New Releases September 2018

by Marie-Madeleine de Lubert - adapted  by Brian Stableford - cover by Mike Hoffman. READ AN EXCERPT - 308 p. - US$ 23.95

Mademoiselle de Lubert’s first fantastic tale, published in 1737, was the striking original Tecserion in which the eponymous king of the Land of Ostriches is madly in love with Belzamire, Princess of Flowers, who herself dotes on the King’s nephew, Melidor. The story is replete with elaborate descriptions of strange societies, including one located on Venus. The fascination extravagantly displayed in her stories with the metamorphoses of humans into animals is reflected in the ambiguous naming of realms and individuals. Such metamorphoses are a common motif within the genre, but no other writer ever deployed it with the same intensity and fascination as Mademoiselle de Lubert.

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by Victor-Emile Michelet - adapted by Brian Stableford - cover by Mike Hoffman. READ AN EXCERPT - 216 p. - US$ 20.95

The stories collected in Victor-Emile Michelet’s Superhuman Tales (1900) reveal his determined and constant ambition to push various envelopes in horror, fantasy and supernatural, which gives them a unique, particular edge. Michelet makes considerable efforts to distance his work from the conventional formulae. His tales draw energy and charm from the earnest esotericism of their central motifs, and poignantly exploit the author’s fascination with death. Filled with the ironic spirit of the contes cruels, which dominated upmarket short fiction during the fin-de-siècle, they are visionary fantasies with a peculiar obliquity that is the hallmark of his work. Michelet took his fantasy and symbolism seriously, especially when their extrapolation led him by convoluted paths to the strange conclusions displayed in this collection.

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seven stories selected and adapted by Brian Stableford - cover by Jean-Félix Lyon. READ AN EXCERPT - 416 p. - US$ 30.95

Journey to the Isles of Atlantis is the sixteenth volume in a series of anthologies translating antique items of French roman scientifique. Included in this collection are Fututistic Paris in 5839 (1822), a story for which the editor was fined a thousand francs and sentenced to three months in prison; The Clockmaker of Nuremberg (1882) and The Inventor (1902), which anticipate the age of aviation; King Beta (1905), in which an aeronaut ends up in a kingdom where modern science is unknown and people still believe in the power of enchanters. Optimistic accounts of the human future future are presented in Humans in the Year 3000 (1907), dedicated to H G Wells, and The Discovery of the Earth in 2009 (1909). Finally, the eponymous Atlantis-based fantasy written in 1914 features Plato’s fictitious island, and uses that vanished civilization as a satirical reflection of contemporary France.

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