BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Conversations about Christians who wrote fantasy and science fiction often bring up certain names. Gene Wolfe with his Book of the New Sun series. Madeline L’Engle with A Wrinkle in Time. C.S. Lewis with his Ransom trilogy. A smattering of readers may bring up R.A. Lafferty or Maria Doria Russell. At least two of these writers are covered in the 2020 documentary The Science Fiction Makers, one of the better summaries of Christianity’s role in science fiction.

A lesser-known figure cited in The Science Fiction Makers is Victor Rousseau Emanuel, better known as Victor Rousseau.

Born Avigdor Rosseau Emanuel in 1879 in England, Rousseau used many variations on his name (and many pen names, particularly Lew Merrill or as H.M. Egbert) across decades of writing. Most of his stories appeared first in newspapers and pulp magazines before being collected into books.

His work is fairly easy to find today, at least digitally. Ebooks of his early novels abound, including sci-fi works like The Lord of Space, alternative history works like Swords of Florence, and lost word adventure tales like The Eye of Balamok. His short stories often appear in collections of pulp magazine stories, such as Wildside Press’s MegaPack series or digital reissues of Astounding Science Fiction.

However, other than his 1917 novel The Messiah of the Cylinder, few of Rousseau’s stories are rarely discussed. Profiles on him regularly describe him as “understudied” or “largely overlooked today.” The only detailed study of Rousseau appears to be His Second Self by Morgan A. Wallace, which offers over 30 pages on Rousseau’s life as well as a detailed bibliography and a selection of 18 stories from Rousseau’s pre-1923 output (that is, the work in the public domain).

Because Rousseau wrote so much, in fact had to write so much to make even a decent living in the pulps, his stories vary. The works included in His Second Self range from “The Box of Borneos,” a serviceable riff on the Sherlock Holmes detective story, to “The Amulet of Marduk,” a fun if contrived mystery featuring a sleepwalking jewel thief, and then to “The Cripple at Prospect Park,” a sci-fi heist story later expanded into The Devil Chair. The third story has gained substantial admirers; John Clute highlights the way Rousseau works a gyroscopic one-wheeled chair into his story. The other two stories are fun if not terribly original.

Rousseau’s characters were often memorable, but sometimes more memorable for how they fit into trends or bridged changing trends than for their originality. Michael R. Brown has described his super detective Jim Anthony as a clone of Doc Savage, but Brown finds the character entertaining enough to write multiple blog posts covering Jim Anthony’s appearances. Jeff Nevins observes in The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger that Rousseau’s occult detective character Dr. Martinus was one of the few superpowered pulp magazine heroes in the 1920s, the grey area between pulps decreasing superhero tales and comic books reinventing the superhero genre.

Some of Rousseau’s pulp stories anticipate trends. Les Daniels notes in Batman: The Complete History that Rousseau wrote “Batman,” a 1936 story in Spicy Mystery Stories about a man who may have had his brain transplanted into a bat’s body. The story was published by Harry Donenfeld, who released a much more famous Batman story three years later in Detective Comics.

All of these works are engaging, but Rousseau’s crowning achievement was The Messiah of the Cylinder. The novel has two claims to fame. First, Clute observes that it is perhaps the first sci-fi novel to use the phrase “ray gun.” Second, this novel is perhaps the first sci-fi novel to offer an explicitly Christian critique of Darwinian thinking.

The novel is a response to H.G. Well’s When the Sleeper Wakes, a story about a man awakening from suspended animation to discover a brutal society and raises a movement to demolish the leaders in his city. Emily Strand and Michael Boyce observe in The Science Fiction Makers that The Messiah of the Cylinder offers a strong critique of eugenics (something Wells gently supports in the novel, at least in theory) and of secular materialism dismissing faith as foolish. Boyce, echoing John J. Pearce’s comments about Rousseau in When World Views Collide: A Study in Imagination and Evolution, sees Rousseau as one of the first authors to provide an explicitly theological vision in science fiction. Similarly, Richard D. Mullen observes:

“Futurism, a social philosophy, may be said to be the belief that men can establish a well-nigh perfect social order, if only they will rely on science rather than superstition, on logic rather than tradition. Emanuel’s answer is the ancient answer of Christian conservatism: as a fallen creater, man is basically passionate rather than rational, basically evil rather than good, expect insofar as he has been redeemed by religion. Science without religion, logic without tradition, can only lead to disaster…” [Extrapolation VIII no. 2, 45].

Mullen’s essay appeared in Extrapolation Volume VIII, number 2, in 1967. It appears to be one of the most recent academic articles on Rousseau’s novel. Which underlines the question mentioned earlier: why is Rousseau not celebrated as much as figures like Lewis or L’Engle?

Public perception is certainly part of it. Lewis and L’Engle both write nonfiction alongside fiction, including works discussing their spiritual journeys and their views on a Christian view of the imagination. Rousseau was primarily a fiction writer. Other than three literary novels based on his life (The Story of John Paul, The Middle Years, The Selmens), he never published much about his own beliefs. It takes more work to show his faith informed his work. The long arm of history has found it eaiser to fit Lewis and L’Engle easier into the “Christian sci-fi” marketing label than Rousseau.

Publishing trends is another part of it. The debate about what makes a sci-fi story “Christian” or “secular” has a long history. However, much of the current debate is influenced by terminology that did not exist until after Catherine Brown published the historical novel Christy in 1968. As Daniel Silliman explores in Reading Evangelicals, Christian Fiction became a marketing category when the book-buying market changed in the twentieth century to produce Christian bookstores accommodating many flavors of evangelical Christianity under one roof. Originally, Christian Fiction mostly offered romance novels, but figures like Robert Siegel (author of Alpha Centauri and Whalesong) introduced sci-fi into the market by 1978. Before that specialty market existed, Christians expressed their views through mainstream novels, as Lewis did in his Ransom trilogy, and showed their religious views in interviews or public talks, especially with book clubs and magazines specializing in Christian topics. Writers like Lewis, L’Engle, and Rousseau who published before the 1960s always look a little eccentric placed alongside authors like Siegel or Walter Wangerin. For many of these pre-1960s writers, a Christian worldview was the norm, and it would have been strange to ask whether the book was “secular” or “Christian.”

A larger issue is that for all that is interesting about Rousseau’s novel The Messiah of the Cylinder, it lacks a rigorously developed theological vision. For Mullen, The Messiah of the Cylinder is not so much a detailed critique of ideas in When the Sleeper Wakes as a critique of Welles’ philosophy:

“The Messiah of the Cylinder is not a philosophical rejoinder to When the Sleeper Wakes, which offers little in positive statement, or implication, and hence very little that one can argue against. It is instead a rejoinder to Wellsianism in general; that is, to Wells’s thought at Emanuel understands it—or, perhaps, as he intentionally misinterprets it.” [46]

Specifically, Mullets feels that The Messiah of the Cylnder fits into a long stream of works that misread Welles’ depiction of eugenics in When the Sleeper Wakes. Wells’ novel portrays eugenics as a key part of the future, but Mullen argues that Wells did not support the practice wholesale. The novelist was gently optimistic about what eugenics could provide a century or more in the future, but found it too impractical to be used anytime soon. Since Rousseau makes a point of depicting his cruel future society as eugenics gone wild, it reads as Rousseau making Wells a straw man he can use to dismantle eugenicism. His concerns about eugenics are in the right place, but he picks the wrong material to make this argument.

Mullen further argues that When the Sleeper Wakes has a vague philosophy, which makes it hard to respond to the book. It offers a “a satire on laissez-faire capitalism, a stirring romance, and a Darwinist criticism of the Marxist view of the future,” but only achieves the first goal [36]. Since Wells cocludes his story in a way that fulfills a Marxist ideal, “the Marxist optimism and the Darwinist pessimism tend to cancel each other out” [ibid]. Given this ambiguity, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Messiah of the Cylinder has become historically important but not known as a clever satire like Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Satire works best when it deconstructs a clearly explained idea. When it respond to muddled material, the satire becomes muddled as well.

The muddled of themes may also be because Rousseau’s beliefs were more muddled than he admitted. He was born into a Jewish family, but Mullen and others note anti-Judaistic elements in his autobiographical novels The Story of John Paul and The Selmens. He became a Christian by 1909 through attending the Washington Avenue Baptist Church in New York, but the church preached a rather eccentric Christianity. Wallace explains that the pastor, Robert MacDonald, followed the Emmanuel Movement, which promoted hypnotism combined with faith as a method to solve all major emotional and mental problems [17-18]. Rousseau was already interested in hypnosis thanks to his boyhood subscription to The Journal of the Incorporated Society for Psychical Research, a group which “investigated thought-transference, mesmerism, mediumship, Reichenbach Phenomena, apparitions and haunted houses, seances, and the history of all the aforementioned phenomena.” [Wallace 9]. It remains unclear how much Rousseau believed in reincarnation or mesmerism, but his homework proved very useful when he wrote such stories as “The Amulet of Marduk.” Given his mélange of influences, and the fact that pulp writers did not have time to quibble about giving readers a consistent vision, it is unsurprising that The Messiah of the Cylinder lacks the rigorous theology of something like Lewis’ novel Perelandra.

For all his intentions then, Rousseau never had the opportunity to develop The Messiah of the Cylinder into a perfect novel. It sold poorly, as did Rousseau’s literary novels, and he had to keep working for whatever market paid, producing volumes of entertaining if not stellar work. If the pulp market wanted Klondike adventure stories, he wrote stories like “The Wolf Trap.” If it wanted science fiction, he wrote science fiction stories like “The Beetle Horde.” Several stories syndicated for newspapers were later adapted into movies, including The Truant Soul (1916), West of Rainbow’s End (1926), Trailin’ Back (1928), and Prince of the Plains (1927). None of these films translated into enough money that Rousseau could rest on his laurels. By the end of his life, he was writing stories like “Valley of Blood” for Spicy-Adventure Stories, risque adventure tales that toed the line between literature and smut.

Yet even Rousseau’s lowest grade hackwork offers hints that he was aspiring to something higher.  “Space Burial,” published in the February 1941 issue of Spicy-Adventure Stories under the byline Lew Miller, has a more pious attitude toward faith than readers may expect. The story follows Bill Sparling’s adventures going undercover among a band of “nectarines,” female sex workers, on the planet Hungaria to rescue his love Ursula, . The concept is salacious but the content not much more so than the average Christian romance novel on sale today. What makes it curious is how it opens. Sparling gets a hint that something has gone wrong when his spaceship, “The Girl Unknown,” passed by a disturbing object.

“It was the body of a man. Bill watched in amazement as the Girl Unknown moved toward it. Then a cry broke from his lips. He recognized that face, with the shock of snow-white hair, the straggling white beard, even though the habitual black clothing had been stripped off and the corpse flung to destruction in its thermotex underwear.

It was the body of old Houghton, the missionary on the Hilda group of planetoids, beyond the gap that separated them from Eros and Hungaria. Everybody knew and loved Houghton. Even his enemies, of the nectarine trade, respected him, despite the fact that he was their bitter opponent in their nefarious business.

A last glance through the optoscope showed Bill the manner in which the old man had met his death. The top of the head had been crushed in by a ferocious blow.”

Sparling takes time to wrap Houghton’s body and give it the space equivalent of a burial at sea before he keeps looking for Ursula. The scene offers little detail about the church’s role in interstellar society.  Still, the description of Houghton offers a more positive image of missionaries than in many science fiction stories. The story’s combination of religion and sex may not be terribly clever. It’s not Frederick Buechner’s Leo Bebb series. But it demonstrates the little ways Rousseau could turn a formula he disliked into something more. A compromise between art and commerce, between ideals and reality that more than a few Christian authors have emulated as they tried to reconcile their beliefs with their need to make money.

References & Further Reading:

Boyce, Michael. “A Final Frontier? The Uneasy Tension between Science Fiction and Faith.” MichaelBoyce.com, 2021, https://www.michaelwboyce.com/public-scholarship.

Huntington, John. “Utopian and Anti-Utopian Logic: H.G. Wells and His Successors (Logique utopique et anti-utopique; H.G. Wells et sa descendance).” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (July 1982): 122–146. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239475.

Mullen, Richard D. “H.G. Wells and Victor Rousseau Emanuel: When the Sleeper Wakes and The Messiah of the Cylinder.” Extrapolation VIII, no. 2 (May 1967): 31–63, collected in Extrapolation: A Science-Fiction Newsletter Volumes 1-10,  ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Johnson Reprint Company, Ltd, 1970).

Wallace, Morgan A (ed.). His Second Self: The Bio-Bibliography of Victor Rousseau Emanuel. Spectre Press, 2011.

Wall, Andrew (dir.). The Science Fiction Makers: Victor Rosseau, C.S. Lewis, and Madeline L’Engle. Refuge 31 Films, 2020.