Posthumous Correspondence (All 3 Volumes)
POSTHUMOUS CORRESPONDENCE (ALL THREE VOLUMES)
by Restif de la Bretonne
adapted by Brian Stableford
cover by Mike Hoffman
Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) produced over 180 books, totaling some 57,000 pages, many of them printed by his own hand, on almost every conceivable subject. Praised in Germany, he was mostly forgotten in France until being rediscovered by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. Two of his most important seminal works are being presented here for the first time in English in a four-volume edition.
Contents:
Les Posthumes (1802)
Introduction, Afterword and Notes by Brian Stableford.
Restif gave free rein to his imagination in Posthumous Correspondence (first written in 1787-89; augmented in 1796, and finally published in 1802), presented as a sequence of letters between Monsieur de Fontlhète and his beloved wife Hortense.
In this first volume, Fontlhète makes contact with Yfflasie and Clarendon, two discorporated souls and learns of their adventures in the afterlife; later, he acquires artificial wings, uses his new-found power to oppose evil and fight crime, taking on tyrants and warmongers, then gains the ability of exchanging identities by taking over other people's bodies with his own soul.
In the second volume, we meet Duke Multipliandre, whose adventures include not only the acquisition of several superpowers, but a vast series of erotic exploits, some involving the ability of exchanging identities by taking over other people's bodies. After visiting many exotic lands, Multipliandre boldly crosses the boundaries of the known world, in order to explore the hypothetical world of Restif's cosmogonic and evolutionary theories traveling to the Moon and Mars.
In the third and final volume, Duke Multipliandre visits the other known planets of the solar system and numerous other worlds then unknown to science, including trans-Uranian planets, a comet and three planets within the orbit of Mercury, and interacts with their peculiar inhabitants. After that, he sets off to visit several other solar systems, including those of Sirius and Vega, and several nebulae, before concluding his journey in the "astral center," into which the entire universe will one day be dissolved, before being regenerated as an entirely new universe. Multipliandre then returns to Earth, where, immortal by virtue of his super-powers, he settles down to witness the entire future of the Earth, initially coping with a new form of life born from a close encounter between the planet and a comet, which produces, among other plant and animal species, a race of winged humans, whom Multipliandre calls "angels."
Posthumous Correspondence was intended to be the most ambitious, fantastic and all-encompassing of all the exotic literary endeavors that Restif had originally planned to write, the ultimate version of his speculative cosmogony.
Contents:
Les Posthumes (1802)
Introduction, Afterword and Notes by Brian Stableford.