The Clock of the Centuries (1902)

If you have not yet heard of Black Coat Press, consider this the voice crying out in the wilderness. Created in 2003 and edited by renowned writers Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficer, Black Coat specializes in English translations of classic French Science Fiction, Horror and Mystery. The earliest work they've gone back to is Charles de Fieux, Chevalier de Mouhy's Lamékis from 1738 and range up to recent work by Jean-Claude Dunyach and the Lofficers. Now that they have begun to transfer their corpus to epub and pdf formats, these obscure classics are but an easy and very worthwhile pittance to have added to one's e-reader.

My first was The Clock of the Centuries by the great Albert Robida, as translated by Brian Stableford. Written almost 20 years after his most celebrated book, The Twentieth Century, this 1902 novella has the cynical conservative Robida invent a novel catastrophe: the sudden reversal of time. A series of natural disasters sweep the world, the scale of which would send shivers of pleasure down the spine of Roland Emmerich. In the wake of them, a strange new cosmic order has taken over. For example, the sun now rises in the West and sets in the East. Hair regains its colour. Fallen teeth grow back. A couple on the verge of divorce before the catastrophe rekindle their youthful ardour. And then the dead start coming back to life.

An old philosopher whose poetic sensibilities have returned at long last lionizes the new order. No more is humanity to be ground under the heel of groping uncertainty about the future, victim to the whims of chance and fancy. Going backwards, he proclaims, is the real progress. The errors of the present can be undone, and with cognizance of history so too can the errors of the past. Devastating wars could be avoided, disasters undone, and a perfect society achieved by the time we revert back to living in caves.

Though a historical romantic in his own right who recreated "Old Paris" for the 1900 edition of the Exposition Universelle, Robida is not immune to recognizing some of the great dangers of this sort of nostalgic utopianism. As a man, his undesceased father and his very late grandfather sit around discussing the issues of the day, it becomes apparent that the past cannot come back without the attitudes that made it what it was. Grandfather has no use for these newfangled steam engines and electricity, and less for the viewpoints of his descendants. It reminded me of a discussion I once had with a friend about my fetish for Victorian aesthetics divorced from the social views of the Victorian Era, and her still open question about whether the aesthetics were themselves a product of the social views. Is it possible to have the opiated women of the Pre-Raphaelites without the Romantic pedestal-placing that was itself a product of treating women as anything other than fully equal human beings? Robida might say no, though it doesn't bother him if the approving tones describing the rapidly extinguishing feminist movement are any indication.

Robida does have a bit of fun at the expense of his characters. There is the artist, unknown in life whose work only appreciated after death, now facing the prospect of another round of poverty. Because he is alive to resume production, his works are once again worthless. The author, however, is at his best when he is still the Romantic. Being France, everyone is dreading when time reverses to the terrors of the Revolution. Into the mouth of one of time's prematurely returned specimens, Robida inserts a dazzling, passionate speech concluding with:

Your liberty, as we saw before you came to understand it, is oppression and violence, a brutal and disordered tyranny leading inevitably to the establishment of regulated tyranny. Your impossible equality will be a stupid abasement of all to a sub-normal level by a roller-press! Your liberty of 1789 ended in the prisons of 1793, where everyone found themselves equal before the guillotine, the supreme and final expression of that sweet word "fraternity," which was never so misunderstood as it was on the day when such a scaffold was made - yes, the fraternity of aristocratic and plebian heads in the bran of the basket.

Stableford has insightfully supplemented The Clock of the Centuries with an earlier time-twisting short story by Robida. Yesterday Now, written in 1890 in response to the 1889 Exposition in Paris, has a mad scientist pulling the court of King Louis XIV out of the past and into the present. Nineteenth Century France is seen afresh through the eyes of the Sun King in this satire, with the usual affirmations of astonishment and distress. He wonders what great monument is being built beneath all that scaffolding, until his scientist-host informs him that the Eiffel Tower is the finished monument itself. Louis is incredulous. Likewise is he nonplussed with the telephone, phonograph, omnibus and aerostat.

With the possible exception of Back to the Future, is there ever a story in which the fish from the past takes to being out of the water? Some of the best moments of the short are when past and present converge, thanks to the scientist using the palace of Versailles as his staging ground. The king's guard are baffled by commoners in the inner chambers, and the tour guide is baffled by these unauthorized historical reenactors. Parisians, nurtured in an Age of Industry in which everything is possible hardly bat an eyelash at the resurrected monarch, except to crowd around him as a tourist attraction.

In both stories, Robida demonstrates his Romantic sensibilities, his nostalgic view of the past and how it might comment on the perceived follies of the modern day. Yet he is not an unabashed nostalgist. He is still capable of reflecting on how we might be able to bring back the good of the past expunged of its challenges, if such a thing is even possible. If left unchecked, it is not only the good that will come back with the old day, but the bad as well.