by Gustave le Rouge
Translated by Brian Stableford
Black Coat Press
Originally published 1908
Been a while since I read this one, but it's a great ride. An engineer goes to Mars by means of an orb surrounded in ocular fluid (ie eyeball juice) that is propelled via the psychic power of a bunch of yogis. On Mars he explores the bizarre wildlife before discovering the invisible bloodsuckers that prey on the living, who are not topless ladies. In the weaker second half the vampires follow the engineer home, but the ending didn't leave any impression with me.
There are a lot of great old French scfi books being translated by Stableford for Black Coat Press, but there was a bit of a pedantic afterword literally listing all the dropped plot threads and inconsistencies. I'm used to this kind of thing with comics, but here it seemed overboard, as if the reader won't be satisfied unless every tiny aspect of the story is explained.
Coming from more of a pulp background, I kind of know what to expect from a hundred year old scifi magazine story that was probably written in less than a month in one draft. I enjoy scifi, but I never got into hard Science Fiction, mainly because of their fan base. Not all of them, but I knew plenty of folk that hated all forms of fiction because it wasn't realistic, but would devour science fiction.
Mainly bringing this up in context of my next post, another thing I didn't finish.
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