An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars Read online

  An Inhabitant

  of the Planet Mars

  by

  Henri de Parville

  Translated by

  Brian Stableford,

  with an Introduction and Afterword

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Henri de Parville’s Un habitant de la planète Mars, here translated as An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars, was originally published by “J. Hetzel” (Pierre-Jules Hetzel) in May 1865. The genesis of the work was an article in the form of a letter that had appeared in the daily newspaper Le Pays on June 17, 1864. The letter was signed “A. Lomon,” that being the name of the paper’s American correspondent, responsible for reporting on the progress of the Civil War. (In those days, newspaper correspondents really did communicate by letter, which is why the article was presented in that form.) The article revealed that an “aerolith”—a meteorite, in modern terminology—excavated from an ancient geological stratum in Colorado by an oil prospector had turned out to contain a mummified humanoid, believed to originate from the planet Mars. The article—which was, of course, a hoax—caused something of a stir among the paper’s readers, and demanded a follow-up, which duly appeared a few days later. By that time, it was on open secret that the actual author of the original article had been the paper’s science correspondent, Henri de Parville.

  The immediate inspiration of Parville’s hoax was a combination of circumstances deriving from the fall of a stony meteorite—a “carboanceous chondrite” quite unlike the more familiar metallic “siderites”—some 20 fragments of which were recovered near the French town of Orgueil on May 14, 1864. The various fragments were distributed to many scientific institutions, including one in Chicago in the USA, where they were examined by numerous scientists. In France, however, they took on a particular significance in the context of a controversy that had been bubbling away for five years, in which one of the contenders, Louis Pasteur, had delivered what he believed to be a lethal blow a few weeks earlier, on April 7. On that day, Pasteur had delivered an address to a regular “scientific soirée” at the Sorbonne in which he reported the results of a series of experiments that he had carried out in order to disprove the theory of spontaneous generation championed by his rival, Félix-Archimède Pouchet. Parville, as an ambitious scientific journalist, would certainly have been present at the soirée, on the bench set aside for the press, and would have seen Pouchet walk out, complaining that the audience was prejudiced against him.

  Pouchet, who preferred to call his thesis “hétérogénie” [heterogenesis] had earlier conducted a series of experiments in which he concocted mixtures of the various materials he thought necessary to the spontaneous generation of life and left them alone for a while; in every case, living creatures eventually appeared. Organic chemistry was then in its infancy, and microbiology was still working under the severe handicap of microscopes whose acuity was limited by chromatic aberration; bacteria were not yet included on the official roster of living organisms, although the suspicion that organisms too tiny to be visible—as yet—was widespread. Pasteur was convinced that Pouchet’s experiments had been contaminated by such invisible “germs” and repeated them, sterilizing all the mixtures with heat, then sealing half the containing vessels to avoid the possibility of external contamination. The unsealed vessels “generated” life while the sealed ones did not—this was what Pasteur reported to the soirée, along with the claim that he had proved that spontaneous generation did not occur.

  Pasteur’s address became famous—the full text can be read on the internet, in French and English—and was widely cited as a classic application of the experimental method, although the impossibility of proving a negative meant that he had really only provided evidence that Pouchet’s experiments could have been subject to external contamination. Pouchet continued to fight his corner until he died, and was not entirely without sympathy in the French scientific community. Although Pouchet has been largely forgotten in the interim, he had a considerable reputation at the time as a popularizer of science, and one element of his retaliation to Pasteur’s address was the publication in 1865 of L’univers, a lavishly-illustrated summarization of contemporary ideas regarding the cosmos, its origin and development, which was reprinted several times. Perhaps more significantly, he was also one of the leading French supporters of Charles Darwin, who had published The Origin of Species in 1859, the year that the Pouchet-Pasteur feud had kicked off.

  Although Pasteur’s victory was, and still is, regarded as a heroic triumph science over superstition—or at least over pseudoscience—his convictions owed as much to his Catholic faith and his antipathy to Darwinism as to his scientific principles. He was opposed to both heterogenesis and natural selection on the grounds that they were essentially “materialistic,” threatening the elimination of God’s creative role in the history of the universe. His diehard belief in invisible “germs”—which also led to his revolutionizing the theory of disease and thus laying the foundations of modern medicine—was, in essence, a means of saving God’s creativity from the menace of a materialistic model of life’s emergence. He would presumably have been disappointed had he been able to anticipate that his own theories would one day be considered to be pillars of materialism, sidelining God just as rudely as he considered Pouchet to have done.

  The relevance of all this to the Orgueil meteorite—and thus to Parville’s hoax—was that the scientists examining the fragments of the chondrite soon began to report the existence within it of organic materials. The finding was initially reported on May 31 by a scientist who signed his papers S. Cloëz, but it was rapidly confirmed by others, including Marcellin Berthelot and Louis Pasteur. This discovery seemed to many observers and commentators to have a significant bearing on the still-hot topic of spontaneous generation, especially if—as Cloëz and others suggested—the organic materials were fossils: the remains of long-dead living creatures. The scientific significance of fossils had been considerably boosted in the early 19th century by fierce arguments about the true age of the Earth and the evolution of life on its surface, whose fervor had recently been refueled by The Origin of Species; their newsworthiness had been further enhanced by a craze for “dinosaur-hunting” that was raging in the USA alongside, and despite, the Civil War.

  The extraterrestrial origin of meteorites had been a hot topic of controversy itself at the beginning of the 19th century, and although it was largely settled by 1864, there was no universally-agreed theory as to exactly where they originated, or why they differed in composition. If some contained fossils, where could those fossils possibly have come from? If the original organisms had sprung from Pasteurian “germs,” where had the germs originated? It seemed to some interested parties that, if there really was, or ever had been, life inside “bolides”—the hypothetical spacefaring bodies that were supposed to give rise to meteorites—then spontaneous generation offered a more plausible explanation than a separate and deliberate act of divine creation, or what later came to be known as the “panspermia hypothesis”: the notion that life originated elsewhere in the universe had reached Earth—and many other planets—by means of a migration.

  At any rate, the potential significance of the Orgueil meteorite’s organic contents briefly became a significant source of speculation in the burgeoning world of French scientific journalism. The publicity given to the analyses of the fragments and the presence within them of organic material not only prompted Parville’s hoax but provided it with a media environment that guaranteed it a measure of superficial plausibility. When the decision was made to expand the two newspaper articles into a book, it was entirely natural that Parville should elect to construct an
imaginary “scientific commission” not unlike the one that had sat in judgment over Pasteur’s experiments at the Sorbonne, which would not only settle the question as to whether the aerolith containing a mummified human really had come from Mars, but examine what that conclusion might imply for contemporary science’s model of the universe and the evolutionary process, with particular reference to the role therein of spontaneous generation. It is possible that Parville had not made up his own mind about the issue when he started out on he extrapolation, and that he used the imaginary debate to clarify his own thoughts and to decide where he stood—for the time being, at least.

  Parville evidently began to struggle with the task of extrapolating his original article as soon as he was required by popular demand to write as follow-up piece. He had, in effect, already set out the basic idea in its entirety; the second letter could only reiterate it and add some relatively trivial additional details. Although the notion of describing the proceedings of a scientific conference summoned to study and discuss the discovery must have seemed both obvious and attractive to him, he found considerable practical difficulty in formulating that project.

  The first chapter of the extrapolation clearly intends to develop the description of the conference as a satire on the conduct of contemporary scientists; it mostly consists of a series of more-or-less brief descriptions of eccentric stereotypes. It is possible that Parville cannibalized other writings in its composition; the anecdotal description of Mr. Stek might well have been co-opted from elsewhere. He soon decided—or was advised by his publisher—that he was on the wrong track, and, rather than begin again, abruptly changed direction. His subsequent attempts at satirical humor were tokenistic, and he settled down to the more earnest business of constructing a summary account of—quite literally—life, the universe and everything.

  Parville never wrote anything else as expansive as the cosmic vision featured in Un habitant de la planète Mars. The fact that he was writing fiction, putting his ideas into the mouths of hypothetical individuals, gave him a freedom to speculate and associate disparate ideas that he did not allow himself in his customary reportage. The struggle he experienced in fictionalizing the material, however, illustrated one of the key difficulties under which the hybrid genre of “science fiction” has always labored: the fact that any authorial concession to the primary narrative convention of mimetic representation (usually summarized as “show, don’t tell”) tends to have a focusing effect that is not easily suited to the discussion of scientific issues, especially those involving the development of Grand Theory. In general, story-telling techniques make a much better metaphorical microscope than telescope, while non-fictional formats are far more amenable to the opposite tendency. By keeping his concessions to narrative design to an absolute minimum, though, Parville achieved a particular combination of quasi-non-fictional technique and speculative ambition that was exceedingly rare at the time, although it is echoed in numerous 20th century works of “visionary non-fiction,” perhaps most artfully in the works of Loren Eiseley.

  Inevitably, everything that Parville thought about the nature of the universe was eventually falsified by the progress of scientific knowledge. His notion of how the cosmos is organized and the character of the interconnecting threads that bind it into a coherent whole were based on false assumptions, of whose falseness he could not yet have been aware. The whole ideative edifice is, in retrospect, nothing but a work of fantastic fiction. That does not mean, however, that it was in any way unintelligent; nor does it mean that it became uninteresting the moment the falsity of its core assumptions was revealed by the further theoretical progress of geology, physics and organic chemistry. Indeed, it is arguable that Parville’s cosmic vision is as useful an artifact in the archaeology of knowledge as his hypothetical meteorite would have been to its discoverers.

  In particular, the essay that Parville extrapolated from his initial hoax allows modern readers to perceive how strangely misleading incomplete knowledge can be, how easy it is to build a mistaken edifice of speculation, quite conscientiously, on actual discoveries, and—perhaps most interestingly of all—how cultural factors work on the interpretation of scientific data to produce particular perspectives. Parville’s cosmic vision is a distinctively French vision, quite different in significant ways from the kindred visions built in Britain by Robert Hunt, in The Poetry of Science (1848), and in America by Edgar Allan Poe, in Eureka (1848). The fact that those distinctive features also show up in the work of his rival popularizer, Camille Flammarion, and were preserved in a considerable fraction of subsequent French scientific romance—though not the works of Jules Verne and his meeker imitators—is due at least as much to a common intellectual background as to any direct influence.

  The author of Un habitant de la planète Mars was born François-Henri Peudefer in Evreux in 1838. After completing his education at the Ecole des Mines—which specialized in the education of would-be mining engineers, although it had perforce to take some interest in more theoretical issues in geological science—he joined a scientific expedition to the Americas, spending time in Central America and the Southern USA before returning to France in 1860. He immediately embarked on a career as a science journalist, eventually writing articles for many of the leading periodicals of the day. His position with Le Pays was the first of any significance, and he was still building his career when he produced his hoax article in 1864, but he subsequently went from strength to strength, working for Le Constitutionnel, La Patrie and Le Moniteur, before becoming the editor of Science pour tous and the science correspondent of the Journal des Débats. He joined the editorial staff of La Nature soon after its foundation in 1873, and played a significant role in its direction during the final decades of the century.

  Like many other men of his century who claimed descent from extinct noble families, Peudefer was ambitious to reclaim an appearance of aristocratic status, and began signing himself “Henri de Parville” from the outset of his career, although he was not granted the right by official decree until December 1865 (according to Larousse; a rival encyclopedia has 1869). In addition to his work for periodicals he produced an annual series of Causeries scientifiques [Scientific Chats] launched in 1861, which offered an informal and sometimes witty explanatory survey of each year’s scientific progress, and eventually acquired a large readership. In the same year that Un habitant de la planète Mars appeared he published a substantial account of Découvertes et industries moderne [Modern Discoveries and Industries] and he went on to produce other significant popularizations, notably one of the guidebooks to L’Exposition Universelle de 1867; subsequently, he provided the same service for the Exposition of 1889.

  Parville was invited as an honored guest to the first screening by the Lumière brothers of their epoch-making film of a train entering a railway station on December 28, 1895, and the comments that he subsequently gave to the press were so widely reproduced that they eventually eclipsed everything else he wrote—they are still quoted in many websites. He retired from active journalism in the early years of the 20th century, eventually dying in 1909. He was sufficiently famous and well-respected to be posthumously honored by the foundation of a Prix Henri de Parville by the Académie des Sciences, which is still awarded annually.

  This translation has been made from the version of the text produced by Ebooks libres et gratuits and distributed via their website, ebooksgratuits.com. I have not been able to compare it with the original, but I strongly suspect that most, if not all, of the typographical errors and misspellings contained in the neatly reset text were carried forward from the Hetzel edition. I have corrected numerous trivial errors of this sort and have unified the forms of several names that are given in different versions at different points of the text.

  Translation of antique speculative texts is always problematic because of their use of obsolete terminology, but I have attempted rigorously to avoid the temptation to substitute terms of more recent provenance, however apt they might
seem. This results in the preservation in my version of such awkward phrases as “quantity of motion” (from quantité de mouvement), for which most modern texts—of a visionary as well as a scientific nature—would certainly substitute “energy,” but it would have distorted the character of the text to do otherwise. I have, for the same reason, dutifully preserved the usage of “inhabitant of the planet Mars” rather than substitute “Martian,” although it might be the inherent tendency of the French language—which always uses formulations of the sort X de Y where English routinely uses contracted formulations—that led Parville to use that laborious formula, rather than any enigmatically conscientious determination on his part to refrain from coining the now-familiar French word Martien.

  Further problems arose from the fact that Parville’s text is so abundantly footnoted, and that some of his footnotes require footnoting themselves if they are to be of much use to modern readers; I have prefaced all my translations of his footnotes with an introductory identifier and have placed direct translations thereof in inverted commas, so as to distinguish them from my supplementary comments and my own notes. I hope that the footnotes to this edition, although they are very extensive indeed, will allow the text to be read with an appropriate understanding of context. Some further comments on the work’s situation within the development of French scientific romance and contemporary scientific knowledge are supplied in the afterword.

  Brian Stableford

  An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars

  Preface

  The letters that compose this book were addressed to us successively in a fashion that was, to say the very least, singular.