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Happily, thanks to the Wesleyan Early Classics of Science Fiction Series, three of Rosny’s finest novellas can now be enjoyed in authoritative translations. Never having encountered any of his fiction, I was unprepared for the power and beauty of “The Xipehuz,” “Another World” and “The Death of the Earth.” There’s nothing hokey or dated about these startling visions of Otherness, although they were first published more than a century ago. You won’t read better science-fiction stories — or even better stories — this year. Let me give you just a taste of each.
These brilliant works by Rosny underscore how often American readers — and I include myself — simply neglect the artistically ambitious and exceptionally entertaining science fiction written in languages other than English. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s “Tomorrow’s Eve” (1886), about an android developed in Thomas Edison’s secret laboratory, is as powerful a fable as “Frankenstein.” Kurd Lasswitz’s “Two Planets” (1897) helped inspire the development of rocketry in Germany. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” (1921), banned in the Soviet Union, remains one of the great visionary dystopias, rivaling (and influencing) works by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury. Only a generation ago, the works of Stanislaw Lem gained a well-deserved international reputation, as this restless Polish writer produced a series of Phildickian metaphysical headspinners and Vonnegut-like science-fictional satires; try “Solaris” (1961) or “The Futurological Congress” (1971).
