THE SUPERMALE (4)
By:
November 19, 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.
Though Marcueil did not budge, he seemed to be experiencing quite a pleasant sensation. Soon it became clear to the three scientists, who were observing him closely, that the subject clearly understood what the machine wanted from him. Although still semi-catatonic, he suddenly said aloud: “I love her.”
Success! The machine was operating precisely according to its inventors’ hypotheses… but then an indescribable phenomenon happened, one which despite its extraordinary nature their calculations ought to have predicted. In hindsight, it was obvious that these savants ought to have recalled that when two electro-dynamic machines come into contact, the machine with the higher potential charges the other.
Having created an antiphysical circuit conjoining the Supermale’s nervous system to eleven thousand volts (which at that amplitude were perhaps no longer electricity), neither the chemist, nor the doctor, nor the engineer could deny the evidence of their senses: It was their subject who was influencing the Love Machine. In fact, as they ought to have mathematically predicted, the machine wasn’t producing love in the man. Instead: THE MACHINE HAD FALLEN IN LOVE WITH THE MAN.
What was going on? Leaping down the stairs, Gough reached the electrical room… then telephoned his observation back to the others. The dynamo was spinning backwards at an unknown and formidable speed. It had become a receiver!
“I wouldn’t ever have imagined this sort of thing possible… but in fact, it makes perfect sense!” murmured Bathybius. “In this era in which technology has begun to dominate humans, it’s only natural that humankind would — in order to survive — become stronger than machines, just as we once became stronger than animals. It’s a question of adaptation to a changing environment. And this man… he is the first of a new race!”
But Gough, working with machine-like speed and efficiency, wasn’t giving up so easily. He connected the dynamo to the Chateau’s battery of hydraulic energy accumulators. So the subject was stronger than the dynamo? He’d boost the dynamo.
Rushing back upstairs, he arrived just in time to witness a terrible spectacle. Perhaps the Supermale’s dynamism had reached too fabulous a potential, or perhaps, contrariwise, he’d grown weak (because Marcueil was rousing from his torpor), or perhaps there was another cause, but the dynamo — overcharged by the subject’s energy earlier — was now the stronger force. As a result, the subject’s platinum crown grew first red-, then white-hot.
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.