| Club Merveilleux-scientifique |
| Total Entries 46 |
| Representative Jean Lebris |
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Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), or “Dr Lerne, Demi-God”, was a celebrated novel by Maurice Renard, hailed by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire as a “subdivine novel of metamorphoses”. Published in English as New Bodies for Old, it heralded the dawn of a new French literary genre – one that ventured boldly into the uncertain and the unknown. Renard called it “merveilleux-scientifique” (“scientific-marvellous”) and its ambition was to help the reader speculate on what could be, and on what exists beyond the reach of our senses, rather than what will be. In other words, allowing a better understanding of what Renard poetically called “the imminent threats of the possible”. As he wrote in 1914, the goal was to “patrol the margins of certainty, not to acquire knowledge of the future, but to gain a greater understanding of the present”. Rejecting the “scientific adventure” storytelling of the celebrated French sci-fi writer Jules Verne – who had died only three years before the publication of Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu – the merveilleux-scientifique genre was grounded in plausibility and the scientific method. According to Renard, only one physical, chemical or biological law may be altered when telling a story. This strict discipline, he argued, is what lent the genre its power to sharpen the reader’s mind, by offering a wholly original kind of thought experiment. ~ Merveilleux-scientifique — Aeon.co
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