Leon Daudet

The Bacchantes: a Dionysian Scientific Romance Leon Daudet

In this classic science fiction novel, Romain Ségétan, a brilliant scientist whose creativity is intimately linked to his erotic experience, particularly in its visual dimension, is struggling to develop a technology to capture and control the "waves of time," which will allow recurrent images and other echoes of the past to be brought forward into clearer focus. After being temporarily blinded by a jealous rival in love, he feels impelled to celebrate the restoration of his sight by means of a historical re-enactment of s series of frescoes found in the recently-excavated Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, aided and facilitated by his wave-enhancing apparatus, the Dyonisos. The result testifies to the subtle force of the waves of time, both in history and on the contemporary human psyche. A strikingly original--and erotic--SF novel about the nature of time!