of France.

Bertrand’s and Saunier’s pieces are interesting examples, respectively, of pondering the war’s meaning and anxiety about more war. But Robida’s novel is truly a forgotten classic, readable in its own right as well as historically important.… (mais)