THE NEW ADAM (3)
By:
August 2, 2025
The New Adam is a 1926 proto-sf novel by the Swiss author Hélène Dufour Pittard (writing as “Noëlle Roger”). The book concerns, one reads in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, “a wholly logical and unpleasant Superman created by gland transplants.” HILOBROW is pleased to serialize Book IV from The New Adam in Josh Glenn’s translation, from the original serialized in the 23 February 1924 issue of the journal La Petite Illustration.
FRENCH PROTO-SF TRANSLATIONS BY JOSH GLENN: Raymond Roussel’s LOCUS SOLUS [excerpt] | Noëlle Roger’s THE NEW ADAM [excerpt] | Alfred Jarry’s THE SUPERMALE [excerpt] | Jean de La Hire’s THE MYSTERY OF THE XV [excerpt].
THE NEW ADAM: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10.
In a flash, the doctor saw again the dead lying there filling the hall of the mayor’s office, this line of dead which would continue to lengthen without end.
— You haven’t counted your victims… he said dully.
— The eternal scruple! cried Hervé impatiently. Master, don’t you know that everything great that has been built has cost lives! Will you reproach the Pharaohs for their pyramids, while you treat as barbarians the poor tribes of shepherds, who left nothing behind them? Our civilization, so slow, so incomplete, is based on thousands of agonies… Only, you don’t see them…
— I see those which are your work! protested Fléchère in a cry.
— My work! Ah! Master, can you really discern it, my work? You are a slave to this limited present… While I… like pulling a rabbit out of it skin, you have yanked me out of my own time… you have hurled me into the future…. The transformation you have wrought in me, humankind would doubtlessly have achieved it on his own… but not for centuries! How could you understand me? I am probably three hundred years ahead of my time…
Fléchère murmured:
— God almighty sees you and judges you…
— God! cried Hervé.
He paced toward his Master and, transfixing him with his burning gaze:
— Oriental wisdom teaches that men have escaped into individual existence, thus rebelling against the will of God. This doctrine truly pleases me! I see the first being liberating himself from the animal order, refusing to repeat forever the same gestures, commanded by instinct, without hope of knowing — and rising up, inaugurating, questioning! You call him Pithecanthropus, others call him Adam… As for me, I salute him as my true ancestor… Like him, I am an escapee [évadé], I escape from inferior humanity. I attain a new level… Like him, I obey that profound will that prepared and ordained our escape, that placed in both of us this torturous need to know… And this obscure will, I call it my God. A God opposed to your childish and contradictory God who said: “Thou shalt not kill” and who never ceases to kill…
He fell silent. Then his feverish face, which seemed to radiate a thought his lips were not quick enough to deliver, was crossed by a sudden expression of pain.
— Master, you who once also obeyed this different God when he impelled you to the geste that freed me, can you not understand? Will you leave me alone once more? Tell me!
His voice then became heartbreaking:
— This torment of not knowing, isn’t it an atrocity? How can we accept living like this, lost in one of the universe’s shitty hidey-holes [un pauvre recoin de l’univers], and knowing nothing… grasping nothing of the world around us, of the forces we sense, of la durée, of life… of ourselves… But yes, the majority of men embrace their ignorance. Not I. My ignorance oppresses me, kills me. I burn to know immediately what the centuries will gradually reveal to happier generations… I must know… I must seek… At any cost, I must lift a little of the veil.
And Fléchère, who was gaping at him, as if hallucinating, repeated to himself:
— Yes, that’s it… at any cost!
Silenrieux had snatched up a thin book, with a worn cover and dog-eared pages, from the table — where it had been buried under a pile of papers. Waving it at the astonished Fléchère, who recognized it as Pascal’s Pensées, he exclaimed:
— He alone among men has suffered, in his flesh as much as in his mind, from the human inability to know. I’ve discovered in him a brother… by virtue of this torture that only we have experienced to an equal degree. But my brother has turned traitor… He has taken refuge on another plane… He has allowed himself to be consoled…
Hervé fell into a chair, clutching his brow. Suddenly he raised his head, and Fléchère saw that his eyes were shining with tears.
— Master… I have made an immense discovery, which I will tell you about shortly… At first, it filled me with joy. Yet already I feel that it is as if it did not exist, compared to all that remains for me to understand…
Then, leaping to his feet, he cried with exaltation:
— Ah! To know… to know! To wrest an answer from the silent universe! To divulge the secret of all the elements! To make living matter speak! To free us from the mystery… from all the mysteries, those of the earth and those of the sky!
— To what end, Hervé? the doctor interrupted gently. You will always wind up at the edge of a new infinity. You will never comprehend death. You will never comprehend this dark energy [force obscure] you call your God. No matter how much more you may learn each day, you will never be consoled like your brother Pascal…
— You speak the truth, Master… Hervé agreed bitterly. Never consoled… All that remains is for me to allow myself to be diverted by fragmentary discoveries and their applications…
He bowed to Fléchère and, in two bounds, was out of the room, leaving him dazed, seeking support from the wall.
The image that haunted the doctor’s insomnia, that night? It was the map pinned to the white wall of the laboratory, punctuated with crosses in red ink, — the map of the town of Aude. At each street corner, marked by one of these crosses, he could see a furtive hand arranging those lead pellets ready to unleash an incalculable force… Whenever he dozed off for a few minutes, he witnessed the ruin of the doomed town: he saw the church totter and collapse, the houses disappear one after the other, like those of Saint-Blaise.
He wandered endlessly among the rubble, stepping over the dead, picking up the diminutive corpses of children. And always he could hear Silenrieux’s abrupt laugh: “My work… How could you understand my work! I am probably three hundred years ahead of my time…”
In the morning, he dressed like a sleepwalker. What should he do? Try to stop Silenrieux? His feeble arguments were swept away by the man’s unleashed passion. He’d learned that no will could stand in Silenrieux’s way, no human power could restrain this mind hungry for knowledge. Fléchère, desperate, felt he no longer had the strength to carry such a secret alone.
In the garden, he encountered Michel de Javerne, who was returning from the town hall. Michel… his oldest student, now a deferential and affectionate colleague… He took his arm and led him alongside the river that curves at the foot of the steep Puybronde.
They silently followed a towpath, criss-crossed by the narrow shadows of the aligned poplars. Then, his eyes fixed on the murky water, the imperceptible movement of which barely stirred the garlands of white buttercups trailing along the water’s edge, Fléchère uttered a pitiful cry:
— Javerne!
Doctor de Javerne shuddered and turned to his colleague. And it was he who spoke without preamble:
— My dear Master, you can tell that I am very troubled… very worried… But I cannot put my anxiety into words…
— What?… Fléchère murmured, disconcerted.
— You have no idea to what extent the people here are afraid of our friend Silenrieux… They daren’t even speak his name. But in their own private thoughts, each of them blames him for all their misfortunes… Perhaps he would do well to go away for a while… Only, I ask you, how can I offer him such advice?
— Ah! Silenrieux… Fléchère moaned dully, it’s precisely him I wanted to talk to you about.
He bowed his head and seemed absorbed in contemplating a clump of long grass that an invisible eddy was alternately bending and releasing.
— I must tell you the truth, Michel. Silenrieux…
The confession stopped at the edge of his lips. Under Michel’s gaze, in which a growing concern was evident, he quickly continued:
— Silenrieux is a genius inventor… he is abnormal in his excess of intelligence. I must tell you… why I interrupted his medical career… yes, why I dismissed him from my hospital…
Fléchère spoke with an effort, his eyes lost in the transparent patterns, slowly moving between the flowery banks that he could not see. The hospital… the death of the intern… the serum, the repeated deaths, the terror of the nurses… Puybronde… the road to Saint-Blaise… the thunderstruck passersby… the waves…
He didn’t dare go any further. A second time, the full confession died on his lips. Suddenly remembering the seismologists’ claims, he hoped Silenrieux had been boasting. He fell silent. He felt he had done well to speak, and he gave himself over to a sensation of release that merged with the coolness rising from the river. He raised his head and saw that the anguish that was easing within him was now disturbing his friend’s gaze.
— Am I dreaming? Michel murmured, running his hands over his forehead.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.