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Notes 123 Introduction: Rosny’s Evolutionary Ecology 1. Mark Rose, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 7. 2 Robert L. Forward, “When Science Writes the Fiction,” in Hard Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 1–21; quotation from epigraph, 1. 3 Amy Louise Downey, “The Life and Works of J.-H. Rosny aîné, 1856–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1950), 18–28. 4 Cited in Rosny aîné, Portraits et souvenirs (Paris: Cie française des arts graphiques, 1945), 22. Jean Perrin won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1936. The introduction to this posthumous work was written by Robert Borel-Rosny, the son of Rosny’s eldest daughter, Irmine Gertrude, who was raised by Rosny and his second wife, Marie Borel. The family of Robert Borel is the executor of Rosny’s literary estate. 5. Philip José Farmer and J.-H. Rosny, Ironcastle (New York: DAW Books, 1976). JeanJacques Annaud’s film La Guerre du feu was released in 1981. A new English mass-market edition of the Harold Talbott translation: The Quest for Fire (New York: Ballantine Books) was released in 1982. 6. See Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle 64, 681–82 (January–February 1986), a special issue partly devoted to the Wells-Rosny comparison. Most interesting are the essays by Roger Bozzetto, “Wells et Rosny devant l’inconnu”; Daniel Compère, “La fin des hommes”; and Daniel Congenas, “Prehistoire et récit préhistorique chez Rosny et Wells.” 7. In his Origin of Species, however, Darwin did consider what he called “pangenesis” asa hypothesis, thatis, the hypothetical existenceof “pangenes,” some sortofmicroscopic somatic cells or particles that contain information, respond to environmental stimulus, and—in the form of germ cells in the bloodstream—pass on acquired information from parents to the next generation. 8. “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” in Darwin: A Critical Editon, edited by Philip Appleman (New York: Norton, 1970), 103. 9. For the sake of clarity, we will use the term “alien” to refer to extraterrestrials only. 10. Marie-Hélène Huet, L’Histoire des Voyages extraordinaires: Essai sur l’oeuvre de Jules Verne (Paris: Minard, 1975). 11. Allen A. Debus, “Reframing the Science in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth,” Science-Fiction Studies 33, 3 (November 2006), 405–21. 124 Notes to Pages xxiii–xxxix 12. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977). 13. An example of how Wells introduces new perspectives of evolutionary science into this middle-class world is the story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.” At the height of England’s colonial empire, adventurers scoured uncharted places like Borneo seeking new species of flora, such as rare orchids. In Wells’s tale, however, such rarities are little more than things displayed and sold in London’s orchid market. The protagonist, WinterWedderburn , is a “shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting employment” (343). A bachelor, he lives with his cousin-housekeeper. His sole passion is collecting orchids. He buys an orchid with a particularly violent history: it was found under the crushed body of Batten the explorer: “Every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of him by jungle leeches” (346). Wedderburn fancies himself a Darwinist as he ponders his plant: “Darwin studied their fertilization. . . . Well it seems there are lots of orchids known the flower of which cannot possibly be used for fertilization” (348). He speculates that his orchid may reproduce through its tubers. But if that is so, then what purpose do its flowers serve? This he learns firsthand. Day-to-day contact with his “new darling” in his hothouse culminates in an apparent liebestod. When the orchid blooms, it apparently emits a scent that overpowers Wedderburn’s senses. Wary (or jealous) of the plant, his cousin finds him in the nick of time, “lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid.” What ensues seems a struggle between rival lovers—the cousin tears him from the plant’s “embrace” and kills it. The reader’s first reaction is that the plant is a vampire. This reaction of horror, however , is meant to suggest another explanation, a scientific one certainly more shocking to a Victorian...

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