The Supreme Progress

by Charles Cros, Louis Mullen

This collection of 18 proto-science fiction tales, translated and edited by renowned science fiction writer and scholar Brian Stableford, includes such ground-breaking tales as Charles Cros' An Interastral Drama (1872), about an unlawful love between an Earthman and a Venusian woman, Victorien Sardou's The Black Pearl (1862), the first romance of forensic science, Eugène Mouton's The End of the World (1872), depicting an ecocatastrophe precipitated by global warming generated by human industrial activity, and Louis Mullem's The Supreme Progress (1890), an imaginative tour de force of unprecedented scope predicting ideas that were later to be popularized by writers such as Olaf Stapledon. All the stories included in this volume predate the first translation into French of H.G. Wells. They are representative of a distinct tradition of romans scientifiques whose cardinal influences included astronomer Camille Flammarion and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. This edition includes a historical introduction and notes by Stableford.

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2011

About the author

Charles Cros or Émile-Hortensius-Charles Cros (October 1, 1842 – August 9, 1888) was a French poet and inventor. He was born in Fabrezan, Aude, France, 35 km to the East of Carcassonne.

Cros was a well-regarded poet and humorous writer. As an inventor, he was interested in the fields of transmitting graphics by telegraph and making photographs in color, but he is perhaps best known for being the first person to conceive a method for reproducing recorded sound, an invention he named the Paleophone.

Charles Cros died in Paris at the age of 45.

Reviews

[Bo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The third book in Brian Stableford’s collection of early French sci-fi stories translated into English, usually for the first time. The fourth one that I read though.
The collection continues in the same way each volume tends to go with stories often more interesting than good, with some standouts in quality but also some real stinkers, mainly, the work of Louis Mullem who got 92 out of 300 pages dedicated to him in this book, consisting of seven stories of which only one 18 page story was really good in my opinion. That said, if you’re interested in early science fiction then this series of books, soon to be 16 volumes and counting, is a must read. The breadth of ideas explored is wider than in any anthology of modern stories I’ve ever read, and the different outlook on life , religion, politics, etc that prevailed back then, and how those forms the views of the future is all very interesting.

Now let’s get to a more unfortunate point about this book, and this goes for the other four books put out by Black Coat Press that I’ve read as well... they have not been proofread, at least not to any great degree. The copy editing is garbage, you’ll see spelling errors (of the kind that turns one word into another) every other page, sometimes multiple errors on a single page. And repeated words and such. It’s sad considering that they are the only ones putting out this kind of stuff in English on a large scale. One can only hope they have improved since these early volumes I’ve read, which were released more than half a decade ago.
I will continue reading em either way.