The Apocalyptic Science Fiction of Jacques Spitz

Abstract

Jacques Spitz (1896-1963) was the most important writer of French science fiction during the 1930s and 1940s. An engineer by profession and heavily influenced by Surrealism, Spitz specialized in sf narratives combining end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it catastrophes with highly realistic detail and black-humor satire. His most famous sf novels—most of which are not available in English—include L’Homme elastique [The Elastic Man, 1938], La Guerre des mouches [The War of the Flies, 1938], Les Signaux du soleil [Signals from the Sun, 1943], and L’Oeil du purgatoire [The Eye of Purgatory, 1945]. In the history of French science fiction, Spitz was one of the last of a handful of pioneering sf authors in France who, during the early decades of the twentieth century, began to break away from the popular extraordinary voyage narrative recipe of Jules Verne and —following in the speculative footsteps of H.G. Wells, J.-H Rosny aine, and Maurice Renard—experimented with a host of new sf variants.