By MAURICE RENARD (Black Coat Press; 2010)

It took a century for this 1910 French classic to be translated into English, and it was nearly worth the wait.  The author was by the late science fiction legend Maurice Renard (1875-1939), known primarily for writing H.G. Wells pastiches; they include the 1905 novel DOCTOR LERNE, an extravagant take on THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, and the 1923 story “The Man who Wanted to be Invisible,” in which Renard provided a rejoinder to THE INVISIBLE MAN in the form of a character who thinks he’s invisible (but in reality isn’t).  THE BLUE PERIL/LE PERIL BLEU would appear to represent Renard’s take on THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, although this time around he came up with a premise that, while replicating the overall form of Wells’ classic, is genuinely original.

It posits that a race of invisible beings known to us as “Sarvants,” residing in an upper region of the Earth’s atmosphere, are plucking—or fishing—objects and people from the surface of the planet for display in a vast floating terrarium.  The novel’s early portions, in which the citizens of the Bugey region of Eastern France are perplexed by the sightings of folks rising up into the air (and the periodic rains of blood and body parts that inevitably follow), are slow going; nowadays it seems downright inexplicable that, amid all the rationales floated by the characters, nobody ever breaches the idea of extraterrestrial abduction (doubtless the first possibility people would jump to today).  It certainly doesn’t help matters that none of those characters, whose ranks include a Sherlock Holmes wannabe whose purpose to the story isn’t announced until the end of the book, are very interesting or compelling.

It takes until a little over the halfway point, when a scientifically oriented individual gets fished by the Sarvants and thinks to keep a diary of his experiences, for the book to really gain momentum.  It’s here, upon the finding of said diary attached to its author’s corpse (jettisoned by the Sarvants after he committed suicide), that the novel attains the type of visionary grandeur that shows precisely why THE BLUE PERIL is often proclaimed Maurice Renard’s masterpiece.  The descriptions of existence in the floating terrarium, whose subjects are subjected to horrific experiments by unseen tormentors, are stunning feats of pure imagination, as are later passages describing the exploration of an invisible submarine the Sarvants have crashed on the surface of the Earth.

Equally interesting is the humanistic bent of the book’s latter portion, in which Renard offers a rejoinder to the xenophobia of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (not unlike that which the aforementioned “The Man Who Wanted to be Invisible” wreaked on THE INVISIBLE MAN).  It’s in the final pages that the Sarvants elect to cease with their abductions and inhuman experiments.  No, that development isn’t too profound, but the conclusion reached is; as one of the principal characters notes, this change of heart by the Sarvants actually puts them ahead of us on the morality spectrum.

The translator was the indefatigable Brian Stableford, who in conjunction with Black Coat Press has made several volumes of Maurice Renard’s fiction available in English.  As with many of Stableford’s 300-plus translations, the text is littered with typos, but otherwise this is a salutary piece of work, in service of a novel that, dated though it is, remains a standout work of speculative delirium.