Brian Stableford

Posthumous Correspondence (Volume 3) Brian Stableford

Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) produced over 180 books, totaling some 57,000 pages, many of them printed by his own hand, on almost every conceivable subject. Praised in Germany, he was mostly forgotten in France until being rediscovered by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. Two of his most important seminal works are being presented here for the first time in English in a four-volume edition. Restif gave free rein to his imagination in Posthumous Correspondence (first written in 1787-89; augmented in 1796, and finally published in 1802), presented as a sequence of letters between Monsieur de Fontlhète and his beloved wife Hortense. In the third and final volume, Duke Multipliandre visits the other known planets of the solar system and numerous other worlds then unknown to science, including trans-Uranian planets, a comet and three planets within the orbit of Mercury, and interacts with their peculiar inhabitants. After that, he sets off to visit several other solar systems, including those of Sirius and Vega, and several nebulae, before concluding his journey in the "astral center," into which the entire universe will one day be dissolved, before being regenerated as an entirely new universe. Multipliandre then returns to Earth, where, immortal by virtue of his super-powers, he settles down to witness the entire future of the Earth, initially coping with a new form of life born from a close encounter between the planet and a comet, which produces, among other plant and animal species, a race of winged humans, whom Multipliandre calls "angels."