Best 1909 Adventures (5)

By: Joshua Glenn
March 6, 2019

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1909 adventure novels. Happy 110th anniversary!

There are no existing first editions of Darvel’s book, so here’s a vampire squid.

Gustave Le Rouge’s Radium Age science fiction adventure La Guerre des Vampires (The Vampire War).

In Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars (1908), adventurer Robert Darvel discovers that Mars’s rather dull-witted humanoids are herded and harvested by the vampiric Erloor. That is to say, it’s a kind of occult, hastily written mashup of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and The First Men in the Moon (1901). In fact, Le Rouge has been credited with helping French sci-fi transition from its Vernean incorporation of science to a Wellsian imaginative fictionalization of science. In the feuilleton installments that make up this sequel, Darvel’s comrades back on Earth — including several brilliant inventors, the lovely millionairess Miss Teramond, and an avant-garde chef (!) — work feverishly in their Tunisian laboratory to communicate with Darvel. Their blind servant, Zarouk, can perceive “obscure radiations of the electromagnetic spectrum,” which will come in handy when invisible creatures follow Darvel back to Earth, kidnap Miss Teramond, and threaten to prey on all humankind. We discover that the Erloor are controlled by invisible, blood-drinking octopus-bat creatures, which inhabit a kind of massive Habitrail. Moreover, these Vampires are themselves preyed upon by a mysterious, psychic, volcano-dwelling entity. What can it be?

Fun facts: Le Rouge’s Mars sequence was translated and published in omnibus form by Brian Stableford, in 2008; and also by David Beus and Brian Evenson, in 2015.

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Best 1909 Adventures (5)

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