On anticipation novels

In the 2nd volume of our Almanach des Lettres, we posed the following little problem to our readers:

Recent books by Alexandre Arnoux, Le Régime du Bonheur, and by Claude Farrère, L'an mille neuf cent trente-sept, take place around 1935-1937. There is one by Hugh Benson, Le Maître de la Terre, which surpasses them by almost forty years. But there is much better. Who will set the record for anticipation?
Perhaps the answer to this question will be found in the latest novel by Mr. André Reuze: La Vénus d'Asnières or in the ruins of Paris which has just been published? The successful Traveling-Robinson mission, which left Timbuktu, capital of the West African Republic, to the place where Paris once stood, dates from the summer of 2922 and it may well be that this was a record.

That if, indeed, we consider the latest published anticipations, there is none, it seems, that has so audaciously exceeded the year 2000. One of the most famous and most discreet, Saint Magloire, by Roland Dorgelès, if no precise date is assigned to it, is most certainly placed, according to the context of the novel, around 1925-1926; the novels of Farrère and Arnoux (the latter also announces the annihilation of Paris and of Latin civilization), do not go beyond 1937; Karel Tchapek's famous comedy R.U.R. begins in 1960 and lasts only a few years. The Resurrection of Doctor Valbel, by Lucien Deslinières and J.-Mac Py, is from 1972, from the spring of 1972. The destruction of Rome and the papacy by Felsenburgh's planes (R.-H. Benson), The Master of the Earth, took place on Pentecost 1978. The Red Plague, finally, by Jack London, decimated humanity in the year 2012 and made civilization regress to the terrible age of the caves and the story of the great American novelist is told by one of the survivors of the epidemic to young and wild goat herders in 2050.

Only the curious story of Mr. René Lalou, The Chef, which appeared last year and did not have the success it deserved, could be compared to Mr. André Reuze's anticipation of the Franco-German war, of which he tells us the phases (in the novel, it is a war of Yllonians against the coalition of Eleutherians, Interatlanticians and Ekmalites) takes place in 2547. We are already far from Jack London, but nearly 400 years still separate the adventures of the "chief Otto de Rosenkranz" from the explorations of the scholar Travelling-Robinson and the record of The Venus of Asnières remains unbeaten.

Léon TREICH.