The Blue Peril

Often hailed as the best French science fiction writer of the early 20th century, Maurice Renard coined the term "Scientific Marvel Fiction" to pen a series of gripping, ground-breaking stories that owe as much to Edgar Allan Poe as they do to H.-G. Wells. Until now, Renard was best known to the English-speaking public for his thrice-filmed thriller, The Hands of Orlac. The Blue Peril (1911), which many consider to be Renard's masterpiece, features invisible alien creatures which live in high Earth orbit and which, feeling threatened by man's incursion into space, retaliate by fishing for men the way we capture fish, and studying our species. It is the third of a series of five volumes, translated and annotated by Brian Stableford, devoted to presenting the classic works of this pioneering giant of French science fiction.The Bugey region of France is a picturesque area in a low series of hills at the tip of the Jura Mountains.[3] Mysteriously, human body parts start to be discovered scattered all over the landscape. Coincidentally, there have been instances of both humans and animals disappearing. Initially, we are led to believe that these are crimes of the natural sort, until it is discovered that they were kidnapped by invisible, ethereal beings, the Sarvants, living 50,000 feet (15,000 m) above the Earth in the upper atmosphere. It turns out that the whole planet is covered by a thin, transparent spherical membrane that covers the atmosphere in the same way that the earth's crust covers the molten rocks beneath.Once they have been collected, the humans are dissected, studied and mounted for display in a sort of museum of natural history. Certain bodies are discarded, and thrown "overboard", which is the cause of the body parts which are found scattered across Bugey.[4] This is uncovered through an account found in the pocket of one of the bodies discovered, written by one of those unfortunate enough to have sojourned with Sarvants who managed to write and who chose to kill himself in order to be dumped out of their stratospheric dwelling.After managing to capture one of the ships of the Sarvants, the French authorities discover that these enigmatic beings do not exist as individual entities, rather they are a race of tiny insectile creatures who are able to assemble and dissemble their bodies with each other in order to form temporary and functional organs controlling their machines.Eventually, the Sarvants accidentally discover that the specimens they have been acquiring are capable of both suffering and rational thought. This realization leads the Sarvants to cease their experiments.(It) "still reads as well as when it was originally published."