THE SUPERMALE (3)
By:
November 8, 2025
We are pleased to serialize an excerpt from Alfred Jarry’s proto-sf novel The Supermale (1902), translated by Josh Glenn, for HILOBROW’s readers. This excerpt first appeared in Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age (MIT Press, 2025), an anthology edited by Josh Glenn.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
Here’s another electrical insight that helped inform the Love Machine’s design: In America, condemned criminals are typically electrocuted by a current of twenty-two hundred volts. Death is instantaneous, the body fries, and the spasmodic convulsions are awful to witness. (One might even get the impression that the electrocution device was being used to resuscitate a corpse!) However, if one were subjected to a current more than quadruple this amount — ten thousand volts, say — nothing would happen. As you consider what is about to transpire, please bear in mind that, thanks to the water rushing through the Chateau de Lurance’s moat, the trio of experimenters were able to avail themselves of the eleven-thousand-volt dynamo in the castle’s basement.
Still in a postcoital torpor, Marcueil was tightly strapped into an armchair by his servants. (Servants enjoy nothing more than obeying a doctor whose diagnosis indicates that their master is sick or insane.) Thus spread-eagled, a bizarre object was placed on the man’s skull: a sort of crenelated crown, made of platinum and with its teeth pointing downwards. In front and in back one could spot what only appeared to be large table-cut diamonds. (In fact, the crown was fashioned in two parts, each fitted with a red copper earpiece and lined with a moistened sponge ensuring contact with the temple; the two metal semi-circles were divided by a thick plate of glass, the ends of which, visible above the subject’s forehead and occiput, sparkled like cabochons.) When the springs of the crown’s two side plates were tightened against his temples, Marcueil didn’t wake — though at that moment he dreamed uneasily of scalps and hair.
From an observation station in the adjoining room, Bathybius, Gough, and Elson observed these preparations. The crowned subject, still in a state of partial undress, and whose Red Indian makeup was fading in places like an ancient statue’s coloring, presented a spectacle so inhuman that the two Americans, who “had the Bible” and thus knew the New Testament by heart, struggled for a few minutes to compose themselves — by appealing to their common sense to dispel this pitiful and supernatural image of the King of the Jews himself, diademed with thorns and nailed to a cross. They were about to set a world-renewing force in motion… but might they destroy the world?
The electrodes attached to his temples were connected to wires sheathed in gutta-percha and green silk. The Supermale was entwined with these cables, which writhed away and out of sight, burrowing into the walls like vermin gnawing their way towards the crackling hum of the dynamo.
Elson, in his dual role as enquiring scientist and ultra-practical father, prepared to switch on the current to the Love Machine.
“Hang on a second,” said Gough.
“What now?” demanded the chemist.
“I’m beginning to wonder,” admitted the engineer, “whether this device will deliver the desired result, or no result at all… or perhaps an entirely unexpected result. Besides, it was jury-rigged rather hastily…”
“That’s the nature of an experiment,” Elson interrupted. He flipped the switch.
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].
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.