Prisoner of the Vampires of Mars

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Prisoner of the Vampires of Mars

Gustave Le Rouge
Translated by David Beus and Brian Evenson
Introduction by William Ambler

Bison Frontiers of Imagination Series

416 pages

Paperback

July 2015

978-0-8032-1896-3

$26.95 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

July 2015

978-0-8032-7713-7

$26.95 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

July 2015

978-0-8032-7715-1

$26.95 Add to Cart

About the Book

Robert Darvel, a young and penniless French engineer at the turn of the twentieth century, is an amateur astronomer obsessed with the planet Mars. Transported by a combination of science and psychic powers to Mars, Robert must navigate the dangers of the Red Planet while trying to return to his fiancée on Earth. Through his travels, we discover that Mars can not only support life but is also home to three different types of vampires. This riveting combination of science fiction and the adventure story provides a vivid depiction of an imagined Mars and its strange, unearthly creatures who might be closer to earthly humans than we would care to believe.

Originally published in French as two separate volumes, translated as The Prisoner of the Planet Mars (1908) and The War of the Vampires (1909), this vintage work is available to English-language audiences unabridged for the first time and masterfully translated by David Beus and Brian Evenson.

Author Bio

Gustave Le Rouge (1867–1938) was a French writer of early science fiction. His masterpiece vampire novels charted an innovative course for early science fiction. David Beus is an assistant professor of international cultural studies at Brigham Young University–Hawai‘i. He translated, with Brian Evenson, Christian Gailly’s novel Red Haze (Nebraska, 2005). Brian Evenson is the Royce Professor of Excellence in Teaching in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University. He is the author of more than a dozen novels and translations, including Immobility, Windeye, and Altmann’s Tongue (Nebraska, 2002). William Ambler lives and writes in Rhode Island. His work can be found at the Huffington Post and Word and Film.

Praise

“The best novel of one of the most important SF writers in France at the dawn of the twentieth century. Gustave Le Rouge was one of the first to portray the overlap between scientific technology and psychic phenomena to explore a host of new cognitive, aesthetic, and speculative frontiers. In so doing, he helped to launch a new literary genre.”—Arthur Evans, author of Jules Verne Rediscovered and managing editor of Science Fiction Studies 

Table of Contents

Introduction by William Ambler

The Prisoner of the Planet Mars
Part One
I. A Mysterious Message
II. Ralph Pitcher’s Home
III. Missing
IV. Yarmouth Street
V. The Castle of Energy
VI. Marvels
VII. The Catastrophe
VIII. The Awakening
Part Two
I. The Wilderness
II. Dead from Joy
III. The Conquest of Fire
IV. The White Beast
V. The Vampire
VI. Captain Wad’s Experiment
VII. The Martian Village
VIII. Public Festivities
IX. War with the Idols
X. Nocturnal Battle
XI. Explorations
XII. Progress
XIII. The Crystal Mountain
XIV. The Photographs
XV. “RO-BERT DAR-VEL”
XVI. Darkness
Translator’s Note

The War of the Vampires
Part One: The Invisibles
I. Zarouk
II. The Villa des Lentisques
III. A Meal Worthy of Lucullus
IV. The Invisible Being
V. The Catastrophe
VI. A Strange Meteorite
VII. A Potent Cure
Part Two: The Martian Mystery
I. Robert Darvel’s Tale
II. After the Victory
III. The Aerophytes
IV. The Glass Tower
V. Arsenals and Catacombs
VI. The Opal Helmet
VII. The Isle of Death
VIII. The Road Home
Part Three: The Last of the Vampires
I. Nocturnal Phantasms
II. The Pursuit
III. Explanations

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